She also felt somehow different from other Amish girls—vaguely inadequate, or like everyone else was in on a joke she didn’t understand. By sixteen, Amish girls are long done with schooling and are considered old enough to be schoolteachers themselves. Each year, the local Amish school board would choose a sixteen-year-old girl to be a teacher the following year. Emma had expressed an interest in teaching, but she was never asked to be one, even though younger girls were.

Sixteen was also the age at which Amish girls started dating, and by seventeen it was considered unusual not to have a boyfriend. Yet, girls were also not supposed to reveal if they had crushes on certain boys. They were instead expected to wait until someone set them up.

One day, some male friends of Emma’s brought a guy over to her house. Just a few minutes into the date, this new boy walked out the door. Emma thought he was just going to the bathroom, but then she heard his buggy pulling away.

“That really hurt my feelings,” Emma told me. “I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. I am definitely an outcast or something.’” When all the other teens found out about this misfire, they blamed Emma.

It took forever for anyone to set Emma up again, and when someone finally did, it was not with the boy she’d hoped for. Still, she continued seeing him, since it was expected. Every two weeks—as expected—he would come to her room. Without speaking a word, they would climb into bed together. Sex was forbidden, but this strange co-sleeping stage was required. She and a boy whose name she scarcely knew were to lie side by side in a narrow bed together all night and determine whether they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Though this is the community’s sanctioned form of “bed courtship,” a patina of propriety had to be maintained. The following morning, the boy would wake up before dawn and leave under the cover of night, to avoid being seen. After about a month of this, Emma told him she didn’t want to see him anymore.

That’s when the headaches and nausea started. According to her memoir, Runaway Amish Girl, published in 2014, Emma’s parents took her to a quack doctor who “treated” her by shoving balloons up her nose and inflating them. The painful treatment made Emma even more miserable than before. She couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her: everyone else seemed to accept their Amish fates. It felt like God had put something in her that made her doubt.