Colorado governor Jared Polis signed a “right to repair” bill on Tuesday (April 25), ensuring the rights of farmers to fix their own tractors and combine harvesters. The law also mandates that manufacturers of farm equipment provide the necessary manuals, tools, parts, and software to their customers.

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A few years ago, Billy Raymond Counterman was convicted of stalking. Now his case is before the Supreme Court—where, bafflingly, the justices spent oral arguments last week exploring how to define a “true threat,” something Counterman was never convicted of making. Threats and stalking are entirely different crimes, with entirely different elements and constitutional implications. If the Court goes ahead and issues a ruling about threats, as it seems poised to do, it could inadvertently weaken stalking laws around the country. A set of imaginary facts could lead to serious real-world harm.

How did we get here? At some point around 2014, Counterman apparently became obsessed with Coles Whalen, a singer-songwriter in Denver. He seems to have suffered from delusions that the two were in a relationship, despite never having met. Over the course of two years, Counterman sent her hundreds of direct messages on Facebook. Some were aggressive. Some were creepy, as when he asked if he’d seen her driving a white Jeep, a car she had once owned. Many were simply confusing or mundane, such as when he said he would bring her tomatoes from his garden, sent a frog emoji, or asked Whalen, a complete stranger, “I am going to the store would you like anything?” Whalen repeatedly blocked him, but Counterman just created new accounts. The messages would not stop.

[Timothy Zick: Making true threats is a crime]

Whalen eventually went to the police. Prosecutors initially charged Counterman with both making threats and stalking, but dropped the threats charge before trial. This was smart: The stalking charge was a much better fit for what Counterman had done. One of the most common techniques stalkers use is “life invasion,” the persistent and unwanted intrusion into the daily routines of their victims. Life invasion can be profoundly traumatic even when it doesn’t involve overt threats—in part because the willingness of a total stranger to force their way into your life raises the implicit question of what else they will do. Whalen testified that she began having panic attacks, terrified that Counterman would show up at her concerts. Her performing career stalled, and she found another job. The jury concluded that, in this case, it was reasonable for Whalen to experience “serious emotional distress” as a result of Counterman’s relentless stream of messages. He was convicted and sentenced to prison.

Here is where the case took a strange turn. On appeal, Counterman’s lawyers argued that his stalking conviction was unconstitutional. Counterman hadn’t intended to scare Whalen, they claimed, and so his messages to Whalen did not rise to the level of true threats. Given that he hadn’t been convicted of making threats in the first place, this was a bit like a driver challenging a speeding ticket on the grounds that he wasn’t drunk. And yet Colorado reached for its Breathalyzer. Instead of simply pointing out that the stalking statute didn’t require them to prove that he had threatened anyone, the state’s lawyers engaged with the debate on Counterman’s terms. Focusing on a handful of messages, including “Fuck off permanently” and “Die. Don’t need you,” they contended that Counterman had indeed threatened Whalen. They argued that what mattered was what he had said, taken in context, not his subjective intent. The Colorado Court of Appeals agreed, rejecting Counterman’s appeal but implicitly affirming his framing of the case.

And so, by the time Counterman’s appeal reached the Supreme Court, the underlying facts had been reimagined. Now the case was packaged as a chance to finally weigh in on a long-running dispute in First Amendment law. Everyone agrees that free speech doesn’t include the right to threaten someone, but views differ on what makes a threat a threat. Is it an objective question of how a reasonable person would react to what was said? Or is it subjective, turning on whether the speaker intended to terrify?

It’s the kind of subtle distinction that lawyers, judges, and academics love to sweat over, which may help explain why nobody seemed to notice how far the case had drifted from what had actually happened. Indeed, the Court and many constitutional lawyers had been waiting for years for such a case. Counterman’s lawyer, John Elwood, had pressed for the subjective theory in a 2015 case, Elonis v. United States, which The New York Times described at the time as an opportunity for the Court to determine “how the First Amendment applies to social media.” In the end, however, the Court decided the case on statutory grounds, leaving the First Amendment question for another day.

