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Enjoy the show. When I was seven, I lived in a dusty, vacant part of the West with an atmosphere straight out of a Judy Bloom novel.

Despite everyone on my neighborhood living on large lots, isolated plots of land, mostly

ranching families, kids played hockey in the streets. Crime was minimal to non-existent, and everybody

knew everybody else. I had a tight-knit group of friends. Names changed to protect privacy,

obviously. Let's call them Shirley, Natalie, and Bailey.

We'd been friends since before we could walk, mostly because we were the same age and all lived

in the same neighborhood. We weren't idiots, but we definitely were sheltered. The same could be said for our parents, many of them,

ended their education after high school or even a bit sooner

and grew up in similar, if not the exact same community,

where anyone who'd shake your hand was probably trustworthy.

That's why no one had noticed anything before it was

too late. Just before the summer started, a new family moved in. Families moving in wasn't

terribly uncommon, but this family had a girl my age, and so it became a big deal. Her name was Ella, and her whole family

was a bit strange. It took two weeks for them to introduce themselves to anyone. Plenty of people

went over to introduce themselves, but even when it was obvious, people were home. No one came to the

door. Finally word got around that the father was a minister

at some church no one in town had heard of and the wife was working part-time as a tailor. We spent a lot

of time outside and eventually spotted Ella, my friends and I, and we invited her to join our group in whatever we were up to that afternoon.

Through that, we learned that she had four older brothers and an infant sister.

She and her whole family had very antiquated gender roles,

...