The Nowhere Girls Read online

  Mom’s first mistake in the church was being a woman, which happened way before she bumped her head. Many of the old white folks (in a congregation that was mostly old white folks) crossed their arms in front of their chests and frowned during her guest sermons, waiting for the real pastor to take over and do the real preaching. Even before the head bump, she was a little too chipper for their tastes, a little too into the love business. So they were primed and ready for all hell to break loose when she went and married those two gay guys who owned the dog salon. In her last sermon before she got the boot, in addition to reminding the congregation of the annoying fact that Jesus loved and accepted everyone without judgment, she alluded to his being a brown-skinned socialist. There was even a rumor around town that someone overheard her exclaim, “Fuck Leviticus!” while she was pruning roses in her yard.

  So, just like that, after years of service, Grace’s mom was out of her job as director of women’s activities and guest speaker at Great Redeemer First Baptist megachurch, instantly reviled and hated by nearly seven thousand parishioners from Adeline and the neighboring three counties. Dad had just started his online marketing business and wasn’t making any money yet. But worse than being suddenly poor was being suddenly friendless in a small town where everybody was friends. No one would sit by Grace at lunch. Graffiti started showing up on her locker, the strangest of which was “Slut” and “Whore,” since she was, and is, still very much a virgin. That’s just what you call girls when you want to shame them. So Grace spent what remained of the school year eating lunch alone in the gym bathroom, talking to no one throughout the day except the occasional teacher, and her parents had no idea. Mom was too busy trying to find a new job and Dad was too busy trying to find clients; Grace knew her pain wasn’t something they needed to talk about.

  Grace isn’t quite sure how to define what she’s feeling right now, but she at least knows it’s not sadness about leaving. Adeline made itself very clear that it no longer had anything to offer Grace and her family in terms of friendship or feeling welcome. And even before that, when Grace was comfortably lodged in her low but stable place in the social hierarchy, with a set cast of friends and acquaintances, with well-defined rules of behavior and speech—even then, with all that order—Grace suspected something was off. She knew her role well and she performed it brilliantly, but that’s what it was: a performance. Some part of her always felt like she was lying.

  Maybe she always secretly hated Christian music and the cheesy, horribly produced Christian-themed movies they always watched in Friday night youth group. Maybe she secretly hated her social life revolving around youth group. Maybe she hated sitting at the same lunch table every day, with the same bland girls she never really chose and never particularly liked, who could be both timid and insufferably hostile to anyone outside their circle, whose gossip cloaked itself in Christian righteousness. Maybe she secretly wanted a boyfriend to make out with. Maybe she was curious about all sorts of things she was not supposed to be curious about.

  Grace had always yearned for something else. Different town, different school, different people. And now that she finally has the opportunity to possibly get it, she realizes she’s terrified. She realizes she has no idea what she actually wants.

  What’s worse? Lying about who you are, or not knowing who you are at all?

  Right now, faced with the uncertainty of starting a new school year at a new school in a new town, Grace would give anything for the simplicity of her old life. It may not have been satisfying in any meaningful way, it may have not been true, but at least it was safe. It was predictable. It was home. And those things sound pretty good right now.

  But instead, here she is—in this weird place that doesn’t know if it’s a small town or a suburb, stuck in this purgatory between an unsatisfactory past and an unknown future. School starts tomorrow, Sunday is Mom’s first sermon at the new church, and nothing feels close to being okay. Nothing about this place feels like home.

  Grace suspects she should be praying or something. She should be asking for guidance. She should be making room for God. But right now she has bigger things to worry about than God, like surviving junior year of high school.

  Grace realizes what she’s feeling is homesickness. But how can someone be homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist anymore?

  And how can someone start a new life when she doesn’t even know who she is?

  ROSINA.

