The Nowhere Girls(19)
There is so much Erin has tried to forget. Not just this. Not just Lucy. The wrong is bigger than Lucy, bigger than their school and town, bigger than all of them. But it is also as small as her own private memories. It is a tiny box she locked them in and left back in Seattle.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Erin says, pulling her phone out of Grace’s hand. She is thinking a trip to the library might be in order.
“I appreciate your passion, Grace,” Rosina says. “But Lucy’s gone. No one knows where she went. No one can help her.”
“Maybe we could,” Grace says. “We could help her.”
Rosina laughs. Erin shudders. “Even if we wanted to—which we don’t,” Rosina says, “who would listen to us? Erin and I are like the freaks of the school and you’re new, and no offense, but you’re kind of sabotaging your social capital potential by hanging out with us.”
Grace is different today, Erin thinks. Until now, she’s mostly just sat quietly and a little hunched over, like she’s not quite sure she has permission to speak. Now she won’t stop talking. Erin thinks she liked the old Grace better. This new Grace is far too exhausting. This new Grace is bringing up things Erin doesn’t want to think about, and certainly doesn’t want to care about.
“Hey,” Rosina says. “Think of the positive. At least we’re not getting married off to old guys at nine years old and getting our clits cut off.”
“Gross,” Erin says. “Too much.” She looks at the chopped nuts and veggies in her bento box, and for the moment she’s glad Mom has made her a vegetarian.
“Why do you care so much?” Rosina says. “You never even met Lucy.”
“I don’t know,” Grace says. “It’s weird. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Maybe your house is haunted,” Rosina says. “And you’re possessed by her ghost. Except she’s still alive.” Rosina’s face pales. “I hope.”
Grace opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, but then closes it and starts chewing on a fingernail. Maybe she does think her house is haunted.
“Get a hobby,” Erin says. “You need a hobby.”
“Or a job,” Rosina says. “You can have mine. Do you want to get paid less than minimum wage and get yelled at all night by my uncle?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Grace says, obviously not listening. She is looking over at the troll table like she’s thinking the kind of thoughts that can get a person in trouble.
“You can’t change nature,” Erin says, but she knows Grace doesn’t hear her, so she doesn’t say the rest of what she was going to say, which is probably for the best because she knows Rosina would get mad at her. They’ve had this conversation before, and it ended in Rosina throwing a water bottle at her.
What Erin was going to say but didn’t is that boys are animals, and they act like animals because it’s in their natures, even the ones who seem cute and cuddly like sea otters. But like otters, they will turn ruthless in an instant if certain instincts are triggered. They will forget who you think they are supposed to be. They will even forget who they want to be. Trying to change them will never work. The only way to stay safe is to stay away from them completely.
Erin knows none of us are better than animals. We are no more than our biology, our genetic programming. Nature is harsh and cruel and unsentimental. When you get down to it, boys are predators and girls are prey, and what people call love or even simple attraction is just the drug of hormones, evolved to make the survival of our species slightly less painful.
Erin is lucky to have figured this out so young. While everyone else wastes their lives running around chasing “love,” she can focus on what’s really important and stay away from that mess completely.
US.
A girl sits in the corner of her classroom, looking at all the backs of heads, trying to take deep breaths and notice without judgment the feelings of rage bubbling up inside her. She tries to remember the mindfulness techniques she learned over the summer. The only way out is through, she repeats silently to herself. She waits for the feelings to drift away like clouds.
It’s so strange how someone can be one person one day, then be transformed over the course of a few months, then come back to their previous life with completely different insides but all anyone still sees are the same old outsides. It’s not like she thought she’d come back from rehab and suddenly be able to have a normal high school experience, but maybe a part of her hoped there’d be space for a tiny reinvention. She thinks maybe she should do something different with her hair, dye it some drastic new color. But all people would see is the same girl with different hair. Her place has been carved out for her already. There is nowhere else here for her to fit.
She watches a couple flirt next to her. She notices the rage bubble up again, but focusing on her breath does nothing to distract her. She hates them with a fury that scares her. How dare they flaunt what this girl knows she’ll never have—that innocence, that romance, that feeling of potential? Whatever possibility of that she ever had was burned out of her a long time ago, before she even had a chance to know it was something she wanted.
*
A few seats away, in the desk assigned to Adam Kowalski, sits another student, nameless. The student watches the flirting couple with yearning, with a thick, heavy sadness that makes it hard to breathe.