Misty, a sex-education instructor, was presenting that day in April at Odessa High School, a mini-mall-sized campus with buildings the color of pie crust. The teens slouched and giggled at the mention of sex. One girl kept in a single earbud, like a diplomat awaiting a translation to teenager-ese.

Sarah wants to remain abstinent until she finds “The One,” Misty says. Yet, she ventures to a party, she drinks too much, and she sleeps with a guy she barely knows. “The next morning,” she says, “he’s gone.”

Misty works at an organization called the Life Center, which is headquartered in the neighboring town of Midland. They call themselves a pregnancy resource center, preferring that to the term many pro-choice advocates use: crisis pregnancy center. Across the country, these centers position themselves as alternatives to abortion clinics, counseling pregnant women with the hope that they won’t terminate their pregnancies.

Over the next three days, Misty would deploy a mix of goal-setting, real talk, and gag-inducing pictures of gonorrhea in an effort to convince her captive teenage audience to save themselves for marriage.

That’s a tall order anywhere, but perhaps even more so in West Texas, where there isn’t much for a young person to get up to beyond church and vice. Midland and Odessa are canonically Texan: remote moonscapes studded with oil jacks and tied together with a 20-mile stretch of highway.

I lived in Midland for much of my childhood. Every year, our class made a pilgrimage to the town’s main cultural attraction, the Petroleum Museum. (Its star exhibit: a floor-to-ceiling tower of household objects made from petroleum byproducts.) When I returned for this reporting trip, my hotel room contained the latest issue of Midland Magazine, whose front cover announced that the Petroleum Museum had seen some recent upgrades. In a place where the answer to boredom is studying hydrocarbons, the abstinence advocates have their work cut out for them.