#surrounded by one of the most dysfunctional families for HOURS at a funeral

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AY(OYM)!!!! CHAPTER FIVE!!!!!!! Yay

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Best Movies Coming to Netflix in May 2021

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Movies are slowly coming back to life at the cinemas. You can see it with each glowing report about a Godzilla vs. Kong or Mortal Kombat doing solid business. And for those with more discerning tastes, films like In the Heights and Those Who Wish Me Dead are definitely going to make their release dates.

Nonetheless, there are many who are understandably not ready to go back to theaters (or have yet to get an HBO Max subscription). Thus Netflix remains an old reliable option. While the Netflix movie selection can be narrow, each month offers some worthwhile gems to revisit or even discover. And May has a surprisingly robust group of Hollywood films from the last 40 years coming to the streaming service on May 1. Here are the best ones.

Back to the Future (1985)

Great Scott! Back to the Future is coming to Netflix. As one of the most beloved films of the 1980s—if not ever—it’s doubtful we need to explain in great detail why this is exciting news. From its star-making turn by Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly to the grand musical score by Alan Silvestri, everything about this movie justworks. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s script is like a Swiss watch in precision, paying off every single setup in the film’s first act when Marty commandeers a time machine made by Doc Brown (a lovable Christopher Lloyd) and accidentally travels from 1985 to 1955… to meet his parents as teenagers!

More time has passed since the movie’s release than the once massive generational gap between the film’s primarily ‘50s setting and 1985. Yet it still plays as a timeless story about family, time travel, and manure. Large piles of manure. By the way, the rest of the Back to the Future trilogy is coming to Netflix, too.

Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009)

Forget about all the “sad” dog movies of the last decade where canines have funny voiceover narrations and then die on repeat. Hachi: A Dog’s Tale is a very bitter, bittersweet dog’s journey based on a harder truth. A remake of the 1980s Japanese film, Hachikō Monogatari, this American movie is based on the real events surrounding Hachikō, an Akita dog who lived in 1920s Japan. Every day Hachikō would run to the train station, awaiting his master’s return from work. One day, after a fatal stroke, his master never returned. Yet for another 10 years, the dog would escape its various new owners and spend the afternoon waiting at the station.

Directed by The Cider House Rules’ Lasse Hallström, Hachi captures this anecdote about a dog’s loyalty with grace and genuine sweetness. But you’re not going to get through it dry-eyed.

The Land Before Time (1988)

Before it birthed a string of straight-to-video movies meant to babysit pint-sized millennials, the original Land Before Time was a generational touchstone for childhoods in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Overseen by Don Bluth at the height of his talent, and in partnership with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, The Land Before Time is a marvel in animation from the period before Disney Animation’s renaissance. It follows an assortment of baby dinosaurs, including a recently orphaned “longneck” named Littlefoot, after a horrible earthquake has rained devastation on all the isolated herbivores. But together they may just find salvation in a land called the Great Valley.

Essentially a dinosaur road movie for children, to the modern eye it’s told with a surprisingly delicate sensitivity. There is no fourth-wall breaking humor and sideways smirks here. It’s a very earnest fairytale captured in the lost art of hand-drawn animation.

The Lovely Bones (2009)

Based on Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestselling book of the same name, The Lovely Bones has a tough premise: a teen girl is raped and murdered, and goes to heaven where she watches her loved ones attempt to process and move on after her disappearance. The debut novel was not only very popular, but generally well-received for its treatment of trauma, sexual assault, and grief.

The movie, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci, among others… was not as well received, fairly criticized for its prioritization of CGI heavenly visuals over a nuanced, character-driven story. You may wonder, then, why we’re recommending a movie that wasn’t great? Because The Lovely Bones is a fascinating watch for those interested in the limits of adaptation and, in particular, how a great filmmaker with expansive resources (including a very talented cast) can fail if they’re not the right person for the job. 

Mystic River (2003)

As one of Clint Eastwood’s best films as director, Mystic River was the first cinematic adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, and the author’s hardboiled vision of Boston’s tragically seedy underbelly is well realized here. As much about the hard luck community on the South Side as the story of three men, it nonetheless tracks how neighborhood lives intersect.

We meet three boyhood friends in the movie’s unnerving opening and then jump to their bitter middle age. Oe of them, reformed gangster Jimmy (Sean Penn), has a daughter who’s been found murdered in a gutter. His onetime pal Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a detective, swears he’ll figure out who the killer is, and both men’s estranged acquaintance Dave (Tim Robbins) knows more than he’s letting on. All three’s fates are interlinked in this operatic passion play about the traumas we keep hidden until we’re drowning in regret.

Notting Hill (1999)

Though Four Weddings and a Funeral might have put writer Richard Curtis and star Hugh Grant on the map as the kings of ‘90s British romance, Notting Hill is arguably their true pinnacle. Grant plays a foppish bookshop owner who happens to meet the most famous actress in the world, Anna Scott (played by Julia Roberts who might just have been the most famous actress in the world at that time) when she stumbles into his shop.

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From the sympathy brownie competition, the junket where Grant’s William Thacker has to pretend to be a journalist from Horse & Hound, and Rhys Ifans in his pants, there are plenty of funny, moving moments. But it’s the two montage scenes—a walk through Notting Hill as seasons change to Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and the final montage to Elvis Costello’s “She”—that would melt the hardest of hearts. Rom-com perfection.

Scarface (1983)

Reviews were not initially kind to Scarface, director Brian de Palma’s explosive three-hour remake of the 1932 gangster classic starring Paul Muni (that in turn was based on a novel which loosely chronicled the rise of Al Capone). Written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino as psychopathic Cuban refugee-turned-drug-kingpin Tony Montana, the 1983 film was excoriated by critics for its relentlessly graphic violence, excessive foul language, and over-the-top performances, especially by its leading man. But critics at the time missed the point: Scarface was a reflection of its time—the hedonistic, greed-driven, cocaine-fueled ‘80s—and was appropriately and utterly crazed as a result.

The film did mark the moment when Pacino transitioned from intense, thoughtful character actor to (mostly) histrionic circus barker, but he leaves it all on the field and his mania drives the fast-paced film to its epic, bloodsoaked, and unbelievable (in all aspects of the word) conclusion. As a metaphor for the insane decade of excess that birthed it, Scarface is riveting, breathless, occasionally shocking and often unintentionally hilarious. It’s the gangster movie on coke.

