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Samantha Leach and her best friend, Elissa, were inseparable since infancy. They attended nursery and elementary school together in the suburbs of Providence and amused each other by turning songs and prayers into games during temple. In fifth grade, when Leach began to develop breasts first, Elissa donned a bra in alliance. But by middle school, Elissa had grown from “a lanky child who loved cartwheels and showing off how fast she could run,” as Leach writes in her new book, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, to a girl who was physically insecure, boy crazy, and always pushing Leach beyond her comfort zone. On vacation in Palm Beach, Florida, Elissa cajoles Leach into buying condoms; back home, they begin drinking. “The further she pushed my elastic limits,” Leach writes, “the more outsized the reward. The more uncomfortable she made me feel, the more fun we’d have in the end.”
By eighth grade, the girls’ middle school principal had wearied of their antics. He issued Leach a warning and told Elissa that she wasn’t welcome at their high school, inadvertently propelling her into the so-called troubled-teen industry: a loose network of therapeutic boarding schools, boot camps, residential drug-treatment centers, and wilderness programs that cater to wealthy parents desperate to course-correct their rebellious teenagers. Paris Hilton would later crusade against the industry, detailing how she was abducted from her bed at the behest of her parents and eventually enrolled at Provo Canyon School, which she described as “a torture place,” rife with abuse. She is not alone; according to the American Bar Association, the troubled-teen industry houses between 120,000 and 200,000 youth per year and has weathered myriad allegations, including physical and sexual abuse, starvation, seclusion, and conversion therapy.
Elissa’s experience at a therapeutic boarding school was grim, save for the fact that it was where she met fellow quote-unquote troubled teens Alyssa and Alissa. Together the girls survived strip searches, public humiliation, and the school’s version of attack therapy, a method of group counseling that encouraged participants to shame each other. In 2011, the Elissas emerged from the school, firmly bonded and with matching tattoos: the enigmatic phrase “save our souls.” Within eight years, all three girls had, unexpectedly and unrelatedly, died.
In The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, Leach becomes acquainted with Alyssa and Alissa posthumously, reading bygone Facebook posts and interviewing their loved ones. She frames the three girls’ intersecting stories with research into the murky recesses of the industry. Vogue asked Leach about the high-wire act of writing about privilege and the pain of losing your oldest friend.
Vogue: It took you eight years to try to write this book and an additional four years to actually write it. What clicked at the eight-year mark?
Samantha Leach: When [Alyssa and Alissa] died, it became a story that was greater than a story of a friendship. It felt, from a creative way, like an opportunity to write through a lot of this pain—what I’d experienced, what these girls clearly experienced, and what a lot of survivors had. It gave a sense of urgency where I was like, This isn’t a story I want to tell anymore. This is a story I need to tell.
Writing about young women who have died can be a powder keg, but your involvement in the story has a softening effect. How did your self-portrayal evolve as you wrote?
I was resistant to putting myself in. And then a trusted friend of mine read the manuscript, and she was like, “We need more [of] you because…you are the person that’s left. And we need you to carry us through this story.” When I wrote the chapter about Elissa’s funeral, I felt like I was vulnerable enough on the page. I was like, Okay, this is the tone. This is the level of honesty I need. And I went back and then added more of myself back in.
You write that the school-to-prison pipeline is the flip side of therapeutic boarding schools. Did you have any misgivings about focusing on the more privileged echelon of so-called troubled teens?
I remember going on a walk in Central Park with my editor at Bustle at the time, and she said, “If this can happen to the 1 percent of 1 percent that can afford this, then imagine what can happen to other people.” Unfathomably awful things happen to so many teens, particularly in the prison pipeline, and that weighed on me. But I also didn’t think that invalidated the story of what happened to the Elissas. Their privilege didn’t erase their pain.
Going back to the moment in the principal’s office where your and Elissa’s paths diverged, do you have a sense of why the principal treated you differently?
There was something about Elissa that felt unstoppable. That was sort of the fated element of it. Maybe he felt if he punished her, she would just rebel further. And I was just pretty malleable. I really liked school. I never really got in trouble at home. I’m a people pleaser. It scarred me, whereas that was just going to fuel [Elissa] in the opposite direction. I think that was apparent to him.
When you started investigating the troubled-teen industry, did you have an inkling of what you were going to discover?
I had suspicions. I remembered snippets of things Elissa told me, like the idea that if you tried to run away, they would take away your shoes. That was a really visceral detail that stuck with me—this idea of her barefoot. And I knew obviously she couldn’t communicate with people. But I had no idea that there wasn’t any governmental oversight. The way that I think about it now is that it’s negligence at best, abuse at worst. And I certainly wouldn’t have thought that going in. My contact at Breaking Code Silence [a nonprofit that works to eliminate child abuse in institutions] said to me at the start of this project: “Don’t try to understand it yet. It’s going to sound so ludicrous. Just believe me. And eventually you’ll wrap your head around it.”
What is your hope for this book?
In a dream world I think we’d eradicate the industry. I would love for there just to be governmental oversight, full stop. National legislation. State stuff is great, but I think a lot of times people just pack up and move states. People ask me a lot, “If my child is ‘troubled,’ what should I do?” I think the number one thing is not isolating people from their families and communities. There need to be accessible alternatives for people on every spectrum of wealth and class. Do I think this book is going to do that? No. But does it make me feel so much more invested? Yes.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia is out from Hachette Book Group on June 6.
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