How far would you go in the name of friendship? How far would you go to know you were loved? Would you go to the end of the earth? In “Flat Earth” by Erin Sherry, two teenagers set out to reach the world’s rim. What at first might seem like a simple tale of youthful rebellion and the dangerous allure of conspiracy theories, quickly becomes a heartbreaking story of nuanced power dynamics, the fear of being left behind, and the malleable lines between love and hate.
Power Plays
“Joey would jump off a bridge if I asked her to.” From the very first line, the power dynamics between these two girls is on dangerous display. The narrator goes on to list the increasingly unsettling dares she’s put Joey up to. Her control over her friend seems absolute.
But as the story unfolds, Sherry subtly begins to poke holes in that control. When they steal a car, it is Joey who drives. The narrator beats up a boy that Joey has been dating. Joey, we see, is the one beginning to enter into adult experiences, and while their dialogue revolves around school and games and the flat earth, the tension begins to grow from Joey’s quiet ability to depart from their childhood cocoon.
The narrator also describes playing dead, forcing Joey to “rescue” her again and again. On the surface, this seems like the narrator exerting her control over Joey. As with truth or dare, Joey is playing her game. But as she expands on her game, we see it actually reveals the narrator’s own vulnerability—her fear of abandonment.
“There’s a sort of relief I picture at the end of the world, this delicious satisfaction that, in my mind, is what apocalypse is all about: everyone’s hearts stopping with mine. Other times, I just feel sort of lonely and what helps is when I hear the worry in Joey’s voice, the real fear. I know it’s evil but this is when I feel most loved: when I’ve sold it so well that Joey thinks she’s really lost me.”
What makes these dynamics so compelling in terms of storytelling, is that we’ve begun to understand things about the narrator that she isn’t yet willing to admit to herself. She sees this as an evil act of power, instilling fear in Joey. But we see it as the narrator’s own fear causing her to jeopardize the very friendship she’s so scared of losing.
The power dynamics continue to shift as we learn that Joey comes not only from a more affluent household than the narrator, but one where the parents are more involved. As their runaway journey progresses, Joey’s parents frantically try to contact their daughter. Almost as an aside the narrator notes her parents haven’t called yet. The power has really been with Joey all along. Her power to be loved. Joey is all the narrator has, but the narrator is not all Joey has. And so, we come to the climax of the story:
“If I asked Joey, right now, her deepest, darkest secret, she’d tell me she hates me, has hated me all along. I see it so clearly: the way she’d stand right before me on the side of the road and laugh, laugh, laugh. She’d say it gleefully, like it was never a secret at all. She’d confirm what I’ve always feared most, and then somebody’d appear on the highway to save her, take her home, back to the way she was before all this, before me.”
Often, we try to create situations that spin out of our character’s control in order to build tension. But what “Flat Earth” teaches us is that it’s not the situation so much as a shifting understanding of a relationship that can provide the most compelling arc. The actual state of power between Joey and the narrator doesn’t alter that much over the course of the story. What does change is the narrator’s (and our) perception of their dynamic, and that is what gives this piece such an impactful emotional center.
The Twilight Zone Effect
Of course, this story hinges on a conspiracy theory. The earth is flat. The narrator believes this with all the conviction of a teenager certain she knows everything. Importantly, Sherry doesn’t try to make us question if the earth might be flat, and so relatively little time is spent on the conspiracy theory itself. What’s essential, is that the characters believe it and how this belief shapes their actions.
This is an example of what I think of as The Twilight Zone effect. In the old TV show, it’s easy to be distracted by the aliens and the time travel. But what many of those stories do is use improbable scenarios to reflect aspects of humanity that are hard to come at directly. And within that twilight zone, we often find emotions and impulses that are startlingly familiar.
“The two of us and everything else are spinning on a broken record, so fast we’re soon to fly right off the surface. We hold on so tight.”
The outlandish conspiracy isn’t really what’s driving this story. The narrator’s feeling that her world is spinning out of her control as she hurtles towards adulthood is what drives the story. This reminds us not to let a hook take over a story. The conspiracy might grab our attention and give the story its unique frame, but it remains just that—a frame for the relatable, human emotions at play as a girl faces growing up.
Building a Layer Cake
Beneath the conspiracies, this is a story of children wanting to remain children. In a blink and you miss it line, is the crux of what’s really at issue here: “We were chasing swigs of her mother’s vodka with the baby’s apple juice…” The baby. And again a few paragraphs later,
“Her mother and the baby were sound asleep and they didn’t hear a thing, not how we laughed…not even the snow white Saturn inching down the driveway when suddenly we wanted milkshakes from the drive-thru. We were fourteen.”
There’s no expository paragraph detailing the state of their families, but from the context we learn there are babies in both households. Just as the power dynamics between the girls are carefully layered into the story, so is this change in their home lives. Buried in a list of things the narrator doesn’t miss about her old friends are “their involved mothers.” Part of what lets the girls’ behavior spiral is the fact new babies are distracting their parents. And at fourteen, though again, there is no line directly stating this, they are expected to start taking more care of themselves.
Effective stories build conflict in layers. Beneath the external action of chasing the conspiracy theory is the tension of the power dynamics between the girls, and beneath that, is the tension between them and their mothers. What bakes this into a single, delicious cake is the way these tensions feed into each other. Despite the narrator using “baby” as an insult throughout the story, she clearly would like to remain a baby a little longer herself. She wants to be loved by her mother, by Joey. She wants to feel safe in the world. Growing up means entering into a world where none of these things seem certain. When all these fears and desires layer together, we get a story that is constantly evolving, keeping us engrossed until the very last word.
by B.B. Garin