State of Play (2009)

Kevin Macdonald’s remake of a British miniseries by the same name turned out to be a strong thriller in its own right. With a whip smart script by Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, this movie doubles as both an enjoyable investigative procedural and a love letter to journalism just as newspapers were beginning to die out in the 2000s. Russell Crowe plays Cal McAffrey in the film, the last of the old school guard of reporters, but his ethics will be challenged when the congressman with a dead young woman on his staff turns out to be his old college buddy (Ben Affleck). Rachel McAdams also stars as a young blogger who learns the thrill of chasing a story that takes more than an afternoon to research. Helen Mirren, Robin Wright, and Jeff Daniels also star.

The Whole Nine Yards (2000)

Remember when they made comedies for adults? The Whole Nine Yards is one such anomaly. Really a buddy film about a suicidal dentist (Matthew Perry) and a gangster living under a phony alias who moves in next door (Bruce Willis in one of his last truly charming performances), this giggles and gangsters laugher is a secretly delightful ensemble movie with a deep bench of talent. Indeed, Kevin Pollack, Amanda Peet, Nastsha Henstridge, and Michael Clarke Duncan, as the cuddliest gangster you’ll ever see punch your protagonist in the balls until he’s pissing blood, all get to shine. With a twisty plot, it’s an R-rated throwback to the type of screwball shenanigans that were once Hollywood’s bread and butter.

Zombieland (2009)

It’s rare when calling something the second best zombie comedy ever made is high praise, but in a horror subgenre that also includes Shaun of the Dead, this is high praise for Zombieland. As an R-rated teen comedy, one suspects the filmmakers almost lucked into the absurdly talented cast they assembled with Emma Stone, Jessie Eisenberg, and Woody Harrelson. In the years since this movie’s release, all three were nominated for Oscars (Stone even won one), but in ’09 they’re just having a blast with this goofy stoner hybrid about a dysfunctional makeshift family having fun during the zombie apocalypse.

Also, it features arguably the greatest comedy cameo ever conceived. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not going to spoil it for you here either…

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Part 21

There was a lot of death in 2001-2002. My uncle Rocky died of an overdose, Doris, my grandma's best friend died of old age, my half sister Roxanne's father died, and then after all of that, my estranged grandpa Roy died. He was my mother's father and he had been a cruel man. My mom spoke to him maybe once every fifteen years. She had nothing to say about him. I had only been around him once. Someone mistakenly invited him to my parent's wedding back in '91 and him and his friend got so drunk that they went into the closet and peed on my baby shoes. He had been physically and mentally abusive to my grandma and my uncles and aunts.

For the last three months that he was alive, my mom tried to take care of him – as she is a nurse who does home health. He was in the final stages of cancer, and I met him once before he died. He wanted to meet his grandchildren whom he hadn't really seen before he died. It remember the ride up to Kellogg, feeling very strange about meeting this man for the first time, who had a lot to do with my own mother's mental problems.  He had been a miner for most of his life. After my grandma divorced him in the late 60's, he had married a few more times, and now he lived alone in a really nice cottage type house in the woods about fifteen miles from a very small little community – barely even a town really – called Kingston. He had never really beat my mom per say too much, but he had a general hatred for women and beat her mom a lot. I think this abuse honestly prevented my mom from growing. My mom in many respects has the maturity of a nine year old child at times. The trauma of her life prevented her from going past that.

It was late summer and I would be starting 8th grade in a week. We drove all the way up to north Idaho in the late summer. It was cooler up there and quite lovely. We listened to CCR all the way up. We drove onto this obscure road, that lead onto another obscure road that went congruent with this small river, and then we turned onto this long drive way that dipped down in the middle and had a field in front of it of long grass. It was really cute house. It had this big front porch with a gazebo. We timidly got out. My mom opened the door and we all entered. He was very sick. The house smelled of death. I had never really smelled that before then. There is a smell the body takes on when it is shutting down, and even if you've never smelled that, it's like your animal mind instinctively understands exactly what it is.

He stood up. He was shaky, and thin and tall. His face was sunken in. He struggled over to us. He had remorseful eyes that were filled with pain. Regardless if some might say that he deserved the lonely and painful death he was getting, I fucking hate cancer. He was in misery. He gave us all hugs. It was definitely one of the strangest hugs I have ever had. He was sunken in and the smell was as I have said, unmistakable. Later,  eight of his surviving twelve brothers and sisters came to the house. They all had names that started with a G'. My grandpa Roy was the only one who didn't. I don't remember all their names, but some of them were Genever and Gwenevere (twins), Grady, Gladys, Gregory, Gretchen. My grandpa Roy had a huge family. They all lived in Utah, with the exception of Grady who had sided with my grandma Marie when she divorced Roy and stayed a family friend who lived in Smelterville a few miles away.  My great grandma and grandfather had been a poor  mountain-folk family from Tennessee. Their first names had been Queen Elizabeth and George Washington which was strange, but I hear was fairly common with Appalachian people. George Washington had killed himself during the depression by stepping into a moving vehicle after he could not provide enough food for his thirteen children and wife (my grandfather had been the youngest) and they were all living in a cave – as the story goes.

Three weeks later he died. He was buried in the same cemetery that my uncle Rocky had been buried. The funeral was very similar to the one my uncle had been in, but I think that they actually sent me back to Roy's place after the funeral to watch my siblings who were all five and six and would have no fun at a function for elderly like that. And because Roxanne had inherited that enormous sum of money from her own father's death, everyone decided to move into his house that year and eventually buy it. Despite all the partying, I loved that house. Roy had been pretty heavily invested in boozing, and he had actually built a bar room off the house. There was also this giant storage room filled with years' worth of preservable foods. He had a Jacuzzi for a bathtub, which was amazing.  The walls were stained with years of tobacco, which I kind of liked for some reason. Behind the house was a giant hill, and I guess sometimes people saw a wolf pack out there. There was this strange area too that you would not have expected to be there out by the river. You would be driving, and about ten miles before you got to Roy's place, out of the blue there was this biker bar, with people pitching tents all over in the front of it. It was definitely a strange place, and one of my family members would come and pick us up every weekend. It was a great escape from my life in Kendrick, and even from my friends to a certain degree.

