“It should come as no surprise that tenth grade was the first time I tried to kill myself. Well, not technically—it was more like the first time I wrote a note and chickened out. But once I had known the idea, rolled it around on my tongue and tasted its battery-acid truth, I knew it was for me. It was the relief I sought; I dug my toes into suicide like cool wet sand after a walk on hot pavement. I was now a girl with a Secret, and the secret was that I was going to die. I just had to find the right time to announce it.

[…] I toyed with how I might do it: head in the oven (too copycat), overdose (where would I get the pills?), wrist-slitting (my mother would never get the blood out of the grout), jumping in front of a car (the speed in Prairie Grove was 40 miles an hour, how much damage could that do?). I tried to drown myself in the bathtub a few times, just to see if I could do it, but at a certain point my body forced my head up out of the water and breath into my lungs, pissing me off greatly.”

— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”