Dasani knows that her exit from Hershey will be seen as self-sabotage, as a form of educational suicide. But for Dasani, succeeding at Hershey required another kind of death. It meant losing, even killing off, a basic part of herself. “It was like they wanted you to be someone that you wasn’t,” she says. “If I talk the way I naturally talk—to them—like, something’s wrong with me.” She looks out the window, passing trees and barns and cows.