Also, right before school started, my dad broke up with Jodi for a few weeks. He came to me and apologized for taking things out on me. He really embellished on it, and made promises that he would do better. We went on a small trip in the woods, just us family. I believed him this one last time. And then two weeks later he went back with Jodi, and then turned against me, and I don't think I ever took anything he said one hundred percent at face value ever again. He's always done that. If he sides with one person, it's never just that.  When he sides with someone it is intrinsic with him turning against another. It's the way his mind works I suppose.

I started trying to do stuff with my hair. I pulled some of it back. And of course I immediately began failing my classes. I listened to all the lectures, and I even understood my homework, but I never would do it. Our school gave out several hours of homework each day. It was doable if you spent several hours doing homework, and the unspoken rule in the school was that if you were popular enough you cheated your way through. Each morning, a few of the super smart kids who understood their lessons well would get paid a small fee to sit out in the hallway and give the answers to all the popular kids. So maybe about four or five kids were doing all their homework. The rest were doing small bits and then copying someone else. Samantha was one of these kids. If you were not popular or well liked you were not a part of this group.  The teachers knew about this. It was all in the open. The principal did too. It was low key explained to us that cheating and fitting in were a part of life, so if you weren't popular enough to get the rights to be in these cheating circles, than you were failing in some other unspoken element of life that would mean you made a bad phony adult and deserved the bad grade for not conforming with the group mindset.

I didn't really believe in cheating. It's not that I am of great moral integrity by any means – I have done worse, but if something doesn't satisfy my personal sense of achievement, aesthetic, or personal growth I don't try very hard even if it is for my own good. I have to mean most of the things I do and feel that it makes sense emotionally and has to connect to my own sense of authenticity, and as an adult, I struggle against myself constantly to this day, to the point of internal dysfunction just to talk myself into doing mindless repetitive tasks that mean nothing to me. It's probably one of my greatest character flaws because it makes doing stuff that I need to do that much more difficult. But I never even tried to cheat. I just didn't do the work, and if I had wanted to pass I would have just done my own work to at least get the satisfaction of personal achievement. But since my classes meant nothing to me, it would not have been authentic of me to pretend or base my academics on a lie.

Kyle seemed different in 8th grade. He did his hair differently than he had a year ago. His voice began cracking. He seemed to be starved for attention from other popular kids. It was definitely going to be more of a challenge to get his attention, but the trend on following me around saying my name backwards Eener, putting kick me signs on my back, and buzzing which makes me flinch ( I have kind of this ASMR thing and some sounds cause a really uncomfortable jolt down my back) was also becoming very popular. Very quickly I found myself in a situation where not a day would go by where I didn't find something absurd in my locker that someone would put there. The football players would surround me and wouldn't let me go to class..  People were discovering that I am genuinely very easy to scare or surprise. The teasing wasn't really as harsh or cruel as many people do experience. For one, nobody ever called me fat or ugly. Cody Cooper would make rude comments about my acne, but he was generally alone in that. I am sure people said stuff when I wasn't around.

But to my face, I was getting this other kind of teasing that was like flirting but not. It is hard to explain. It was definitely not respectful or dignified. And I suppose I intentionally brought it on myself once it started to happen. Like, nobody was going to date me, that was obvious – I wasn't the kind of girl they wanted to get connected with socially, sleep with (at least I don't think) or be seen with, but it got to this point where boys in my class and in the class above me would spend a lot of their time focused on me and getting me to react, to shriek, jump, get upset, or walk into some kind of prank, and there was this slightly sexually charged aggression to it.  There were many times where there would be ten guys who would surround me in the hallway and push me around a little bit, push me against the locker, and say strange things to me to see how I would react.

They stared at my chest a lot, but what they liked from me for the most part was their own power. It was kind of gross and a predecessor to rape culture though most of them probably would never do something like that directly, it had this volatile element to it – but as long as Kyle was a part of it – though he was always more on the playful side and less on the aggressive, I didn't flat out snap at anyone or tell them no and I subtly let it happen. I simply reacted the way they all wanted me to.  I felt like some kind of plaything and there was an element of sexuality to it because this would not have happened had I not been a girl.

On one hand, I was the one in power and I liked being the center of attention even though it demeaned me. I was curious to see how far I could drive people to focus on me. I was getting more attention than any one girl in the class  in some ways, but on the other hand, the boys were the ones who were in power and their girlfriends were given a sort of false respect because they were the prizes. The boys were defining me and reducing me somehow to a toy and felt physically comfortable in touching or controlling me on some level. Nobody ever frightened me, or really got too aggressive but looking back I think had there been the right sort of person in these groups it might have been a different story. And I guess this was my first introduction to these kinds of unspoken power things. They would surround me in the hallways, staring at my chest, they would be intentionally ready to spook me around every corner. I was frequently discussed. I grew to expect it. Girls would glare at me jealously, but also feel lucky they weren't me. I am that other kind of girl. And to them I was not a real person. It was a bit of a unique title for me, since the other girls who lacked in popularity were given mostly insults and direct attacks. What was in store for me was stranger. It was like they were putting me in this situation where they passed me around and all the guys had to have some part of getting me to react. It felt like I was being used or passed around the way they might pass around an easy girl in school whom everyone knew too well but nobody took seriously. And yet, it was a different kind of need they got from the situation – sexual, but not quite. I don't know if I can possibly explain it and I think that is where I will give up trying and leave it at that.

My mom had gotten this Chesapeake Bay retriever pup that we named Chester. And Roxanne had gotten this Pitbull named Tasha who had learned all these neat tricks. Someone had taught her to do everything in slow motion. If you said SLOW to her, she would eat in slow motion, walk in slow motion. It was the funniest thing. Tasha was a really cool dog, and the only problem she had was that she tried to kill cats. Since I had lost Pixie, my dad grew weirdly paranoid that my mom was going to 'win' me to live with her because of these dogs.  He was afraid that somehow Roxanne's money would buy me away and then he would no longer have me as a babysitter. So he went out and got me a puppy at a shelter, to compete with the other dogs I guess. They told us that it was a German Shepherd and boxer mix, but everyone who saw this animal believed that she looked like a coyote. She acted like a coyote. I am actually 80% certain they lied about the German Shepherd in her. She almost looked full bred coyote aside from a slightly copper tone to her fur, and something about the way her legs were shaped. I named her Pepsi because of her color.

