Carrie Firestone: Hi, I'm Carrie Firestone, author of Dress Coded. So the idea for Dress Coded came from me overhearing conversations my middle school daughter was having with her friends in the back of our minivan. And I noticed that they spent a lot of time talking about how teachers and administrators were constantly policing what they were wearing and they were getting dress coded all the time. And I started to ask some questions and then I found out that this was actually a very pervasive problem in their school. And so I started interviewing students from other school districts, and I learned that so many students had upsetting and even traumatic dress coding stories. So while the characters in Dress Coded are fictional, every single dress coding story in the book is rooted in a true story. And so I felt like I wanted to honor and do justice to the stories girls were confiding in me.

This was very organic. So, essentially I started by putting out, I think I put out a Facebook post just saying, "Are your children having issues with dress coding or do you know anybody who is?" And I just started reaching out to children of friends and friends of my children. And I feel like I got a pretty good sample of young people from around the Northeast, some in suburban areas, some in more rural areas, and a couple in the city. And so I felt like after listening to all of these stories, it was definitely a pattern I was seeing that dress coding is an issue in our country in general and it's something that I think not a lot of people think about in the way I hope this book illustrates.

I often say I am hoping Dress Coded starts conversations. I'm hoping students will maybe see themselves in the story and think, "Okay, this is something that's also been upsetting me and maybe I can work to make a change in my school or talk to my school staff about how I'm feeling about being dress coded." But essentially I'm hoping the take away is to give students and teachers and parents an opportunity to start conversations about this topic because often I just think people are kind of programmed and conditioned to accept certain rules and certain things without really stopping to think to themselves, "Okay. Why? Why are we doing this? What's the point of this?"

So I'm going to read one of the early chapters from Dress Coded. The chapters of the book are pretty short. And this is kind of leading up, this is the incident that leads up to every step through the rest of the book:

I'm already beginning to think Dress Coded: A Podcast, was a mistake. Olivia seems very uncomfortable.

"Are you okay?" I say, checking to make sure the recorder is off.

She nods. "Maybe we should just forget about this. Pearl says the story will die by high school graduation."

"Olivia, I can't let everyone hate you for something that wasn't your fault. It's just not right. People need to know what happened."

I don't say this to Olivia, for obvious reasons, but when Mr. Dern and Mr. Couchman were yelling at her because of a royal-blue tank top with spaghetti straps, I witnessed a piece of her soul leave her body. Until that day, I had thought of souls leaving bodies at the time of death, all at once. But when I saw Olivia's face, her arms crossed in front of her, the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the rose-colored hives blooming upward and outward across her chest, I knew everything I ever believed about souls leaving bodies was wrong. Souls leave bodies in tiny gasps, like when you hold the lip of a balloon tightly and let out the air a little bit at a time.

That's why I texted her two days later. I had planned to talk to her at school, but she refused to go.