“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

my final grades, which were excellent, because I was incapable of not doing the thing in front of me well, regardless of whether I wanted it.

But I was already gone internally. I had already driven to Pensacola in my head a dozen times. I had already read the commissioning ceremony description on the OCS website until I had memorized it.

I knew what continue reading …