Of course, I was young and wanted a puppy, but my father buying me Pepsi was one of the worst kinds of dogs he could have started me off with. I wish he had gotten me a smaller more manageable pet. He expected that I would clean up after her and take care of her and train her. I had no experience in doing this. And I really did try. I felt very proud of her, and I took her with me on the weekends up to my mother's. But it was hard. For one thing, she was not as friendly even as a young pup. She behaved much more like a wild dog than she did a domesticated one. She liked being pet somewhat. But I could not control her. She was also obsessed with running away. And I could never catch her. She was loose in Kendrick so many times. I remember her running down the street once, with a semi on her heels and with a wild doggy grin on her face. It got to where the neighbors would complain when they saw her out.

She was difficult to potty train because I was in school for much of the time. There wasn't enough time or room to be had for her.  She didn't care about approval like other dogs. And trying to leash train her became impossible. She would fight me with every bit of strength she had as soon as we began heading down the street, and often times she would break the leash or her collar and then she would bolt. She was full of energy, and was an incredibly sly dog.  Very destructive. I loved her to death, but there was nothing I could do with her.  I remember getting frustrated and crying trying to control her. I guess nobody fully realized that she was part coyote. And from what I have read, coyotes are very difficult pets, not even legal in many states. I think had I been a better animal trainer – like a trained professional, she could have been trained to be somewhat acceptable. But she needed to run. And she was the kind of dog that needed to have her respect earned in some mysterious way and I was far from someone who would be capable of that. You could see that on her face.

My friends and I by this time were very obsessed with boys, and in some ways perfectly typical of 8th grade girls to a degree that is somewhat painful. I had started this weird comic that was basically all centered around a future fifteen years from now, where Kyle and I were married and had children. My thinking was so naive and small at that time that I drew us living in this triangle house, and the comic mostly revolved around corny jokes you could make about us, and the way our children lived there lives. It was hilarious, and bad.

I tried to go to every football game even though to this day I know nothing about football or how it is played. When people ask me what my favorite football team is, I always just say The Penguins – and they always scoff and tell me that that is a Pittsburgh ice hockey team. There was something liberating about football games in the small town. It was the one social event where everyone seemed to be mixed for one.  You were not as confined to your position in the school while you were there. Almost everyone seemed to show up. And there was some really strong social situations that were cemented while the games were going on. There was something in the air that was both liberating and apprehensive, like something was about to happen. I initially went because Kyle was on the football team, but truth be told, after awhile, even Kyle looked like just another strange body with enormous shoulders and tiny legs running around with the ball, and randomly stopping and reforming in ways that I don't understand because of my ignorance of the sport as a whole.  We would go almost every night, even when it got cold. There was this contrast at night that always made me feel giddy and a stranger to myself and seemed to reflect an inner psychological divide between the conscious and organized and the wild Dionysian elements to my subconscious. Beyond the school, the world was enveloped in darkness of the woods, and you could hear the noises of coyotes and the creek running. Being outside for all of this put us all out in the elements. It would get very cold during the end of the season, and I could see my own breath. It was very tribal. Even though I was not partial to our school's team, I still felt that tribal quality.

I had kind of become the baby of my social circle and this used to upset me rather badly. For one, everyone I knew was fascinated with having sex with someone – or multiple people. They would have sex dreams, would think about their crushes without their shirts on and I imagine talk about it more when I wasn't around. And I just didn't want to have sex. I wanted to get to know someone in a very meaningful way and then see what happened. I wanted this terribly. The level in which I felt this desire to be loved didn't come from the same place as most of the girls I knew. It wasn't that I was closed off to those ideas altogether. It just wasn't happening. And to some degree, I might have been a little naive about certain elements of sexual desire. But my friends either thought I was lying to them because of embarrassment, or they thought I was still like a third or forth grader. Samantha, without even trying to sound mean told me people who didn't want to have sex were not capable of being in real love. During one sleepover, I got so upset that I pretended to be sick so I could go home.

That Halloween was the last year I ever properly participated in dressing up in a costume or trick or treat. It remember it being a lot of fun. We made terrible jokes that we all thought were very funny at the time – it seems we thought we were all terribly hilarious and our lame gags were simply the best. I generally never cussed, and my friends were giving me a hard time for this, so that Halloween I intentionally said Fuck. Everyone was shocked at me, but it seemed to go over well, and I was accepted as someone to be taken more seriously henceforth in the social fold. We were all witches – though Katie might have been something else, like a werewolf of some kind. When it was late and we had gone through the whole town, we went home and emptied our candy out on the floor of Sarah's house on the top of the hill. We all laughed and traded our candy. I was always partial to tootsy rolls.

Katie put up for me around this time in a very meaningful way, that I still remember fondly. Sarah-Mae had cut back on saying short negative things towards me over the last few years, but occasionally it still happened. She still said small things in conversation to keep me in check I think. Asking her today about why she said some of the things she did, and she really doesn't remember, other than she felt insecure sometimes. So I am left to assume this was an alpha female move to keep me from feeling too confident in myself or something. One night, Katie, Sarah and I were all sitting around Sarah's kitchen listening to the radio, talking about boys, eating ice cream, and drawing anime. I said something goofy – nothing insulting to anyone at all but a little silly, and Sarah for whatever reason retreated into her former self. She looked at me coldly and said 'Renee, Shut Up.' She said this in front of Katie. And the look on Katie's face was instantly ferocious with no apologies. She got right in Sarah's face.  She told Sarah off immediately in a way I had never seen anyone do before. I think it started off with 'WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY TO RENEE?!?'

Sarah seemed shocked. She looked down at the table, her entire face was red and I don't remember her ever having anything to say in return. The room was pretty awkward. I just looked down too. I inherited this weird smile when I get nervous from my mom so if my memory is correct, I was probably smiling nervously. I had never had a friend who stood up for me before, and I think about that component to Katie and I really do appreciate that element to her personality and this one single instance gave me this strong sense that I was an equal after all who deserved to be treated with respect.  I think we all eventually calmed down. Sarah never told me to shut up ever again. In fact, aside from maybe a few other times, I can't think of a time where she ever seemed to intentionally say anything mean to me.

