PLATTE, Neb. — For Laura, memory did not begin with the move to Platte, Nebraska. She had been just three years old when her father accepted a position as the county planning commissioner, relocating the family to the Midwestern community defined by wide-open spaces, dirt roads, and a strict social topography. Nor could she ever recall a time when Carrie was not her closest friend.
Though Carrie came from a sprawling farm family and Laura was a city child—a divide that typically separated every classroom in Platte as true and straight as the local grid lines—the two had been inseparable since the day they met in Miss Clearman’s kindergarten class. Both girls arrived holding identical Clifford lunch boxes and both had dissolved into tears the moment their mothers departed that first morning.
Miss Clearman had taken one blond-headed girl and one brown-headed girl, the only two crying children in the room, under her wing-like arms. Pulling them close, her ample breasts pressing into their small bodies, the teacher offered a quiet decree that would shape the next decade of their lives: "I think the two of you should be friends." And they had been ever since.
Carrie’s family lived fifteen miles outside of Platte on a farm that stretched across two county lines. As an adult, Laura would come to understand that this single fact—wealth—was what allowed Carrie to seamlessly cross the invisible boundary between rural and town kids at school. As a child, however, Laura simply felt a profound sense of luck to have been chosen by a classmate who traveled to Chicago every summer to purchase her school wardrobe.
Every morning, Carrie and her two older siblings rode the school bus, which picked them up at 6:00 a.m.—a time of day plunged in darkness for much of the academic year. The bus traversed the gravel roads of Hamilton County for nearly two hours before finally arriving at the school. Laura, by contrast, did not even need to emerge from bed until 7:30 a.m., often catching a ride downtown with her father on his way to work.
Reflecting on those formative years, the trajectory of Laura’s life feels almost preordained by that initial moment of separation anxiety. Had Laura not missed her mother so acutely on the first day of kindergarten, had she not responded to that clawing fear with tears, and had Miss Clearman not pulled them into her warm embrace, perhaps Laura never would have found herself years later standing in the Pierce family barn, helping push a classmate named Kelly Spranger from the loft.
At age five, Carrie had lifted her tear-streaked face, hiccupped once, and reached out to grasp the hand of Laura’s that was not clutching her Clifford pail. Laura had not let go.
As an only child growing up in a home filled in equal parts by silence and books, Laura was deeply grateful for the companionship. "You wanna sit by me?" Carrie had asked that first morning through tears that made her eyes shine rather than redden.
For much of her early life, that single question remained the most precious gift Laura had ever received, eclipsing her Barbies, her Baby Alive, and her Sunshine family dolls. Laura had nodded, and the two girls found conjoined desks at the very front of the classroom. At lunchtime, sitting outside beneath the row of cottonwoods lining the elementary school playground, they opened their Clifford lunch boxes to discover they had each been given the exact same snack: a crunchy peanut butter Nature Valley granola bar. They ate lunch together every single day.
Years later, that dynamic of following Carrie’s lead extended far beyond the classroom. Following was something Laura did well, establishing it as her preferred position: second. She knew she was not a leader, did not want the pressure, and was more than happy to be known simply as Carrie Pierce’s best friend rather than Laura Runnell.
When Carrie bought rainbow suspenders in the third grade, Laura immediately begged her mother for a pair. When Carrie’s parents forbade her from seeing The Wiz because the film starred Black actors, Laura quietly stopped dancing to "Ease on Down the Road" in her bedroom at night. When Carrie bobbed her hair, Laura did the same, eventually learning to wield Aquanet hairspray to achieve Carrie’s signature feathered look. Even when her parents refused to purchase expensive Lacoste sweaters or Ralph Lauren polos, Laura proudly turned up the collars of her budget-friendly knock-off brands, smiling from ear to ear every time she walked into the cafeteria and saw that Carrie had saved her the seat right beside her.
That unwavering loyalty, however, was tested as they transitioned into junior high and became involved in school social hierarchies. The complexities of their social standing came to a head in an old wooden barn on the Pierce property, a structure built decades prior by Carrie’s ancestors using hardwood hauled in from Omaha after local timber had been depleted. While Mr. Pierce farmed with his brothers and utilized modern metal silos painted a distinct "money green" that could be seen from the interstate, the old wooden barn remained near the family home, largely used for storing garden tools and rusted equipment.
Though Carrie had previously insisted the barn was haunted following a tragic suicide in the family generations prior—and strictly kept her thoroughbred horse, Hero, in a separate, modern stable—she nonetheless chose its dusty loft as the site for an initiation ritual.
Inside the narrow loft, standing near a desiccated wooden table bearing deep gouges, Carrie, Laura, and another girl named Julia confronted a trapped classmate. Inside a large cardboard box sat Kelly Spranger, a quiet sixth-grader who had recently moved to town from North Carolina and struggled to fit in.
"Let me out!" Kelly pleaded from inside the enclosed box, her voice muffled as the cardboard bent beneath a stiff kick from the inside. "This isn’t funny."
"You know the rules, Kelly," Carrie said, her voice entirely flat as she thumped the top of the box. "If you want into the Jackrabbits, you have to take the dare."
The arduous journey of hauling the box up the narrow staircase had left Laura’s arms trembling and her legs weak. Throughout the climb, Kelly had flailed in panic, causing the box to slip and slide like a bowling ball until Carrie issued a sharp command for stillness so they could focus. Once they successfully breached the loft, sliding the box across a floor littered with bird droppings and mouse pellets, Kelly’s pleas intensified.
"If you want in," Carrie reiterated during a brief pause in Kelly’s crying, "then you go off. In for off. That’s the rule."
"No!" Kelly cried out. "I want out. Not in. I want out."
While Carrie motioned for Laura and Julia to join her at the wooden table to execute the final phase of the initiation, Laura hesitated. Moving away rather than toward the center of the room, she bent to fit beneath the angle of the rafters, searching for the cool shadows at her back. Standing in the quiet stillness of the barn, aware of Kelly’s genuine terror and the realization that the hazing could easily be stopped, Laura confronted the limits of her lifelong role as a follower, standing at a crossroads between her devotion to her closest friend and her own emerging conscience.