[Read: Does a true threat require a guilty mind?]

In the media, Counterman was billed as a chance for the Court to revisit Elonis, and the significant differences between the cases got swept aside. Both concerned disturbing messages on Facebook, but whereas Anthony Elonis publicly posted a handful of violent screeds to his Facebook page, visible to his friends, Counterman sent hundreds upon hundreds of private messages to a single stranger who repeatedly blocked him.

Before the oral argument, we filed an amicus brief, along with fellow First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, urging the Court not to treat Counterman as a true-threats case. Ultimately, however, the arguments proceeded as if in another universe—one in which Counterman had actually been charged, prosecuted, and convicted for making threats. At one point, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked whether Colorado could have had an easier time if it had “pursued the defendant for stalking and secured a conviction for that.” The answer to that question is definitively yes, because that is in fact what happened. But, apparently committed to arguing about true threats, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser went along with the conceit that that’s what the case was about. By this point, the lawyers, the justices, and the other amicus briefs seemed to have lost sight of where this case had actually started.

This is not merely an academic or theoretical concern. How the Court characterizes Counterman’s behavior could have a significant effect on future stalking cases. Courts have for the most part rejected First Amendment challenges to stalking laws so long as they are narrowly defined to criminalize repeated, unwanted communication that is directed at a specific individual, and that causes that person significant emotional distress. But Counterman could change that. When lower courts apply Supreme Court precedent, they often look at the facts of the case to see how it applies to the one they’re deciding. If the Court accepts Counterman’s legal theory, lower courts will see a case in which a stalking conviction was overturned because it didn’t meet the criteria for true threats. The practical effect could be to dramatically raise the constitutional bar for protecting cyberstalking victims.  

This would be a tragic outcome. Stalking laws were passed precisely to protect victims, mostly women, from menacing behavior even when their tormentor made no explicit threats. California enacted the United States’ first stalking law in 1990 after the actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot and killed by an obsessive fan who had stalked her for years. Soon after, in unrelated incidents, four other California women were killed by stalkers. In every case, the killers had stalked their victims relentlessly, and in every case, law enforcement had been powerless to help until it was too late. Since then, all 50 states as well as the federal government have enacted laws against stalking.

Studies show that many stalkers do not expressly threaten their victims. To prevent the law from intervening unless a stalker says a particular set of words would be to misunderstand the harm that stalking laws seek to prevent. And it would leave millions of victims a year without the ability to seek protection.

This outcome is still hypothetical, of course. The Court can easily avoid it by resisting the urge to graft a constitutional ruling onto a completely mismatched set of facts. Billy Raymond Counterman couldn’t distinguish between reality and fantasy. Hopefully the Court is up to the challenge.

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The internet is full of threats—violent, personal, severe threats, the recipients of which are left to assess the threats’ seriousness, to figure out how to protect themselves. Perhaps the most well-documented and well-known threats were those made to election workers during the 2020 presidential campaign. In voice messages, emails, and social-media posts, election deniers told state and local officials they would “get popped,” “hang from a tree,” and be “executed for treason.” One Facebook message said, “You raided an office. You broke the law. STOP USING YOUR TACTICS. STOP NOW. Watch your back. I KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP, I SEE YOU SLEEPING. BE AFRAID, BE VERRY AFFRAID. I hope you die.”

I was part of a group of legal experts asked by Reuters reporters to help determine whether these threats were unlawful. When contacted by reporters, many who sent these messages were unapologetic; some were even proud of their messages, viewing them as patriotic. They downplayed the intimidating nature of their communications and characterized them as harmless “trolling.” Law enforcement showed little interest in tracking down the speakers, reasoning that the communications were lawful—a conclusion that, in many instances, I and other First Amendment scholars disagreed with.  