  Fuck cousin Erwin and his useless boy existence, fuck all the uncles of the world, fuck Mami and Tía Blanca and Tía Mariela for thinking Rosina’s their slave, fuck old-school tradition for agreeing with them, fuck this bike and its crooked wheel, fuck this town for its potholes and crumbly sidewalks, fuck Oregon, fuck rain and rednecks and football players and people who eat at La Cocina and don’t tip and throw their greasy napkins on the floor for Rosina to clean up.

  But Abuelita’s okay. Rosina both loves and likes her grandmother, which is no small thing for Rosina. Even though Abuelita thinks Rosina is her dead daughter, Alicia, who never made it out of their village in Mexico. Even though Abuelita wandered off Tuesday night when no one was looking and made it all the way to the slightly nicer and much whiter neighborhood nearly a mile away, and that pretty cheerleader named Melissa who Rosina’s been crushing on since sixth grade had to bring her back. After crying for an hour, after riding her bike through the neighborhood searching for Abuelita, Rosina heard a knock and opened the front door, her face blotchy, her hair a mess, her nose wet with tears and snot, to a vision of beauty and kindness: Melissa the cheerleader holding Abuelita’s hand, a warm smile on her face, her eyes radiant with sunlight. “Look who I found,” the cheerleader said, and Abuelita kissed Melissa on the cheek, said, “Eres un ángel,” walked inside the house, and Rosina was so embarrassed, she shut the door in Melissa’s beautiful face after only barely managing to say thank you.

  Rosina cringes at the memory. Never has a girl made her feel so un-Rosina-like. Never has she felt so bumbling. She thinks of the stupid expression “weak in the knees,” how she always thought of it as some gooey romantic nonsense, but now she realizes she has experienced scientific proof that it’s a real physical condition, and she hates herself for being such a cliché, for having such a crush, for being such a girl about it.

  She pedals hard, hoping the burn in her legs will wipe away this unsettling feeling of wanting something, wanting someone, she knows she cannot have. Even on her bike, riding as fast as she can, Rosina still feels caged, trapped. She can’t ride to Eugene. She certainly can’t ride to Portland. All she can do is wander around the streets of this tired old town, looking for something new. Sometimes after a rain there are sidewalks full of half-drowned worms. Sometimes lost mail. The usual empty bottles and candy wrappers, receipts, a couple of crumpled-up shopping lists. Roadkill. The only new things in this town are trash.

  Rosina races through the streets of Prescott, an eternal loner, the only brown girl in town who doesn’t hang out with the other brown girls, as if she’s trying to stand out on purpose, her spiky black hair snaking through the air, earbuds in her ears, listening to those wild women that made music in towns and cities so close to here but practically a whole generation ago, those brave girls with boots and electric guitars, singing with voices made out of moss and rocks and rainstorms. Relics, artifacts. Everything worth anything happened a long time ago when new really meant new.

  Why does she always end up on this street? There’s nothing here but cookie-cutter houses that were new in the fifties, a few scraggly trees, small front lawns with browning grass. This street isn’t on the way to anywhere Rosina wants to go. It’s not on the way to anywhere.

  But there it is. The house. Lucy Moynihan’s house. Faded white paint peeling like on every other house. From the outside, it’s nothing special. It housed a girl Rosina barely knew. It’s been empty all summer. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t. So why does she keep coming back here? As if it’s calling her. As if,
even though Lucy’s long gone, she’s not done with this town quite yet.

  But the house isn’t empty now. Not anymore.

  If Rosina hadn’t already been staring, she probably never would have noticed the plain, chubby white girl reading on the front porch. There isn’t much about the girl that makes her stand out from the side of the house. She is off-white against off-white. She has the kind of soft, undefined face you don’t remember. But she’s new, and that’s something. That’s more than something.

  “Hey!” Rosina calls, screeching to a halt on her bike.

  The girl jumps. Rosina thinks she hears a mouselike squeak.

  “Who are you?” Rosina says as she kicks open her kickstand. “You just moved here?” she says as she walks up the cracked footpath. “This is your house now?”

