"Hi," Izzie nervously uttered her first word to the students. She was testing her voice, seeing what it sounded like in the room. Not a single student reacted.

"Good afternoon." She began again. "Some of you are probably wondering who I am." She paused and a small smile came across her face. "Some of you are probably wondering how long this is going to take." She looked down at her watch. "They tell me you finish school at 2:20. I promise I'll be finished before then." Still there was no reaction from the students. She wasn't even sure if they were listening to her. She took another breath and pressed on.

"I remember when I was in school. We used to have assemblies like this where the school would get someone in to talk to us about life. I remember I used to sit there and think. What would this person know? They don't know anything about me. They don't know what it's like to live here. They don't know how difficult it is. I used to think it was funny that the school couldn't get anyone local, they always got people from the big cities. My friends and I joked that the reason for this was because no one from the town ever amounted to anything or if they did they ran so far away they never came back." She paused for a moment. She seemed to have a few kids attention now.

"Well I'm not going to pretend I know what it's like to be you but I do know a little bit about what it's like to live here. You see this is my high school too. I grew up in this town. I lived out in Forest Lake." She smiled as a new thought crossed her mind. "I probably babysat a few of you when you were little. So I know what it's like to live here. I know what it's like to feel like you're stuck, to want to get away but feel like there is no way out."

A few more kids sat up to listen. "Now I'm not here to tell you I know your situation. I don't know anything about any of you. I'm here to tell you my story and hopefully some of you might get something out of it."

Izzie closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated on her breathing. This wasn't how she'd planed to do this. This wasn't what she'd practiced. She opened her eyes again. Everything was exactly the same. She could see there were a few kids listening but most of them looked totally disinterested. This wasn't what she had expected. For some reason she'd thought they'd all be captivated by her every word. But really who was she kidding, when she was a kid she'd never listened to people like her. There were a few kids listening though. If she got through to just one of them it would be worth it.

"So…" Izzie began again before her voice trailed off. She didn't know where to start. Did she start at the beginning or was it better to start at the end and work backwards. The silence went on a little longer than it should. Kids began moving in their seats, those who had been paying attention began to look around. She was losing her audience and beginning to regret tearing up her papers. And then Alex caught her eye, from the back of the auditorium he was smiling at her and when he saw her looking at him he gave her the thumbs ups. She took another deep breath and began her story in the middle.

"I left this town eleven years ago. Two days after my eighteenth birthday I packed up a suit case and hopped on a bus bound for Seattle."

Slowly she began painting her story. It was all over the place and jumbled up, she kept moving back and forth between her life in the town and what happened when she left. She wanted to cover everything, she wanted them to know everything because she thought she'd been dealt a lot of bad cards in her life but she'd made the best of them. She spoke about her father's death, her grandmothers which on some levels was so much harder. She didn't talk much about her mother, her mother still lived in the town and she was sure people would know who she was. Her mother wasn't a bad person she just hadn't been there like she needed to be.

She spoke about getting pregnant a few months before her sixteenth birthday and how the experience turned her life around. Before she'd been pregnant she'd been getting into a lot of trouble at school, she'd been trying to get her mothers attention but it wasn't working. She told the students she'd never planned to get pregnant. She told them that at the time it felt like the worse thing that could possible happen but in retrospect it was probably the best thing. She descried the pregnancy as the wake up call she needed. She talked about how she cleaned herself up, started taking care of herself and started going to classes. She talked about the moment she realized she wanted her child to have more than she could offer and her decision to put the child up for adoption. She said it was the hardest decision she'd ever had to make but she'd never regretted it for a second.

The more she talked the more students sat up and started to listen. She saw them putting down their books, closing their magazines and watching her.

"When I left Chehalis I didn't have much. I wasn't even accepted into any colleges. For the first six months I lived in this tiny little apartment with three other people. I waited tables to pay the bills and wrote application after application for mid year intake at every college around."

"Getting into college was hard. I'm not going to lie to you and say it was easy but…" Izzie's voice trailed off as the door at the back of the auditorium opened. For a second the woman was framed by the light from outside and Izzie saw who it was. Her heart skipped a beat; she hadn't expected her mother to come. For a moment she couldn't talk. She watched her mother cross the room and stand next to Alex. She smiled at him and he gave her a nod. What? She thought to herself before she shook her head and kept talking.