There was this one situation where I think Katie and the rest of us really overreacted and I wish I could have had the wisdom to handle differently. This girl in our class who wasn't very bright named Megan seemed very confused about herself sexually. I am not sure what was going on in her life that made her do this, but it started in the girl's locker room before gym. Samantha was getting dressed, and Megan came up and grabbed her boob. Samantha told her to stop, and she wouldn't. She then started trying to grab Sarah, and she tried to grab my nipple when we were on the bleachers over the course of week. She had this mindless look on her face as she did this. We all told her to stop. We yelled at her to get away from us. We called her a lesbian. She seemed nervous but would do it again. I really really regret throwing that word out at her like it was some shameful way of being and if I were in that situation today I know I would have handled it a lot better. I had every right to feel violated, but I dealt with it shamefully. I might have gone over and talked to her and explained why what she was doing was inappropriate if it happened today. Obviously she was incredibly confused. I never really liked her as a person, but I called her a lesbian like she was gross, was really gross on my own part. We told the duty teacher, but it seemed to make the gym and duty teachers embarrassed, so nobody wanted to tell her no.

There was this popular girl named Erica who confronted us. She was kind of known for taking unpopular girls under her wing that made her feel more powerful. She had taken to befriending Megan for this reason. She never had any interest in befriending me since I was not really all that entranced by her and had enough dignity to understand what she was doing. Anyway, she came up to us and started saying that we should just take it and stop being mean to Megan. I basically told her 'no way' and Erica walked away pissed since she wasn't accustomed to being told no by girls of lower status than herself.

Katie eventually got tired of hearing about it, so she found Megan in the hallway between classes, grabbed her by her front collar, picked her up off the floor and slammed her against the lockers and told her that if she ever fucking touched one of us ever again she was going to fuck her up.' Megan cried and Katie let go of her, and that seemed to end it. That was above and beyond anything Erica would have felt safe getting involved in. Nobody wanted Katie to fuck them up. She meant it. I don't think there was any situation where Megan bothered me in any way after that. But honestly, even though it all got corrected, I still feel the ugly sounds of me calling Megan a lesbian coming out of my face. And I really wonder if we dealt with any of that the way it should have

Meanwhile, I was more obsessed with Kyle than ever. In a way, this is when the whole thing started veering more towards unhealthy. I was giving more and more up of my self worth just to be accepted. And days when he gave me attention were the only days worth living for. On a day when I was ignored, I would go crazy, like a junkie who needed a fix. I would stop being able to breath throughout the course of the day, hoping for a smile, some eye contact, a joke thrown my way, something. I would feel this lump in my throat growing until I was holding back tears. I would stumble home, and I would feel this self loathing hatred for everything about myself. I might scream and pull out my hair. I felt ugly. I would take my rage out on my little brother and sister, who might have been mildly disobedient but really didn't deserve it. They grew to live in fear of these extreme explosive mood swings I would have. I think they were beginning to really resent me, and I really don't blame them. Whenever anyone did anything slightly wrong, I never gave constructive criticism, If they made a mistake I used aggression and shame to put them down. It's something as I have said previously, that I wish I could go back in time and take back.

What really got to me was that Kyle and this popular sportsy girl named Kayla were really into each other. They sat together, walked together, flirted and chased each other around.  Even their names sounded good together. And who the fuck was I? Someone Kyle would tease when nobody was around. I was good enough to be around when nobody was looking, but not good enough to be taken seriously or dated. I can look back, and I really do understand why I was probably not the lead lady in the situation. I was insecure, and selling your soul for attention is not endearing. It was only that I was kept as some kind of secret friend to Kyle, even when he finally did get popular. He still looked for me when he was alone with warmth, and still flirted with me. I was the other girl on the side that made him feel good about himself that he could act freely around. Surely by this time he must have been aware I liked him. It was incredibly obvious. So what he was doing was wrong. He liked that I was infatuated with him because it made him feel good about himself, so stringing me along was worth it for his own needs. 

And even though I don't even think what I was feeling was what I would consider real love it was consuming my entire existence with obsession and making me suicidally depressed and sort of ruining my life. And it was the closest to love I had ever felt, before him I had never really wanted anything before. So this was everything to me. If I failed at winning his love, it was the equivalent of death. There was no other option I could imagine. And in the very back of my mind, there was this strange and frightening realization that felt like a tug dragging me into blackness that I had no words for that seemed to be emerging behind what I took for granted. Like another me that was wanting to take over, but more like this realization that behind what I really thought was my life that I lived unquestioningly was this deep sense of nothingness that nothing I thought I knew could contend with and something I would have to face alone. This strange abyss that seemed to be sucking me in always right outside the corners of my perception. I was fighting that change by clinging to the hopes that Kyle would eventually fall in love with me. If he fell in love with me, I could fight ever being fully immersed into being whoever it was that I was starting to become. I could live in a safe and loving environment, I could have children, live in a small town and grow old and content with the limited existence I had and an empty sense of certainty.  

If you want to read my life story from the beginning, below are the previous parts i have written so far. 

Also, here is a picture of about 25% of the town i lived in. Quite a boring place.

PART 20 - http://tinyurl.com/y8jskymt

PART 19 - http://tinyurl.com/rfhbms8

PART 18 - http://tinyurl.com/ycrznrwk

PART 17 - http://tinyurl.com/y77unlng

PART 16 - http://tinyurl.com/yadpsv8c

PART 15 - http://tinyurl.com/yb3lt6k5

PART 14 - http://tinyurl.com/yb4cfedq

PART 13 - http://tinyurl.com/yalanq9s

PART 12 - http://tinyurl.com/yc79mw94

PART 11 - http://tinyurl.com/yc9qhj84

PART 10 - http://tinyurl.com/yb734w24

PART 9 - http://tinyurl.com/yc2t6vfw  

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

[needyourglowtoglow]

Next Sunday's (Feb 5) *New York Times Magazine* will include an extended article: "The Youth Group That Launcheda Movement at Standing Rock" by Saul Elbein.

Here are some excerpts:

[begin excerpts]

Jasilyn Charger was 19 when she learned her best friend had killed herself. Charger was Lakota Sioux, and she had left the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota for Portland, Ore., just a few months earlier. But in the summer of 2015, she flew home for her friend's funeral. Then, two days later, while she was still in Eagle Butte -- the largest town on the Cheyenne River Reservation with a population of 1,300 -- another friend killed herself. Charger was shocked. "It hurt all of us because these were people who we thought we knew but really we had no idea what they were going through," she said. "It really woke us up."

In the weeks that followed, more teenagers on the reservation killed themselves with belts, knives and handfuls of Benadryl.