[From the November 2022 issue: Bad losers]

It’s admittedly a tough determination to make. The First Amendment does not protect threats—that much is clear. But the Supreme Court has provided little guidance on what qualifies as a threat. That may soon change, when the Court decides Counterman v. Colorado, which will be argued next Wednesday.

In a 2003 case involving cross burnings, the Supreme Court defined a threat as a statement in which “the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” But which expressions are “serious”? And whose perspective counts when making that determination—the speaker’s or the recipient’s? A small minority of courts have concluded that the First Amendment requires the speaker to intend to make the recipient fear violence or know that would be the result (sometimes referred to as a “subjective” or “specific intent” standard). Most courts, including Colorado’s, have focused instead on whether a reasonable recipient would view the message, in context, as a threat (sometimes referred to as an “objective” or “reasonable recipient” standard). Counterman will decide which standard satisfies the First Amendment.

That may sound like a narrow legal technicality, but the stakes are very high. The standard the Court adopts will affect not just speakers’ liability but also the safety and peace of mind of the recipients of threatening speech and the nature of online and offline speech cultures. The Supreme Court must adopt a standard that protects political and other valuable expression while at the same time shielding targets from the substantial harm that threats inflict.

Adopting a standard that focuses on what was in the speaker’s mind would allow individuals more latitude to vent and lash out, in part because it is hard to prove speaker intent. Like the election denier, many speakers could claim that their intent was to troll, rant, or even entertain rather than threaten acts of violence. But focusing solely on what the speaker intended would leave vulnerable targets at the mercy of threatening speech.

The Court should follow the majority of lower courts and adopt a “reasonable recipient” standard like Colorado’s. That standard protects vulnerable targets from the harms the Court has identified, including “the fear of violence and the disruption that fear engenders.” These harms relate not to the speaker’s state of mind but to the recipient’s well-being. Threats can turn targets’ lives upside down, forcing them to quit their job, hide their identity, and stop going out in public.

Consider the facts in Counterman. In April 2017, Billy Raymond Counterman was convicted of making threatening statements to a local musician on Facebook over the course of two years. Among other things, he criticized the woman’s “arrogance” when she did not respond to his messages, asked her “What do you fear?,” indicated he had seen her in public, and accused her of “not being good for human relations.” When she did not respond, Counterman told the musician to “Die” and “Fuck off permanently.” The musician contacted law enforcement, obtained a protective order against Counterman, and canceled public performances. The First Amendment generally protects nasty and abusive language, in part to allow speakers to engage in political rhetoric. But regulating unwanted communications like these, repeatedly directed to an individual over social media, does not threaten to suppress valuable expression on matters of public concern. Indeed, threatening communications chill public discussion and instill terror in their recipients. An objective standard recognizes this reality. At the same time, it does not criminalize all violent and abusive language or suppress political speech. Courts and juries must consider the full context of speech, including the words used, the recipient’s reaction, the course and manner of communication, and the relationship between speaker and recipient.

[Stephen Bates: The man who wanted to save the First Amendment by inverting it]

The Supreme Court’s own precedents have focused on contextual factors, such as the conditional nature of a threat, the audience’s reaction, and the general context of the communication—for example, whether the speech was part of a public political rally or a civil-rights boycott. This approach protects political hyperbole and rhetoric. It also makes it less likely that speakers will be subject to punishment or liability based solely on their use of crude language or a good-faith misunderstanding of words taken out of context. Such a standard is in line with the First Amendment’s goal of protecting robust public debate on important matters while excluding speech that threatens physical and other harms.  

As Counterman shows, threats are not limited to the political context. Anyone can be subjected to threats online, though women seem to receive a disproportionate share. And what happens online does not necessarily stay online; over and over, threats proffered on social media have been linked with real-world violence.

