“I was eating M&M’s straight out of a pound bag, about to make myself sick. They weren’t normal M&M’s. They were the color of characters in a cartoon movie that hadn’t done any good and the bags ended up at Big Lots, large and cheap and just this side of safe to eat.” 

Dawn’s family is poor. They shop at discount stores for the discarded food that won’t sell at other stores, their houses are in disarray, very few of the adults Dawn is close to have stable, or even legal, employment. Like many others, Dawn likely lives in a food desert in which grocery stores selling affordable, fresh food items are few and far between, making healthier food items inaccessible for families like Dawn’s, which is why Dawn makes frequent references to junk and fast food.

“When it was over, Mamaw had to shake me to get me to move. I dreaded walking out. I wasn’t invisible anymore. I was never invisible.” 

Speaking out at the hearing awakens a sense of power and purposes in Dawn that she never realized was there, but once she uses her voice, she can no longer deny that she has no power. Prior to speaking out at the meeting, she had many reasons to feel invisible: she’s a kid, she’s a girl, and she’s poor, in other words she belongs to a population most often swept under the rug and ignored. Dawn recognizes the absurdity of her insignificance, and how people like herself are manipulated into submission; being silenced in this manner is harming their lives.