Native American teenagers and young adults are 1.5 times as likely to kill themselves as the national average, with suicides often clustering in epidemics that hit and fade. Suicide is so common on the reservation that Lakota youth don't bother to say "committed suicide" or "attempted suicide." They just say "attempted" or "completed."

By the end of that summer, Jasilyn told me, 30 Cheyenne River kids attempted and eight completed.

"We said, 'They committed suicide for a reason,' " Charger told me. In Eagle Butte, reasons weren't hard to find. Their elders liked to talk about them as the future, but no one seemed to pay much attention to how their lives were hard, bordering on hopeless. Cheyenne River kids had families struggling with poverty and parents and relatives with serious drug-abuse problems. Often there was violence at home, to the point that many youths had nowhere safe to go at night. And amid all this, there was a hard-edged social pressure to drink or use drugs.

<snip>

Together with White Eyes and their friend, Trenton Casillas-Bakeberg, she formed a youth group. They raised money for basketball tournaments and for a youth trip to the Red Nation Film Festival in California, where the kids were able to see the ocean for the first time in their landlocked lives. They went to the tribal council, demanding and getting funds for a safe house for young people. Most of all they counseled young people, urging them to look out for one another and get involved. "Yeah, it looks all pretty on Facebook," Charger remembered saying, "but really, what's going on in real life? You can be busy getting on Snapchat while someone's getting bullied."

As the suicide wave crested and broke, the youth group, now called the One Mind Youth Movement, turned to something more political. They spent that fall as part of the local campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, whose route would cut under the Cheyenne River just upstream from the reservation that bears its name.

And after the Obama State Department denied the Keystone XL permission to cross the U.S.-Canadian border in November 2015, they moved their focus to the neighboring Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where the company Energy Transfer Partners was trying to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. That pipeline would move half a million barrels of oil a day beneath the Missouri River, the main source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux, which is one of the cousin bands to Cheyenne River, as well as for other downstream Sioux reservations.

The youths came to believe that the Dakota pipeline was not only a threat to their drinking water but also a harbinger of the larger environmental crisis their generation was set to inherit.

Last April, Charger, White Eyes and a few One Mind teenagers and mentors helped establish a tiny "prayer camp" just off the Dakota Access route, on the north end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Over the next six months that camp grew into an improbable movement that united conservative farmers with the old radicals of the American Indian Movement; urban environmentalists with the traditional chiefs of hundreds of tribes. As Donald Trump pushes forward with the Keystone XL and Dakota Access, he will face a movement emboldened by a victory on Dec. 4, 2016, when the Department of the Army denied an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline and directed the Army Corps to consider an alternate route. It was a rare triumph for both the environmental and land rights movements, as well as for the American left in an otherwise dark moment. But little remarked upon at the time was the unlikely seed from which the movement had grown: an anti-suicide campaign among a tight-knit group of youths, most younger than 25, impelled by tragedy and guided by prophecy.

At the start, the camp seemed like a quixotic undertaking. Lakota culture is effectively run by the old -- traditionally young people are supposed to apologize before they even speak in front of elders -- so for the youths to take it upon themselves to lead a movement was a radical act. In March, concerned citizens of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, frustrated with the lack of action from their tribal council, the body that functions as the tribe's official, U.S.-recognized government, put out a call for help to the other Sioux reservations. One Mind Youth made the two-hour drive north to propose setting up a prayer camp modeled on the ones raised against the Keystone XL. The tribal council agreed to set up the camp but offered little other support, pessimistic about the effort. The youths were undeterred. In early April, a handful, joined by a few former Keystone activists, moved into tepees in a protected ravine beside the Cannonball River, on the extreme north end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Those days, the temperatures were in the 30s and there was still snow on the ground. The youths dubbed the camp Sacred Stone and lit the sacred fire. At first, they lived on little more than bologna sandwiches, potato chips and water. But then residents from the small reservation town of Cannon Ball, up the hill from Sacred Stone, began to bring donations: leftovers from dinner, cut-up wooden corrals for the campfires, a chain saw. Life in the prayer camp was supposed to be lived "in ceremony," a sort of mindfulness or religious retreat in which all things are done with the intention of maintaining purity. Days began with a water ceremony; the sacred fire had to be regularly fed; meals began with prayer and a "spirit plate" served for the ancestors; alcohol and drugs were strictly forbidden.

It was, in other words, the sort of safe place that the youths had been insisting was necessary for them. They needed a haven, Charger explained, to "regroup, figure out what you're going to do and not worry about where you're gonna sleep." The previous fall, they rented a hotel room in Eagle Butte as an informal crash house for Cheyenne River youth, where sometimes as many as 20 teenagers stayed, sleeping and showering, safe from bullying or the lure of alcohol or drugs. The prayer camp at Standing Rock provided something similar. Members of One Mind would drive home every week to resupply and pick up youths who wanted to experience the camp.

For Charger and other leaders, as important as the idea of the safe space was the idea that activism would teach children the skills to survive more immediate threats, like bullying and drug abuse. They hoped to pass on skills at the camp that they themselves had been taught by Keystone activists in their community. During the long campaign against the Keystone XL, groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network (I.E.N.) helped set up a "spirit camp" on the Cheyenne River Reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Eagle Butte, where activists prayed and taught the surrounding communities about civil disobedience. The I.E.N. paid for One Mind members to be trained as organizers -- they sent Charger to Washington and White Eyes to network with aboriginal climate activists in Australia -- and the teenagers and young adults were exposed to ideas and training that linked the pipeline fight to larger struggles in their society. Every direct-action training against the Keystone XL, for example, referenced the prophecy of the black snake, a figure out of Lakota myth that in recent times has been identified with pipelines. But it has a more general meaning: "It symbolizes a darkness, a sickness, whose only intention is to sow dysfunction and loss of life in our communities," said Dallas Goldtooth, an I.E.N. organizer who worked with Charger and other One Mind members. The message was clear: The struggle against the pipeline was part of the same struggle against alcoholism, suicide and abuse.

After weeks at the Standing Rock camp with minimal tribal support, the young people decided that they needed to carry out some sort of public action. "It was important to make the adults see that if you're going to sit there and argue, we're gonna go wake up our brothers and sisters," Charger said. Bobbi Jean Three Legs, a young mother and long-distance runner from Standing Rock who had become active in the camp, had a vision. Her daughter woke her one night to ask for water, and she suddenly saw a day when, thanks to water pollution, there would be no water to give. Soon after that, she and White Eyes proposed a 500-mile relay run from the Sacred Stone Camp to Omaha to deliver a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers, asking it to deny the Dakota Access Pipeline permission to cross the Missouri River. The I.E.N. began a social-media campaign announcing the run and organized a blitz of calls and letters from tribal members on various reservations.