Speakers should not be jailed or subject to civil liability merely for their use of abusive or violent language. But neither should they escape liability when their words reasonably cause someone to fear serious bodily harm or death. Consider a voice message left for employees at a voting-machine company: “You’re all fucking dead. We’re going to fucking kill you all.” Or the graphic threats of rape and murder frequently sent to women on social media. These communications can’t be brushed off as harmless venting or trolling. Nor are they part of any robust and uninhibited political discourse protected by the First Amendment. They are unprotected speech, and the law should treat them as such.

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Tina Peters -- the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, and the state's most prominent 2020 election denier -- was sentenced by a judge Monday to home detention and community service after she was found guilty last month of obstructing a government operation.

Photographs by Brenda Ann Kenneally

“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.

Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that my best friend, Darci Brawner, and I dreamed about was getting out. “I want to see new people and new places,” I wrote in my journal when I was 12. I wanted to move to California but would take “any state besides Oklahoma or Mississippi.” We wanted careers, we wanted to be rich and famous, we wanted to be far away. Boys and sex would only stop us, catch us, or so my mother had warned.

Clinton is the county seat of Van Buren County, Arkansas, and, with slightly more than 2,500 people, the biggest town in the area. It’s on the southern edge of the Ozarks, the hills we generously called mountains, situated in a valley where two big creeks come together in a Y. The county’s median household income in 2021 was $40,763. Almost everyone goes to an evangelical church, and in the halls of the town’s only high school, everyone knows everything about everyone else, or seems to: whom you dated, where you bought your clothes, how you acted on weekends, and even your destiny, inherited from the generations that came before you.

I moved away for college when I was 18. While I was gone, I heard updates: who was getting married, having children, getting divorced. I heard worse stories, about who was on drugs, who’d been arrested and sent to prison, who was in rehab, who was in rehab again. Who had died. By the time I was a journalist writing about rural poverty in my mid-30s, I’d seen studies and data that helped me put the stories from home in context. One of the most alarming trends emerged about a decade ago.

In 2012, a team of population-health experts at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that white women who did not graduate from high school were dying about five years younger than such women had a generation before—at about 73 years instead of 78. Their white male counterparts were dying three years younger. From 2014 to 2017, the decline in life expectancy in the U.S., driven largely by the drop among the least-educated Americans, was the longest and most sustained in 100 years.

They weren’t just dying from so-called deaths of despair—from drugs or suicide. Many of them were also dying from cancer, heart disease, or respiratory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer, a 2022 study found—even as these conditions became less deadly for the rest of the population.

Women in Clinton and places like it, women I’d grown up with, women I knew, were losing years of their life. What was going on?

I returned to Arkansas more and more, trying to reconnect to my hometown, looking for answers. In 2015, on a visit home, Darci contacted me out of the blue. We’d once been as close as sisters, but that spring was only the second time I’d heard from her in the nearly two decades since high school. We visited, and as we caught up and reminisced, I began to realize that I could pinpoint the time when our lives had first begun to diverge. It started during those boy-crazy middle-school years, when we were at the cusp of growing up, when our futures had not yet been written.

Kandice and Braydon in her room. Troy, New York, 2013. (Brenda Ann Kenneally)

Some of us—because our parents were strict or wealthier and more educated, or because we were “good girls” too nervous to break the rules, or because we were just plain lucky—got out. Others got pregnant.

When we were in sixth grade, one of Darci’s good friends, a 14-year-old, had a surprise baby. She’d been feeling sick, and her mom took her to the doctor, who said she was due in a month. A few days after that, the girl went into labor. I heard her parents—the shocked and befuddled grandparents of a little boy just a few days old—relay this story in Darci’s living room.

I knew that what had happened was both wrong and not unusual. Arkansas had, and continues to have, one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the United States. Girls became pregnant in our middle and high schools, at least one a year. They dropped out or graduated as mothers and sometimes as wives, bearing a new name on their diploma.

