1 It's a perfect replica of a Shaker house, lost deep in a West Virginia hollow where a creek named Eden’s Fork runs. The house is at the back of the hollow, at the cessation of a narrow mountain road lined with modest dwellings and one church. For Mr. Kale,1 this home and the land around it is something of an Eden. The three-bedroom, three-bath clapboard structure is square and tall, surrounded by a vast, untreed lawn. The forested hills wrap around the lawn like a cove.

Mr. Kale built the house by hand, carefully following original Shaker plans, and then he furnished it entirely with Shaker-style furniture that he crafted in his shop—beds, end tables, the kitchen table, sofa, and chairs— all made of solid cherry and walnut and oak, perfectly fitted with wooden pegs instead of nails. The furniture, each piece a work of art, makes the home a museum to a prim past.

The thirty or so wooded acres around the Shaker house were all that remained of what had once been a much larger piece of Kale property. The Kale deed to this land dates to , when Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, granted the area to settlers. John Kale was a ranger at Fort Lee on the Kanawha River. The town is called Sissonville, named for another ranger, James Sisson. This was not desirable country. The fertile flat country of Ohio to the north drew the most settlers, and only the hardiest or hardestup came to buy the cheap, steep hardshale land. The Native Americans called these hills the “land of plenty fat doe.” Yet much of West Virginia had been shunned by the pre-Columbian peoples. They considered it a territory of bad spirits, to be used as hunting grounds.

Many Sissonville families are like the Kales—they trace their roots to pioneer times. Few newcomers ever show up, though Sissonville is not far from the present-day capital city of Charleston, just a few miles to the south down Interstate , or old US Route .

That June before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, neighbors took notice when Mr. Kale brought an outside woman with two children to the Shaker house, where he had dwelled alone for so long. Mr. Kale, a white-collar worker with a salt-and-pepper beard and imposing manner, was in his mid-fifties, and for weekend sport he rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He was quite taken by Amy Sierra, a blond and attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Amy had been a single mother for thirteen years, and had known Mr. Kale for a year and a half. A nurse who worked long hours, Amy wanted some stability for her children—Katie, fifteen, and Levi, eight. Katie immediately raised some eyebrows. It was hard not to notice her; she had spiked hair that she dyed bright blue or green. Not long after the Sierra family moved in, a neighbor invited Amy into her home, where the woman announced, “I don’t approve of your living arrangements.” Amy was befuddled.

“Living in sin,” the neighbor explained.

The neighbor chastised Amy for being with an older man, unmarried, and did everything but call her a jezebel. Amy and Mr. Kale were later married in the state capitol—not because of this neighbor, for the wedding had been their long-standing intention. But the meeting caused Amy to have doubts about the community.

Sissonville was also difficult for Katie, given her punk-bohemian ways. In addition to her colorful hair, she had a habit of writing poetry on her shirts with a black magic marker. Usually, these were odes to boys. She wore these shirts to a school where one out of four students is enrolled in the junior Reserve Office Training Corps (ROTC), and kids fly the Confederate flag at home and sport them on their trucks. Military buzz cuts are the norm for boys. The girls dress conservatively, and many already have the dowdy manner of the housewives they wish to become. Katie instantly doubled the minority demographics at the school. She is half Latina, as her father is Panamanian. One other student was half black, the daughter of a white teacher. All the rest of the seven hundred students were white.

This was not at all like Sebring, Florida, where the Sierra family had previously lived. Sebring, halfway between Orlando and Lake Okeechobee, wasn’t exactly cosmopolitan. But it was more accepting than Sissonville. Katie was used to moving. She’d lived in Kentucky and Florida with her mother, as well as in Ohio with her father, Raul. Raul was a computer programmer, and had come to the United States at age sixteen to enroll in Eastern Kentucky University. When Amy entered the school as a freshman, she was taken with the Panamanian who was her age, but two years ahead of her academically. After Katie was born, Amy and Raul were together for a few years, but then separated.

