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.”
When they finally breached the edge of the loft and shoved the box along the wooden floor, bird crap and mouse droppings rolling like ball bearings beneath the weight, Laura almost cried with relief. Her arms trembled and her legs felt weak. She knew they were never going to launch Kelly from the loft door, but it was a miracle they didn’t drop her on the way up the stairs. Laura began to wonder just when Carrie would call the whole thing off.
Kelly had remained quiet as they climbed, mostly because when they had first set out, at stair two, Kelly had started to flail about, asking where they were taking her, and the box had slipped off the stair and back to the floor, landing on its side. “Stop moving, Kelly,” Carrie had ordered when they righted the box, Kelly sliding like a bowling ball, and set out again. “We have to focus.” From that point on, Kelly remained still and quiet.
The loft ran less than half the distance of the barn, and there was barely room to stand between the rafters. This had been the original barn on the Pierce property, raised back when the entirety of the Pierce farm could be seen from the porch. Carrie’s grandfather or maybe great grandfather had built it with his sons, the planks brought in from Omaha since any hardwood around Platte had long been cut down. Decades later, Mr. Pierce farmed with his brothers and had no use for the old wooden barn. Tall silos and storage bins lay scattered across their vast property, most of them metal. Unlike the other Harvester silos around, Mr. Pierce had paid to have his painted green, the color of money he said when Laura asked him why. You could see a Pierce silo from the interstate and know it on sight. And the interstate was dotted by them. The old wooden barn sat close to the family house and was mostly used to store Mrs. Pierce’s garden tools or old wringer tubs and rusted furrows. In the fourth grade, Laura had suggested that the Jackrabbits’s meet in the loft rather than in the buggy bushes behind her house, but Carrie had refused. Some relative had hanged themselves from the rafter years ago, something about the price of corn and subsidies and ruin, and Carrie said the barn was haunted. She refused to go inside, kept Hero with the other horses in a stable built for the single purpose of housing thoroughbreds. So, it was surprising to Laura that Carrie chose the loft for the initiation. When Laura asked why, Carrie just shrugged her shoulders and responded, “We need a second floor.”
“But isn’t it haunted?” Laura asked.
Carrie looked directly at Laura. They were sitting at the kitchen table in Laura’s quiet house, her father at work and her mother at some kind of teacher meeting. Moments before they had been practicing their cheer routine for try outs and now drank water that Laura’s mother kept chilled in a glass pitcher decorated with lemons. “We’re in junior high now,” Carrie responded and downed the remains of her water. She set the empty glass on the table with enough force to settle the matter. “Do you want to spot me?” Carrie asked, and Laura stood to follow.
Following was something she did well. It was her preferred position: second. She knew she wasn’t a leader, didn’t want the pressure, was more than happy to be known as Carrie Pierce’s best friend rather than Laura Runnell. When Carrie bought rainbow suspenders in third grade, Laura begged her mother for a pair. When Carrie’s parents told her she couldn’t see The Wiz because it starred black people, Laura stopped dancing to “Ease on Down the Road” in her bedroom at night. Carrie bobbed her hair, so did Laura. Carrie feathered her hair and Laura learned to wield Aquanet. Her parents wouldn’t buy her Lacoste sweaters or Ralph Lauren polos because of the price, but Laura stood the collars of her knock-off brands and smiled from ear to ear every single time she entered the cafeteria to see that Carrie Pierce had saved her the seat right next to her.
*
“You know the rules, Kelly,” Carrie said as she thumped the top of the box. “If you want into the Jackrabbits, you have to take the dare.”
“Come on guys,” Kelly begged. “I’m scared. Let me out!”
They had managed to get the box to the large wooden table that stood at the center of the narrow loft. Aside from a few broken ladderback chairs, some dented metal tubs covered in dust, and a short stack of boxes marked Xmas, the table was the only thing in the loft. Laura had no idea why it was there. If the table had once been painted, it was now bare. Deep gouges ran the desiccated top. They hadn’t tested the sturdiness of the table before they had lifted the box filled with Kelly, but it hadn’t budged under the weight.
“What’s going on?” Kelly had asked when they set the box down. It had been first time she had spoken since the stairs. She must have been scared to stay that still.
