The Forgotten Girls

Copyright © 2023 by Monica PottsAll rights reserved.Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.Hardback ISBN 9780593730898Ebook ISBN 9780525519928randomhousebooks.comBook design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebookCover design: Alicia TatoneCover image: Stella Blackmonep_prh_6.1_143429684_c0_r4 ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightAuthor’s NoteProloguePart I: CausesChapter 1: PlaceChapter 2: ChurchChapter 3: The School Hill HouseChapter 4: Boy CrazyChapter 5: The RebellionChapter 6: The Summer in New YorkChapter 7: The Escape PlanChapter 8: TraumaChapter 9: The GoodbyePart II: EffectsChapter 10: Leaving and StayingChapter 11: The Party HouseChapter 12: MotherhoodChapter 13: The MoneyChapter 14: The TroubleChapter 15: The TrailerChapter 16: MovingChapter 17: The Downward SpiralDedicationAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author_143429684_ AUTHOR’S NOTEI began returning to Clinton and reporting for this book in the spring of 2015. I moved back during Christmas 2017, and from that time on, I was both a participant in and observer of everyday life here. I interviewed several friends and former classmates, especially Darci, who sat with me for hours, filling in her life’s story. Most of our conversations were recorded. I read through thirteen of my childhood journal volumes, read Darci’s diary, with her permission, and checked facts against public records and newspaper clippings whenever possible. At times, I had to rely on memory. At Darci’s request, I changed the names of her children. PrologueOne day when I was six, my parents hauled my two younger sisters and me around Van Buren County with a realtor, looking for a new house to rent. At the time, we lived in a run-down trailer in Shirley, Arkansas, but my parents wanted to move back to our hometown of Clinton—ten miles away, and at just over twenty-five hundred people, the biggest town in the area—where my dad wanted to start his own plumbing business. None of the places that we looked at were affordable for us, or if they were, they were not in livable condition. I have a sharp memory of my parents taking us gamely into the attic of a small house, promising it could be our bedroom and that we could climb the stairs every night on our own, only to find part of the roof missing and dead autumn leaves all over the floor. We bounced down unpaved rutted dirt roads and curvy country highways in our Ford LTD station wagon, up and down the hills, generously called mountains, that form the southern edge of the Ozarks. We trekked through mud and gravel and pine needles. My parents kept the search going all day even after it was clear nothing we saw would work.Tired and cranky, I finally made it known that I was done. “I hate this town and I don’t want to move!” I screamed. “And I hate all this nature!”The realtor, whose cap of permed hair was shaped like a mushroom atop her head, looked back at me and cackled her smoker’s laugh. “You’ll think different someday.”That memory comes to mind every time I’m on top of Bee Branch Mountain, which crests just south of Clinton, my hometown. For twenty years as an adult, I lived elsewhere—going to college outside Philadelphia, and then living and working as a journalist in New York City, Stamford, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. Whenever I came back for a visit, I had to drive over that mountain to get home from the airport in Little Rock. From its summit, I can see Clinton below me. Ahead of me the mountains stretch north, a mass of green hills that roll all the way up to the middle of Missouri.My drive home had always been long and disorienting. Passing towns full of deprivation made me feel suffocated, as I had as a kid, and I felt pity for the people trapped there. But one day as I was driving home from the airport—I was older, in my thirties—I looked out from the the mountaintop, saw Clinton and the sparsely populated landscape beyond, and felt a flutter of homesickness. I’ve seen many landscapes that were objectively more beautiful: the man-made cityscapes of London and Paris and New York, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Mediterranean, the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. But none of those places were where I came from.• • •On Christmas Eve 2015, I was on Bee Branch Mountain again, this time looking for my childhood best friend, Darci Brawner.Darci and I had reconnected eight months earlier, when she reached out to me through Facebook; before that, I’d seen her only once since high school, briefly, at my dad’s funeral in November 2006. I’d been back in Clinton a number of times since we’d gotten back in touch, and we’d spent a lot of time together, catching up and getting to know each other again. Before flying in for Christmas, I had let her know I’d be in Clinton for the holiday, and she had asked me to drive her to Little Rock once I got there. It was a long trip that I didn’t want to make right after I got home, but I didn’t know when I’d get another chance to see her. I warned Darci that I would need to get under way early in the morning so I could return to my mother’s house by three p.m.—Momma needed her car for last-minute Christmas errands. I was also eager to have a nice dinner with my family—my mom, my sister, and my partner, Samir—who’d be waiting in the house for me to return.When I set out to pick her up that morning, I followed the directions I’d scribbled in a reporter’s notebook. I followed them south on the highway and then up Bee Branch Mountain. Across from the flooded old rock quarry where we used to go swimming, where minerals turned the water sapphire blue, I turned onto a little dirt road. I hoped Google Maps would help me navigate the rest of the way.Darci was staying with a man named