Katie had attended fifteen schools in her fifteen years. Despite this, her grades were good and she was never a discipline problem. In fact, Katie had something one often finds in the children of military families stationed in various locales: the ability to adapt to fresh environments. Katie knew how to deal with new kids, even in a place as mossback as Sissonville, where her classmates were descended from pioneer stock. Katie never yelled at anyone who made fun of her looks. She always spoke quietly. But most kids simply dismissed her as being weird, not worth bothering over. That August when school started, there were a few other outcasts at Sissonville High School, but none as worldly as Katie. She was friends with them by default, though they were not enough to fill her needs. So Katie turned to the Internet. Earlier she had discovered an anarchy website. She began chatting online with kids in distant places. Katie found a community in which she felt comfortable. She fell in love with a boy in Lake Arrowhead, California, and had friends in other states.

Anarchy conjures images of bomb-throwers to most Americans, but to Katie, it symbolized a community of kids who didn’t fit in with buttondown suburban America. After the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, it also symbolized peace. Katie abhorred the attacks. But she also didn’t like the bombing of Afghanistan.

“I don’t know or have an answer for the war, but I do know that killing people is not right,” she wrote at the time.

Katie wanted to do something, so she crafted fliers with a manifesto, to start an anarchy club at Sissonville High School. In part, the manifesto said:

This Anarchist Club will not tolerate hate or violence. While we believe in freedom of speech, we do not want to be associated with any group that promotes destructive behavior. We discourage violence and will do our best to help others see the negative effects of hate and how pacifism could cause greater change and will be better understood by non-anarchists. Not only will we discuss and teach anarchist views, but we will also talk about the negative effects of an anarchist society, and of the strengths and weaknesses of anarchist theory . . . We hope to give students and teachers an opportunity to see beyond commonly held beliefs to discover the basic freedoms that anarchy presents to the world. —Katie Sierra

The constitution of her proposed club went on to say, One of the club’s purposes is to teach others the importance of peace, equality and respect for other humans as well as animals. The club is anti-militaristic, and will circulate pro-peace literature. None of this sat well with Amy. Katie had once tried bringing home a boy who wore a spiked collar, and Amy had forbidden it. Amy came from a military family. Her father served in Vietnam, and now works in a steel mill in Ashland, Kentucky, where Amy was raised in a tiny house. Her two brothers are also in the military; one served in Desert Storm, and the other is a first lieutenant in the army.

Upstairs in a bedroom closet of the Shaker house, Amy kept a big box filled with hundreds of family photos. She’d often go to this box and reminisce, looking at pictures of her daughter before age twelve—when she had turned so weird-looking—a cute girl with bows in her hair, always smiling for the camera.

Undaunted by her mother’s protestations, on October , , Katie went to Principal Forest Mann, an administrator with a narrow black mustache and drooping black hair across his forehead that made him look suspiciously like Adolf Hitler—a resemblance not lost on the students at Sissonville High School. Katie stood before Mann, citing the West Virginia State Department of Education’s student handbook, policy number , which allowed afterschool clubs. (There was, for example, a Christian Fellowship Club and a Civics Club.) She began to ask Mann about starting the anarchy club, but he cut her off.

“You will not be able to form an anarchy club.”

Katie grew frustrated, almost tearful. She didn’t know what to say. He prohibited her from distributing any fliers for the club. “Go back to class,” Mann told her.

A  , Katie sat in the Shaker house, watching CNN. Images of children accidentally killed by American bombing in Afghanistan came across the screen.

Katie was horrified. She rushed to a computer and banged off an e-mail to a boy in the anarchist group. She thought: What can I do? I feel helpless and saddened. I don’t like what happened in New York. Everyone who kills is wrong. But this, too, is wrong. I have to do something!

Katie went to her dresser drawer. She pulled out a red T-shirt and scribbled furiously with a black magic marker, writing across the back shoulders, WHEN I SAW THE DEAD AND DYING AFGHANI CHILDREN ON TV, I FELT A NEWLY RECOVERED SENSE OF NATIONAL SECURITY. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

She wrote other things on the shirt, against racism and for peace, but this stood out.

The next morning she donned the shirt. It was cold, so she pulled on a “hoodie,” a sweatshirt with a hood. She boarded the bus that parked at the back end of the hollow in the predawn darkness. The bus went down the hollow five miles to Sissonville High School. Inside, she removed the hoodie. Students muttered in the halls when they saw the shirt. As usual, Katie never raised her voice, nor was she impolite. She invited students to talk about the war. But in Jean McCutcheon’s third-block English class, the situation came to a head. Sophomore Jacob Reed, seated behind her, was upset by the shirt. “If you don’t love this country, then fucking leave!” Jacob screamed. Jacob was sent to the office. He either told or somehow related to Principal Mann that Katie had written on her shirt, “America should burn,” and “I hope Afghanistan wins.”