"…but if you want to go to college you can. There are ways to get around everything, you just have to work hard. You just have to want it enough. Life is about the choices you make. It is about taking the situations you find yourself in and making the most of them, using them to your advantage. Life isn't meant to be easy. If everything was easy it wouldn't be a life. Things happen, things you don't plan, things that make life difficult. The trick is to not let them take control of your life. You need to accept them, move on and make the most of them."

She was finally getting to her point. She was finally saying what she wanted everyone to take away with them.

"Nine months ago I never would have thought I'd be standing here in front of all of you talking. Nine months ago I was a doctor in the third year of my residency. I had no plans to come back here. This town was part of my history but not my present. And then something totally unexpected happened. I was shot once in the head and my whole world changed. I should have died but I didn't. I was in a coma for over a week and when I woke up I was no longer the person I used to be. I had to learn how to do everything again. I couldn't talk, I couldn't walk, I could barely move and I didn't know who I was." She paused for a moment as tears started to well up in her eyes. This was the first time she'd ever really spoken to anyone about this.

"What I'm trying to say is you can't control the unexpected. You can't plan everything. When bad things happen you just have to accept them, learn from them, and believe that there is a reason why they happened in the first place." She used the back of her hand to wipe the tears from her eyes. "I'm not a doctor any more. The bullet left me with permanent brain damage which makes performing the job impossible. But I like to think now that it isn't so bad. If I was still a doctor I would never have agreed to have come here today. I wouldn't have had time to come here today. Speaking with you today, maybe this was the reason I got shot."

Izzie stopped talking and began to eye off the crowd. Almost every student was watching her. She smiled, this was what it was all about. She stood up and leant on the back of the chair. "I'll leave my contact details with the guidance councilor's office if anyone would like to talk to me more. Thank you for listening to my story."

She turned and started walking to the back of the stage. The room was completely silent and then someone at the back yelled loudly "Wooohooo." And started clapping. Soon almost everyone was clapping. Izzie had her back to everyone so no one saw the smile on her face which just kept getting bigger and bigger.

/\/\/\/\

The school principle dismissed the students immediately after Izzie's speech. She was still standing at the back of the stage when the kids began to pile out of the auditorium. Most of them went straight for the doors but half a dozen made their way toward the stage.

Alex stood at the back of the auditorium with Izzie's mother watching Izzie talk to the students who'd approached her following the speech. She had a smile all the way across her face and her eyes were shining. She was writing something down on pieces of paper and handing it to the kids. He hoped she was giving them an e-mail address and not their home phone number.

He waited until all the students were gone before he started walking toward her. As he started moving he turned back to Izzie's mom. "Are you coming?" he asked and he kept walking.

/\/\/\/\

Izzie said goodbye to the last student and watched as Alex began walking toward her. He had his arms out stretched and when he reached her he embraced her tightly. "That was amazing." He said into her ear. "I'm so proud of you." He lifted her up into the air and then placed her back on the ground. "You were amazing." He said holding her at arms length.

"Yeah." She said smiling. "It did feel pretty good once I got going."

"Yeah."

Behind Alex she could see her mother standing, waiting. Alex looked over his shoulder and nodded. "I'm going to go check out the town." He said letting go of her. "You'll be alright. Phone me when you're finished."

She watched him walk out of the room. She waited until he was gone before she looked at her mother. She didn't know what to say to her. It had been years since they'd spoken and even longer since they'd seen each other.

"Cricket." Was all her mother said as she walked toward her with her arms out stretched. She let her hug her but it wasn't like with Alex. "I've been thinking about you." Her mother said letting go.

Izzie stood staring at her. She was confused and a little overwhelmed. She didn't know what she should say, what she was supposed to say, so she said the one thing she really wanted to know. "Where were you?"

Her mother smiled at her and held out her hand. "How about we go for a walk." Izzie stared at her hand assessing whether she should take it. "Alex will be fine." Her mother offered, thinking that was Izzie's problem.

"Oh." Izzie said wondering how her mother knew Alex. "Okay" and she took her mothers hand and they walked out the auditorium together.