“For twelve years, you called me Trash Girl.
Tonight, I want you to know what my mother was really collecting.”
The words trembled through the microphone.
Four hundred people sat beneath the bright lights of the Bakersfield High School gymnasium, their faces turned toward me.
Teachers stopped whispering.
Parents leaned forward.
Even the restless graduates in the front rows became still.
I was eighteen years old, standing at the podium as valedictorian, with a gold honor cord around my neck and the same faded blue shirt beneath my graduation gown that my mother had repaired with red thread six years earlier.
My name is Molly Walker.
For almost my entire school life, I had been known by another name.
Trash Girl.
The name began when I was six, after a classmate saw my mother collecting aluminum cans outside a grocery store.
By third grade, everyone knew.
By middle school, they had turned it into a sport.