His punishment for yelling: a lunchtime detention. Mann ordered him to write down what happened. Jacob wrote,

I was in rd Block and Katie Siera was in that class her shirt said Stuff about how she thinks America is the dumbest country and how it should burn and she also told the class how She hopes the war against Afganistan we will loose it So I got mad and told her if she doesnt like this country get the Fuck out . . .

People whow herd it was— Jamie Myers Daneil Kersey Todd Shamblin Jacob Reed --

Katie was hauled into Mann’s office. Now chilly, she’d pulled the hoodie back on over the T-shirt. Mann confronted her with what Jacob said, and the fact that she had anarchy fliers. (Katie had the fliers in a folder atop her desk.) Katie told Mann she hadn’t distributed any fliers, that they were with her personal belongings. Then she offered to remove the hoodie and show the T-shirt—insisting that it said nothing like what Jacob described—but Mann said he’d heard enough. She again asked him to look at the shirt.

“Do not take off your sweatshirt, Ms. Sierra.”

Mann then said she’d disobeyed him, and disturbed the other students. Her punishment? Three days of suspension. Written on the official form: “disrupted educational process.”

Mann confiscated the anarchy fliers. Katie was sent to a counselor’s office. The counselor scolded Katie, and said her parents had to fight to come to America.

“Why don’t you love this country?” the counselor asked.

“I love this country. I love this world,” Katie said. “If I didn’t, then why would I want to change it?”

The counselor didn’t comprehend this. Amy was called. She angrily drove to the school. When she saw Katie seated in the counselor’s office, she said, “I knew this anarchy shit would get you in trouble!”

Amy put Katie in her SUV, which sported three American flags on the dashboard, and sped home to the house that had an American flag on a porch pole, near a brass plaque announcing the house’s pedigree. School officials would ask that Katie see a psychologist before being readmitted.

A   eturned to school after the suspension, David Reaser, an assistant principal in charge of discipline, called her into his office. Reaser said she was not to discuss her political beliefs in school. He then turned the conversation in a surprising direction.

“Don’t you believe in God?” he asked. “I don’t see, like, how that has anything to do with anything.” Reaser spoke about a castle made of sand. If she were walking down the beach, would she think it just materialized, or that someone had made it? Did she believe there was a creator?

Katie cried. Katie knew the God talk was out of line. She knew about the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution from her government classes. She assumed these documents meant something. She stewed, and thought: I am being ordered to come back to school as someone else. It’s America, isn’t it? I have a right to free speech. If I can just explain myself, the adults in charge will understand.

The school parliamentarian, Amy Leithead, suggested that Katie attend the meeting of the Kanawha County School Board. The board was holding a special visiting session in Sissonville that Monday after her suspension. Katie thought it was a good idea. That Monday night when Katie and Amy entered the school auditorium, the place was packed. They took chairs at the back of the room near the wife of the ROTC instructor, sitting through two hours of talk about school roofs and mold. In the public comments period, the parliamentarian introduced Katie.

Katie had spoken barely a word when murmurs and hisses erupted. The mood of dozens of parents was nasty. Before she could get to her shirt or say much of anything about her anarchist club, she was shouted down. “What in the hell is wrong with a kid like that?” asked board president Bill Raglin, according to a story written by Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre.

“That’s a treasonous act against the government of the United States!” said board member John Luoni.

Board member Pete Thaw said it was as if she were waving the Japanese flag right after Pearl Harbor. “This country is facing one of its darkest hours,” he said. “You must not have enough to do.”

Katie cried. Amy was dumbfounded.

Eyre interviewed principal Mann after the meeting. Mann repeated what he would later claim Jacob told or wrote him, that Katie’s shirt said “America should burn,” and, “I hope Afghanistan wins.” Eyre put this in his story. The next morning, the community read these mistruths.

The city of Charleston erupted. Katie was the talk of the town—on the radio, on the street, at the nursing home where her mother worked. She became “that anarchy girl.”

Charleston may be the capital of West Virginia, but in many ways it’s a small town. With few exceptions, an entire city had overnight come to despise the anarchy girl.

It was bad. But things were about to turn worse for Katie.