In seventh grade, when we were 12 and 13, one of our friends had a pregnancy scare. She was dating a boy from another town who was at least 16. After a day spent sick and upset in the girls’ bathroom, she turned out not to be pregnant. But none of us thought to tell an adult, even though I knew of some who would have helped. We were not even quite teenagers but we were already navigating the full consequences of adult behavior alone.

In Clinton, sex—and the question of whether we were allowed to have it or talk about it—was related to how people viewed girls’ futures. The idea that we might become fully realized adults, experiencing sexual freedom and fulfillment, was not fathomable. We could become helpmeets for our future husbands, or we could be ruined.

The girls who got pregnant were stigmatized—until their babies were born. Then they were revered as mothers. Our school was full of young moms who were still students, and those newly graduated would come back for ball games and other events, babies on their hips. It was an endless churn, baby after baby, raised in families that spanned five or six generations because so few years separated grandmothers and mothers and daughters—and because the girls couldn’t take care of their newborns without help.

In response to the high rate of teen births, people turned to the church. In 1993 the Southern Baptists founded True Love Waits, an organization that promoted abstinence until marriage. My friends began to wear “promise rings” in middle school. Because some already had serious boyfriends, they dedicated their rings to them as sort of a pre-engagement promise.

Outside the church, the information we got was mostly misinformation. One day in seventh-grade health class, our teacher drew a big circle on the board, and a tiny dot within it. “This circle is the microscopic holes in a condom,” he said. “They’re microscopic, and that means they’re tiny. But guess what’s even tinier?” He pointed his chalk at the white dot on the board. “AIDS.”

The message at church was that we had to keep ourselves pure for our husbands, and the message at school was that sex would either kill us or leave us pregnant, and there was nothing we could do to prevent either scenario except abstain.

Despite the sermons, my friends were still having sex at about the same rates as teenagers elsewhere in the country. They were keenly aware that it was frowned on, and if a crisis resulted, they hesitated to seek help from an adult. In some cases, it kept them from breaking up with their boyfriend and made them vulnerable to exploitation and assault, though I didn’t know to use those words back then. As if they were living in the Victorian era, they assumed that because they’d gone all the way with someone, they would have to marry him.

Robert and Michaela and a backyard stick up. Troy, New York, 2007. (Brenda Ann Kenneally).

My momma spent her life guarding me and my sisters against this fate, lecturing us, warning us, and making sure we came home on time each night. But when Darci started to go boy crazy, there was no one at home to stop her.

In her den—where we’d spent so many hours playing Twister and having sleepovers on the floor—she took to hanging out with her older brother and his friends. At 12, she started sneaking out at night, tagging along with them to house parties. When I interviewed her after we reconnected as adults, she remembered this time as a turning point in her life.

I sneaked out with Darci one night soon after my 13th birthday. I was sleeping over, but instead of going to sleep, we went into the bathroom and put on makeup. My lipstick was mocha-colored, and Darci’s was tinted orange. She fixed her hair so that it was wavy, gelled it to tame it, then tied it in a knot on top of her head. I put on a denim shirt and jeans.

First we picked up a friend of her brother’s whose parents were away. He was in his bedroom getting ready, and I kept giggling.

“Monica, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a boy’s house,’” Darci said, laughing.

Then the three of us crossed the high-school campus and the football field to a ramshackle old A-frame well past its tear-down date. Half a dozen kids were already there, mostly high-school boys, drinking. More boys drifted in and out of the house, grabbing bottles of beer. It was my first party where people drank and smoked openly. I was nervous and bored, while Darci made everyone laugh effortlessly, and abandoned me on the porch while she went off with a guy to hook up.

But I can see, looking back, that she was a vulnerable child. Both of us kept diaries for years, and after I came back she let me read through hers. They were full of descriptions of the boys she liked. In one entry, she described sneaking out to meet a boy she had a crush on. Her crush was drunk. “It was actually kind of funny, but it didn’t seem so funny when he started getting on top of me,” she wrote. “But on the other hand he was so drunk that he wasn’t strong enough to stay there.”