  “Um, hi?” the girl says, setting her book down, a mediocre fantasy novel. She brushes limp, dirty blond bangs out of her eyes, but they fall right back to where they were.

  “I’m Rosina,” Rosina says, thrusting her hand out for a shake.

  “Grace.”

  Grace’s hand is limp and slightly moist in Rosina’s tight grip. “What year are you? You look like a sophomore.”

  “Junior.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m going to Prescott High.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of the only option here.” Rosina does nothing to hide the fact that she’s sizing the new girl up. “Your accent is hilarious. You’re like a cartoon character or something.”

  Grace opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.

  “Sorry, that sounded rude, didn’t it?” Rosina says.

  “Um, kind of?”

  “I actually sort of meant it as a compliment. You’re different. I like different. Where are you from?”

  “A small town in Kentucky called Adeline.”

  “Huh. Well, there are a lot of rednecks here, so you’ll feel right at home. You know whose house you’re moving into, right?” Rosina doesn’t wait for an answer. “Do you know what ‘pariah’ means? This was the town pariah’s house. Have you read that book The Scarlet Letter? She was kind of like that, except not.”

  “I never read it. It was banned from my school’s library.”

  “Wow. Even we’re not that backward here.”

  Rosina’s quiet for a while. She kicks a clump of weeds growing through a crack in the sidewalk. “I guess she’s a sophomore this year. Wherever she is.”

  “Who?” Grace says. “What’d she do?”

  Rosina shrugs. “She didn’t do anything. But it doesn’t really matter what actually happened. It just matters that she talked about it.” Rosina’s eyes shift around but nothing holds her gaze. She wants something to lean on. She is the kind of person who likes to lean.

  “What do people say happened?” Grace asks.

  Rosina shrugs. She is trying to act cool, trying to act like there aren’t feelings running deep beneath the surface. But it is hard to act cool when you’re not leaning on something, when you were already pissed off before this unexpected conversation even started, when the late afternoon sun is in your eyes and you’re standing in the shadow of the house of that poor girl who deserved better and you should have done something for her when you had the chance.

  “The thing is,” Rosina says, “people don’t want to hear something that’ll make their lives more difficult, even if it’s the truth. People hate having to change the way they see things. So instead of admitting the world is ugly, they shit on the messenger for telling them about it.”

  Rosina spits on the sidewalk, sickened by the slow heat rising from the pit of her stomach and threatening to burn her down. What is it about this quiet girl on the porch that is making her mouth move and flames come out? Is it simply because she’s asking questions? Because she actually seems to care?

  “Who gives a crap about some girl getting raped?” Rosina says with bitter sarcasm. “She wasn’t important. None of us is important. The girl is gone. We should all just forget her.” Rosina looks at Grace like she just noticed she’s there. “You really don’t say much, do you?”

  “You’ve kind of been doing all the talking.”

  Rosina smiles. “Well, New Girl, do you have anything interesting to say?”

  “Oh,” Grace says. “Um . . .”

  “Time’s up,” Rosina says. “I’m out of here. See you at school, I guess.”

  “It was nice to meet you?” Grace says. Rosina tips an imaginary hat, then turns and lifts her leg over her bike.

  “Wait!” Grace says. She seems as surprised as Rosina at the sudden volume of her voice. “What was her name?”

  Rosina sighs. “Does it matter?”

  “Um, yes?” Grace says softly. Then a little louder: “Yes, I think it does matter.”

  Rosina doesn’t want to believe her. That would mean caring about something she can’t do anything about. She doesn’t want to say the girl’s name out loud, because that would make her real, and what’s the fucking point of that?

  “Lucy,” Rosina says as she hops onto her bike. “Lucy Moynihan.” Then she rides away, as fast as her long legs can pedal.

  ERIN.