Within days, far sooner than expected, an Army Corps representative from the Omaha district agreed to meet with members of the tribe. To some, this meant the youths could call off the run. But they insisted on going ahead. Not only did they still want support from the tribal council; they had also begun to believe that this run could bring together young people from all the Sioux reservations. The seven bands of the people commonly known as the Sioux had organized themselves in the Oceti Sakowin, or "the Seven Council Fires," a tribal republic that spread out over a vast area, including the Dakotas, Minnesota, Kansas and Nebraska, until federal campaigns forced its members onto the scattered, tiny reservations they occupy now. One Mind saw water as an issue that could unify all Oceti Sakowin youth. And their run had rich cultural resonance: Before Europeans brought horses, long-distance messenger runners held the scattered tribes of Oceti Sakowin together. Three Legs, White Eyes and Charger mapped a route to pass through as many reservations as possible. The run would use a traditional method in which a messenger ran a short distance, about a mile, and then rested while another runner took his or her place. It allowed people who were not very good runners, like Charger, to go on a long-distance run.

Three Legs insisted on bringing someone from each of the nine Oceti Sakowin bands, and the run quickly brought in people from reservations that hadn't been involved with the Standing Rock camp.

<snip>

On April 24, the runners set off south from the Sacred Stone Camp. They ran along the Cannonball River to Highway 1806, then down toward Cheyenne River, their first stop. Grassrope ran next to Charger, who was carrying a heavy staff that represented their ancestors. When she got too tired, Grassrope carried it. In doing so, according to Lakota belief, they were literally carrying all those who had come before. They stayed in churches and community centers and women's lodges and private homes. At every reservation, they met not only with tribal leaders but also with reservation youths, whom they talked to just as they had in Cheyenne River, telling them about the old ways and the camp upriver where those ways were being revived. "It really caught them off guard," Charger said, "that they saw youth like them doing it." Because the Native American community has become heavily networked on social media as a modern means to keep the bands united, word spread far beyond the communities they visited. When the youths arrived in Omaha on May 3, a representative of the Army Corps of Engineers met with them on the steps of the office. They still felt motivated as they went back to Standing Rock. Grassrope quit his job in Lower Brule and settled into the camp with them.

By then time seemed to be running out: The Army Corps of Engineers was still considering the Dakota Access Pipeline's permit, and the Tribal Council still wasn't offering much support. On July 9, through a video released on YouTube, Bobbi Jean Three Legs and several other runners announced an even more ambitious action: a run that would cover 2,000 miles to Washington, where they would deliver a petition to the Army Corps' headquarters. "We need your help," a young woman says in the video. Another woman, with glasses and a long black braid, says, "We're going to be traveling through many of your towns." On July 15, 30 runners set out from Sacred Stone, adding more as they made their way along their route. Jasilyn Charger's estranged twin sister, Jasilea, was one. She was in bed asleep when Jasilyn, passing through Cheyenne River, ran into their house, threw her clothes into a bag and urged her onto their support van. Over the course of the next week or so, a dozen more joined.

But on July 26, the runners learned the Army Corps of Engineers had approved the Dakota Access pipeline easements. The black snake was on its way. The runners decided to carry on to Washington, but the focus shifted back to the camp, as I.E.N. activists at Standing Rock urged people via Facebook messages to rise to the standard set by the youths. Across the great archipelago of North America's Indian reservations and urban communities, people took notice. They loaded cars and buses and camper vans with donations and headed for Standing Rock.

Twenty-six-year-old Eryn Wise moved to the camp in late August, at the beginning of what organizers called the big boom, when the population spiked from dozens to thousands. A native of Minneapolis, Wise was raised by her grandmother on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation after a suicide attempt at 11. On the reservation, she was picked on for excelling at school but was surrounded by her siblings, with whom she formed a close bond. But she returned to Minneapolis when she was 16 to care for her mother. When she read an article about the youth run she felt a pull and quit her job. She found her twin siblings, Alex and Lauren Howland, already at the camp.

Wise arrived just as the elders began to claim more control over the movement the youths had started. The run, Goldtooth told me, had forced their support by transforming the Dakota Access pipeline from a regional Lakota issue into an international one. Standing Rock council members began to visit the camps and pay for emergency services, propane and portable toilets. The camp had expanded onto the floodplain across the river, and grass-roots activists and members of the unelected traditional leadership, which serves as a sort of parallel Oceti Sakowin government, erected a Council Lodge, a large tepee from the tribe's past that the young people had only heard about. The Council Lodge was the traditional meeting place of the Oceti Sakowin in the 19th century, when the bands would gather on the Plains. The Council Lodge tepee at Standing Rock was a sign of a new political awakening, as the traditional chiefs and medicine men collaborated with grass-roots organizers -- the youth and other Native American factions that had joined -- to restore the old, unified tribal republic. It was part of a larger move toward formalizing the prayer camps under a council government. By then, the protests against the pipeline had, for the traditional leadership, become about far more: They had become a long-prophesied end to history.

The black-snake, prophesy said, would only be overcome by the Seventh Generation, which would rise up and, as Charger explained, "bring balance to the Earth. Not just to its people. To the Earth." Many of the youths that I spoke with took this to mean the Seventh Generation had a sort of messianic role to help restore order, on behalf of all beings, to a world thrown out of balance by modernity and greed.

"The Seventh Generation is almost cliche in Indian communities," Goldtooth, the I.E.N. organizer told me. Anyone born between 1980 and the 2000s, he said, "hears about it constantly. The hope that our generation will see a significant shift toward community renewal and nation building and the reminder that our communities expect big things of us." The Seventh Generation tracks roughly with millennials of all races, but they share their own unique history. The generation between Goldtooth, 34, and Charger, now 20, is the first to have grown up free to be Indian. They are familiar with their ancestors' scars but also fluent in mainstream American culture.

