Billie Jean after a breakup. Troy, New York, 2006. (Brenda Ann Kenneally)
By Monica Potts, The Atlantic, April , 2023
"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.
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