Emma and several others I spoke with seemed to have a period where they’re excluded from the larger group, even if in a minor way. After people “communicate” to a norm violator that they broke the rules, Chris Crandall explained to me, the group might spurn the norm violator. Established group members might feel like they have to do so in order to make the group “mean” what it always did.

In fact, some of Emma’s Amish friends might have been making her feel like a loner on purpose. One thing peripheral group members can do is to marginalize someone else—Emma, in this case—in order to curry favor with the rest of the group, says Michael Hogg. In pushing to the side someone even weirder, the weird can feel normal again.

When Emma was seventeen, she revealed to a non-Amish friend of the family that she yearned to leave, and he gave her the phone number of a family that agreed to help her.

One January afternoon in 2006, when her parents were out of town, Emma took off her cap and tied a scarf around her hair—she was afraid to leave home bare-headed. She walked out of her family’s farmhouse. Using a cell phone smuggled to her by another rebellious teenager, she dialed the acquaintance’s number. It was the first time she had ever spoken on the phone.

The note she left for her parents read: “The time has come for me to leave, I am not happy here anymore. I am sorry to do this to you but I need to try a different life.”155

Being American, it turns out, sometimes means having the freedom to decide how much freedom you want.

Asma, Part I

The first time ten-year-old Asma saw the small, Southern town to which her father was proposing to move her family, she cried. The place was littered with run-down buildings, some of which looked as though they were left over from the days of sharecropping. Unlike her previous elementary school, which was brightly painted and had student art projects on the walls, her new school seemed cheerless and gray. The fifth-grade students were covering material Asma had learned years ago.

(Asma asked that I not use her real name or identifying details so that she could speak freely about a place she has mixed feelings about, but in which her parents still live.)

Asma was born to a devout Muslim, African-immigrant family and spent her early childhood in a northern part of the U.S. But midway through her childhood, her family had to move to a rural town in the South for her father’s job. Asma and her siblings would be the only Muslims in her new school.