At Standing Rock, the elders, once resistant to their movement, now insisted that the youths accept the responsibility that the prophecy had foretold. In early September, the Seven Council Fires and Chief Arvol Looking Horse, who, for the Lakota Sioux, is something like their head of religion, gave the youths a gift: a chanupa, the ceremonial pipe that is the most sacred element of the Plains religion, a symbol of the knitting together of the human community and nature, ancestors with the living. In a ceremony under the blazing sun, the council deputized the youths as akicita, a Lakota term that means something like "warriors for the people" or "police." It is difficult to overstate the importance of this gesture. The youths, Looking Horse explained to me, "weren't really ready for it, but we told them that they're going to accept it and learn the traditions. We said they had to be of pure mind. They said, 'We'll try.' "

After the ceremony, the youths, who had begun to call themselves the International Indigenous Youth Council, or I.I.Y.C., to symbolize their desire to unite all nations behind a traditional way of life, moved together into a tepee by the Cannonball River. "A lot of our first month or two living together," Wise said, "was just having someone break down crying." In her short time at the camp, Wise had become a sort of surrogate mother to the other young people -- her nickname even became Ina, or "mother" -- and she found herself in charge of a group of about 25 who were barely holding it together, despite the leadership they had assumed. The I.I.Y.C. was the first experience of family for many members. "A lot of them never had the opportunity to be kids, because they were always trying to take care of themselves or take care of their parents." This process, one of the youth leaders told me, was "terribly beautiful," an unburdening of the "historical trauma" that had defined their lives. "No one realizes what the repercussions of colonization have been, the repercussions of forced removal," Wise said. It was hard, she stressed, to explain to people that these were things that had happened recently, to her generation's parents and grandparents.

"I don't blame my mom," Charger told me. "Her mother was murdered." She shrugged. "The abuse lives in our blood."

Charger was referring to Native American history, not just what happened on the frontier but also in more recent decades. After federal campaigns reduced the Oceti Sakowin in the late 1800s, there were nearly 100 years of calculated assault as the state tried to force Native Americans to assimilate. The unified nation of Oceti Sakowin was broken into widely separated reservations, and after Congress privatized reservation land, many starving Lakota families had to sell off their property to white farmers, further cutting the size of reservations. The U.S. Government banned the Sundance, the Plains religions' most sacred ceremony, with its days of fasting and ritual bloodletting; Native Americans could no longer openly practice their religions. But perhaps most devastating to their psychological health were the boarding schools, in which generations of Indians were sent to schools to be taught white culture. This system reached its nadir in the forced assimilation campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, when the grandparents of many of the I.I.Y.C. youths were taught English literally under the lash.

At Standing Rock, the youths felt they were developing the means to overcome that trauma. The key, as Charger explained it, was to let their history go, which they took as an almost holy responsibility: Forgive, and then take action to spare those who are coming in the future. "We don't want our children to inherit this depression," she said. The remarkable thing about this philosophy was that it was deeply practical: not just forgiving "the white man" but also the parent who beat you. For many, this provided a means to re-establish difficult relationships with parents or siblings. But it also helped bind them together into their own sort of family.

<snip>

One factor that helped recruitment into the regional chapters and Standing Rock was the increasing violence by the police at the camps.

The images of campers being maced or attacked by dogs spread anger across the country, and many brought that anger to Standing Rock.

<snip>

The youths took this seriously, even as they found themselves under physical threat. Wise, the camp mom, remembers, for instance, watching on Facebook Live as her sister was maced. Furious, she raced to the scene and threw herself at the police. Suddenly there were six hands on her shoulders: I.I.Y.C. members, pulling her back. She saw her brother Alex, his face white with what appeared to be war paint. "He was pointing over my shoulder and shouting, 'We'll pray for you, we'll pray for you!" His face, she realized, was covered in tear gas, "and he was still praying for them. That brought me back."

The youths also tried to reach out to the Morton County Sheriff's Department, which in the larger camp had come to be seen as the enemy. After the Army Corps of Engineers withdrew permission for the camp in late November, protesters expected the sheriff's department to violently clear campers off the land. But on Dec. 2, when the department posted on Facebook soliciting donations of granola bars, fruit soda and socks, the I.I.Y.C. showed up with large plastic containers filled with granola bars, warm clothing and water. Lopez, who had returned to the camp to stay in October, made a speech: "Though you have brutalized us, we will not brutalize you." The station was on lockdown; after a while, an officer looking sheepish in his helmet, faceplate and full body armor, opened the door and accepted the containers. From the crowd, someone yelled for Lopez to explain to the officer why they hadn't brought soda. Lopez half turned. "We want you to be healthy!" he yelled. "Mni wichoni! Water is life!"

It was a small gesture, but one that prompted thanks from the officers and anger from some in the camps. "Why are you supporting them?" Wise remembers people asking. But prophecy was important to the youths; they worried that if the movement became too violent, it would ruin everything they had been trying to build.

On Dec. 4, 2016, as thousands of military veterans from across the country crowded the camp in solidarity, the Department of the Army announced its decision to deny an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline route. The decision was a shock and an unexpected triumph. That night, as a blizzard descended on the camp, David Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock reservation's official tribal government, presided over a ceremony around the main fire to thank the youths. "When the youth ran to D.C., that's when this really got started," Archambault told the crowd, as people lined up to shake the hands of the gathered runners. "We all came here to stand for something greater than whatever we did at home." Now, with winter bearing down, he said, everyone could begin to go home.

But the youths didn't want to go home. For them, leaving was more complicated. They thought that the "victory" was too tentative. Energy Transfer Partners had announced it would ignore the Army's decision, and the election of Donald J. Trump had put into office a president who vocally supported both the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. "Dave Archambault doesn't speak for our entire generation," Jasilyn Charger said. "When he dies, my grandchildren are going to be here, and nobody can speak for them but me."

There was also a more personal problem. Many of them had nowhere else to go.

<snip>

All believed their work had to spread, not because they necessarily believed they could stop the pipeline but because the movement had connected, as Lopez told me, "youths who would otherwise never have had much interaction." He offered a practical reason as well: In December, back home in Denver, he got a call from a young person on the verge of suicide. He felt helpless, but he stayed on the phone, "listening to hear, not listening to respond. All I could do was say: 'You are loved, someone cares about you, not necessarily right where you are, but in your community at Standing Rock. Even if you feel no one loves you, no one cares about you, I love you, I care about you. I want to pray with you again. And if you kill yourself now, I won't be able to do that.' "

He paused. "And my brother is still alive today."