“We’re pushing you off the loft.” Carrie replied, her voice blank like paper.
That was when Kelly began to kick and scream. She hadn’t really stopped except to catch a breath.
“If you want in,” Carrie said at one of those pauses, “then you go off. In for off. That’s the rule.”
“No!” Kelly cried. “I want out. Not in. I want out.”
Carrie didn’t seem to register the request. Rather, she motioned to Laura and Julia to join her at the wooden table. Laura, though, moved away rather than toward, bending to fit the angle of the rafters, searching for the cool shadow at her back. Kelly was clearly panicked, and they could, Carrie could, easily stop at this point, tell Kelly she hadn’t passed, wasn’t a member. It could end.
*
Laura was supposed to be Kelly’s Carrie. She knew from the moment her mother first told her about the Spranger family. “They’ve just moved to town,” her mother said as they drove home a November afternoon from her final year at elementary school. “And their daughter is just your age. Poor thing. Having to start sixth grade two months into the year.”
They had stopped at one of the three stoplights that ran the length of Cricket Street. Her mother held both hands on the steering wheel but looked over at Laura. “That has to be so hard.”
Laura squirmed under her mother’s gaze, willed the light to turn green.
“Was she in any of your classes today?”
Laura’s mother taught at the elementary school. As if having your mother as a teacher in your school wasn’t hard enough, her mom was also the acting vice principal ever since Mrs. Dalton had moved up to the high school. Laura had never been a student in one of her mother’s classes—it was against school rules—but at every assembly, she tried to crawl under the bleachers when her mother stepped forward to lead the school spirit song.
“I’m not sure,” Laura said. The light had turned, and Laura watched the Tasty Freeze pass, then the Runza, then the Jiffy Lube.
“Laura Lynn,” her mother said firmly. “That’s ridiculous. As far as I know, Kelly is the first new student in our school for well over a year. You would notice her.”
And Laura had. She had noticed Kelly for being completely unnoticeable. For the first time, Laura understood what it meant to say that someone was “mousy.” Kelly Spranger may have lived in North Carolina, but she certainly didn’t bring anything of the east coast with her. Her hair, barely brown, hung straight and appeared to be chewed at the ends. Even though it was only early November, she came to school wearing a bulky sweater and corduroy pants in some strange shade of green. Worst of all, maybe, was that she carried her books in her arms, across her chest like a shield, not a backpack in sight, let alone a Jansport bag like the rest of them. There was no way Laura could be a Carrie to such a girl. When the first period teacher, Mr. Graham, asked for a volunteer to show Kelly around, Laura had taken out her TrapperKeeper and focused on opening and closing the three metal clasps. Melissa Chaney said she could do it, and Laura’s body flooded with relief.
“I think we should invite her over,” her mother continued, just as they turned into their neighborhood. Two-story houses gathered around a generous green lake that had been made twenty years ago by digging into the silty Nebraska loam. Because the water table ran just beneath the topsoil, the sand pit filled to an hourglass-shaped lake in a single day. Her parents were the very first ones to buy lots on the lake, but others quickly followed. The shoreline read like the minutes from a county meeting: the mayor, the county attorney, the county assessor and the city manager. Every house sat on a large lot that bordered the lake. Almost every house was then surrounded by adjacent empty lots that had been seized to ensure that no one else would build. Some of these spaces were inhabited by horses or llamas, but many were just sown with Kentucky blue grass that was carefully cut every weekend. A brown sign with blue cursive lettering welcomed all to Mystique Lake and warned that no one could swim there unless accompanied by a resident. In early November the lake sat quiet, except for the moments when scores of Canada geese would descend to the surface to rest before continuing their journey south.
“I dunno,” Laura replied.
“Don’t know,” her mother corrected sharply. “Two words. Not one.”
“I do not know.”
“Fine,” her mother concluded as they pulled into the garage. Brown leaves fluttered in their wake. “We can talk about it at dinner with your father.”
The threat remained only a threat, however, as her father arrived home that night upset about the planning commission’s decision to allow a fast-food chain in the historic part of Platte. The dentist and his family were, for the moment, forgotten.
__________________________________
From The Beautiful Plain by Jennifer Sinor. Used with permission of the publisher, University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2026.
