Laura didn’t remember moving to Platte, Nebraska. She had only been three when her father took the job of planning commissioner for the county. Nor did she remember a moment when Carrie wasn’t her closest friend. Even though Carrie was a farm kid and Laura a city kid, a fact that typically divided every Platte classroom as true and straight as the dirt roads, the two had been inseparable since the day they met in Miss Clearman’s kindergarten. They both arrived holding Clifford lunch boxes in their hands and had cried when their mothers left them the first morning. Miss Clearman had taken one blond-headed girl and one brown-headed girl, the only two in tears, under her wing-like arms, her ample breasts pushing into their bodies, and said, “I think the two of you should be friends.” And they had been ever since.

Carrie lived fifteen miles from Platte on a farm that stretched across two counties. As an adult, Laura would come to understand that this fact alone was what allowed Carrie to cross the city/rural line at school: wealth. As a child, Laura just felt lucky to be chosen by a girl who went to Chicago every summer to buy school clothes. Carrie and her two older siblings rode the school bus each morning. It picked them up at 6AM—a time of morning that was dark much of the school year—and drove the gravel roads of Hamilton County for close to two hours before arriving at the school. Laura didn’t even have to get out of bed until 7:30, and her father often dropped her off on his way downtown.

Maybe if Laura hadn’t missed her mother that first morning of kindergarten, hadn’t responded to that clawing fear with tears; maybe if Miss Clearman hadn’t pulled the two of them into her bosomy embrace, then somehow Laura wouldn’t have found herself in the Pierce barn at the age of twelve pushing Kelly Spranger from the loft. Miss Clearman seemed to cast some kind of spell with her pronouncement, ordain the certainty of that future August afternoon. At the age of five, Carrie had lifted her tear-streaked face, hiccupped once, and then reached for the hand of Laura’s that didn’t cling to her Clifford pail. Laura didn’t let go.

An only child in a home filled in equal parts by silence and books, Laura was grateful for a friend.

“You wanna sit by me?” Carrie asked that kindergarten morning through tears that made her eyes shine rather than redden.

For much of her early life, that single question was the most precious gift Laura had ever been given—more cherished than her Barbies or her Baby Alive or her Sunshine family dolls. Laura nodded, and the two of them found conjoined desks at the very front of the classroom. At lunch, outside under the row of cottonwoods lining the elementary school playground, they opened their Clifford lunch boxes to discover they had each been given the same granola bar: Nature Valley, crunchy peanut butter. They ate lunch together every day.

“Let me out!” Kelly pleaded. “This isn’t funny.”

The cardboard bent with a stiff kick from the inside. Laura could almost make out the outline of Kelly’s boots. She must have turned onto her back somehow, maybe during the tortuous ride up the stairs. Several times they had almost dropped the box, struggling between their own balance and the shifts Kelly initiated. Laura and Julia had been below, pushing the box with their heads and shoulders more than with their arms. Carrie moved backwards up the stairs lifting and pulling where she could but mostly just encouraging Laura and Julia along. “Five more steps, four more. You’re almost there.”