Later, the same boy would see her riding around with another older boy and chase her in his car. He followed her to the house where she was spending the night, banged on the door, and tried to pull her outside. The casual violence of it shocked me when I read it as an adult.

At that first party, I saw a glimmer of this other life Darci had begun to live. When we got back to her den late that night, I told her that her new friends were sleazy. “That’s not very nice, and not very Christian” was her response. “I thought we were trying to see the good in people.”

Kayla and Pop. Troy, New York, 2008 (Brenda Ann Kenneally). BIG Jessie with her pellet gun, a gift for her 23rd birthday. Troy, New York, 2006. (Brenda Ann Kenneally).

Parties like that one were uncomfortable for me, largely because of my dad. Starting when I was as young as 4 or 5, I understood that he had a drinking problem. We lived in a trailer and he didn’t make much money. Momma, who had quit work to raise me and my sisters, was often frustrated and, I realize now, lonely.

Daddy came home for dinner one night talking funny and acting weird, and Momma was mad in a different way than usual, and sad. Daddy was apparently angry that supper was spaghetti, and yelled.

“Daddy, what’s wrong with you?” I asked, yelling too.

“You want to know what’s wrong with me, Monica? I’m drunk, that’s what’s wrong!”

When I was little, I thought that when people were drunk they were drunk forever. Later, I learned that this is not true. Even later, I learned that sometimes it is.

When it came to liquor, there were two modes in Clinton: alcoholism or abstinence. This paralleled the bifurcated morality I saw everywhere: girls were either virgins or whores; students were either geniuses or failures; you could go to church or you could be a sinner. The town seemed to operate in two modes—the buttoned-up propriety of the churchgoers, who held power in the county, versus the rowdy hillbillies in families like my dad’s. The rigid divide allowed no room for subtleties or missteps.

Even children were sorted into the binary: the upstanding citizens and the ne’er-do-wells. Darci was getting a reputation as the latter. At her 14th-birthday slumber party, half the girls sneaked out and half didn’t. After that, the “good” girls stopped going to Darci’s house.

I felt trapped by this system. I didn’t want to be judged by those around me, but I didn’t have the power to ignore their judgments. I never really fit in with either the “good” kids or the partiers, but I decided to align with the “good” kids. Today it’s sometimes painful, or laughable, to look back at how severe I was. I didn’t believe in the religious prohibitions on sex before marriage, but I did see the social consequences that those who failed to follow them in Clinton suffered.

Kayla and her son Tony. (Brenda Ann Kenneally).

Our friend Vanessa Allen, who was maybe the most boy crazy of us all, suffered the most. Vanessa had long, curly black hair and was the oldest of four kids. Her mom, Susie, had gotten married as a teenager and had Vanessa at 18. Vanessa wore a promise ring in middle school, but she liked attention from boys and had a reputation for being a flirt. I remember her wearing a tight-fitting bodysuit at a football game. When she walked past a group of grown men, they whistled at her, and one of them said admiringly, “Someone’s been eating her beans and cornbread!” She was 14.

Adults had taught us girls to keep boys from touching us before marriage, but no one ever told us what to do if we wanted to touch them. In that space between Vanessa’s desire and her shame, other girls smelled blood.

The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do, she felt. But her reputation suffered.

At Christmastime during ninth grade, she wore a Santa shirt that said ho ho ho across the front, and one of our friends pointed at her and said, “Hey, that’s right! Ho, ho, ho.” Everyone laughed. Vanessa went to the office, sobbing, and called her mom for a new shirt.

The following summer, Vanessa and her parents went to Colorado to visit family. At the church, they met the preacher’s son, who Vanessa and Susie thought was about 19. He and Vanessa hit it off, and after she returned to Arkansas, they kept in touch. That fall, he traveled to Arkansas and stopped to visit. He asked Vanessa to marry him, and she said yes. She found out then that he was 24.