  “I practiced my routine for tomorrow morning,” Erin tells her mother. “It will take me approximately one hour and fifteen minutes from the moment I wake up until I get to school. Margin of error is plus or minus three minutes. This schedule also assumes that I select and lay out my outfit the night before.”

  “That’s nice, honey,” Mom says. “But maybe it’s not necessary to lay your clothes out since you wear the same thing every day.” Mom is always trying to convince Erin to do things differently. There is always a better way than Erin’s way.

  “But it will add a cumulative one to two minutes to take each item out of its drawer.”

  Erin’s wardrobe consists of three checkered flannels, four plain white T-shirts, two gray T-shirts, three pairs of baggy jeans, two pairs of baggy cords, one pair of black Converse All Stars, and one pair of blue Converse All Stars, everything with the tags cut off.

  “Why don’t you wear those new shirts I got you?” Mom says.

  “They’re too scratchy.”

  “I’ll wash them a few more times. They’ll soften up.”

  “I like my old shirts.”

  “Your old shirts have holes in them. They’re stained.”

  “So?”

  “You may not care about things like that, but other people notice,” Mom says. “People will make judgments about you.”

  “That’s their problem.”

  Erin knows that Mom thinks she’s helping, that Mom thinks this is the key to happiness—belonging, finding a way to fit in. But Erin already tried that. She spent her whole childhood studying people, trying to figure out how to be a “normal girl.” She became a mimic, an actor playing multiple parts—she had long hair, she wore clothes her mom said were cute, she even wore makeup for a short period in eighth grade. She sat on her hands to keep herself from rubbing them together when she got nervous. She bit her cheek until it bled to keep herself from rocking in public. Erin was a chameleon, changing herself to fit whatever group she happened to find herself in, constantly racing through the database in her head for appropriate things to wear, to not wear; to say, to not say; to feel, to not feel. But no matter how hard she tried, Erin was never quite appropriate. Her words were always either a little too early or a little too late, her voice always a little too loud or a little too quiet. The harder she tried to fit in, the worse she felt.

  People know what boys with Asperger’s look like, or at least they think they do. Boys rage and thrash and scream. They fight and throw themselves around. They punish the world for making them hurt.

  But girl Aspies are different. Invisible. Undiagnosed. Because unlike boys, girls turn inward. They hide. They adapt, even if it hurts. Because they are not screaming, people assume they do not suffer. The girl who cries herself to sleep every night doesn’t cause trouble.

  Until
she speaks. Until her pain gets so big it boils over. Until she has no choice but to emerge from her almost two weeks of silence to tell the truth about what she did with the boy named Casper Pennington—her final and most drastic attempt to do what she thought the other girls were doing. The event that led them here.

  Erin shaved her head soon after. She vowed to never again care what anyone thought of her. She vowed to stop caring, period.

  Mom sighs. “I just want to help make life easier for you.”

  “My old shirts make life easier for me,” Erin says flatly. If she didn’t wear the same thing every day, she’d have to decide what to wear every single morning. How do people do that? How do they even leave the house?

  “Fine,” Mom says. “You win.” As if it’s a war. As if it’s Erin against Mom and the Normal Police.

  Mom serves Erin a lunch of avocado-and-grapefruit salad with a side of raw almond butter and celery. It looks more like art than food—weird vegan chipmunk art. She put Erin on a raw food diet last year because she read somewhere it’s supposed to help with mood stabilization and digestion issues for people on the spectrum. As much as Erin hates to admit it, it does actually seem to be working. But now, no matter how much she eats, she’s almost always hungry again in an hour.

  Mom is standing at her usual station at the kitchen island behind her laptop. This is where she lives her online life in the world of Asperger’s parents—sending e-mails to the support group she leads, moderating her Facebook group, tweeting helpful tips and articles, posting raw, vegan, gluten-free recipes on her Pinterest page. She does all these things, is considered to be an expert on Asperger’s by a growing number of virtual friends, but she still doesn’t understand Erin at all.