The Girls Who Would Not Disappear

On The EleMenTs Series and the American Habit of Forgetting

In the small towns where I grew up, there were children who vanished without leaving. They attended school for a few years, then they didn’t. They lived in houses at the edge of town, then they lived somewhere else. Nobody talked about where they went. The polite assumption was that their families had moved, had found opportunity elsewhere, had made cho…