He was a good Christian, however, and she liked him. Sitting in her living room so many years later, she told me she knew that people in town called her a whore. They wouldn’t be able to do that if she moved to Colorado and became a wife.

Vanessa had to be married across the border in Missouri, because in 1996 not even Arkansas allowed 15-year-old girls to wed, not even with parental permission. Vanessa’s parents not only gave their permission, but her dad, a minister, performed the ceremony.

Destiny in her rooom. Troy, New York, 2006.(Brenda Ann Kenneally).

Susie later told me that allowing Vanessa to get married was the worst mistake she ever made. But she felt like she had to, that Vanessa had no future in Clinton. I asked similar questions of Darci’s mother, Virginia: Could she have set more boundaries, protected her better, in those years when her home became a teenage clubhouse, complete with alcohol and, eventually, drugs? No, Virginia said. She could never make Darci do anything she didn’t want to do. “Darci made her own choices,” she insisted. It troubled me that she so casually referred to teenage behavior as “choices,” when we had been only children, still learning and growing.  

In 1994, the summer after we finished middle school, Darci broke my heart. We were out at Greers Ferry Lake with a few others on an August day so hot, we struggled to move fast or take full breaths. The warm green water was barely an escape. We walked a good distance out, kicking up slimy mud from the bottom, negotiating the minnows that nibbled at our feet, then swam out to the floating orange buoys that marked the edge of the swimming area.

The lake fills a part of the valley formerly known as the Big Bottoms, which had once comprised five fertile farming communities. Darci and I had read that when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the dam that made the lake, it hadn’t exhumed the bodies from the cemeteries but just let the lake fill in above them. We would plunge down as far as we could and then open our eyes, terrifying ourselves with thoughts of what we might see.

That day we sat along the line of buoys, dangling our legs in the water, chatting mostly with the person next to us. I was sitting next to our friend Erica when she casually dropped the news that Darci had lost her virginity to one of her brother’s 18-year-old friends. Darci was only 14.

I must have looked shocked. “Didn’t you know?” Erica asked.

I hadn’t known. Darci, I felt, had given up on our dream of getting out. It was the first real fracture in our friendship, and it would grow wider over the years, as I stayed focused on leaving Clinton and she became lost in it.

In January of our senior year, Darci had a miscarriage, something she shared with me only years later in an interview. At the time, she told no one about it. But she had a doctor’s note saying she needed to rest. She kept using Wite-Out to extend the date on it in order to get out of school. She did this so many times that she missed too many days to graduate. Her teachers and the principal, perhaps having already written her off as a lost cause, never bothered to warn her that there was a hard-and-fast rule and that she was about to break it. I was the class valedictorian; when I gave my speech, she wasn’t there.  

Darci drifted, she used drugs—pot, a range of pills, occasionally crystal meth—and at 22, she became a mother for the first time. She got in legal trouble for embezzling from her employer, for which she was convicted in 2008; she was sentenced to probation and lost custody of her children, who moved in with their grandmother. In the years that followed our reconnection, she swung between periods of stability and destructiveness, bouncing in and out of contact; lately she’s been doing better.

It wasn’t just Darci. I returned home to find my whole town in a long, slow decline, on the verge of dying itself. Drug epidemics take root in places that are already sick, already suffering. Momma had been right, it seems, to focus on getting us out, guarding us from boys and early pregnancy and keeping us distant from the people she thought would trap us here. I asked a second cousin of mine about this once, the man who would become the father of Darci’s children. I told him that I wished I’d known his part of my family better, but that my parents had kept me from getting close. “There’s probably a good reason for that!” he said. “This town didn’t suck you down the way it did some of us.”     

When I started to investigate why women like those I’d grown up with were dying younger, I thought I was looking for reasons: What was different about their lives, and why? I realize now that I was looking for one person: my friend Darci.

This article is adapted from the forthcoming The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America.

The images are from the book Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City, published by Regan Arts 2018.