The Nowhere Girls(2)
The problem with humans is they’re too enamored with themselves, and with mammals in general. As if big brains and live birth are necessarily signs of superiority. As if the hairy, air-breathing world is the only one that matters. There is a whole universe underwater to be explored. There are engineers building ships that can travel miles beneath the surface. One day, Erin aims to design and drive one of those ships, armed with PhDs in both marine biology and engineering. She will find creatures that have never been found, will catalog them and give them names, will help tell the story of how each being came to be, where it fits within life’s perfectly orchestrated web.
Erin is, unapologetically, a science geek. She knows this is an Asperger’s stereotype, as are many other things about her—the difficulties expressing emotion, the social awkwardness, the sometimes inappropriate behavior. But what can she do? These are parts of who she is. It’s everyone else who decided to make them a stereotype.
One thing Erin knows for sure is that no matter what you do, people will find a way to put you in a box. It’s how we’re programmed. Our default is laziness. We categorize things to make them easier to understand.
That’s what makes science so satisfying. It is complicated and massive, but it is also so tidy, so organized. What Erin loves most about science is the order, the logic, the way every bit of information fits into a system, even if we can’t see it yet. She has faith in that system the way some people have faith in God. Evolution and taxonomy are comforting. They are stable and right.
But there’s the pesky problem of chance, which never ceases to trouble Erin, and which she has made it her life’s goal to figure out. The whole reason there are humans, the whole reason there’s anything more than the very first single-celled organism, is because of mutation, because of something unpredictable, surprising, and unplanned—the exact kind of thing Erin hates. It’s what makes chemists and physicists and mathematicians look down on biologists as inferior scientists. Too much relies on powers outside our control, outside the laws of reason and logic and predictability. It’s what makes biology a science of stories, not equations.
The thing about evolution that Erin needs to get to the bottom of is how sometimes it’s this unexpected and unplanned thing that is the most necessary. Freak accidents are what make evolution possible, what made one fish start breathing air, what made his progenies’ flippers turn into feet. So often, the key to survival is mutation, change, and most of the time that change is nothing more than an accident.
Sometimes it’s the freaks of nature who end up being the strongest.
*
In the small but steadily growing Mexican part of town, there is one extended family consisting of five adults, two teenagers, seven children under the age of fourteen, and one wilted matriarch with quickly advancing dementia and questionable citizenship status. This does not include the additional cousins, second cousins, and cousins-once-removed scattered across Prescott and several surrounding towns. Rosina Suarez is the only child to a single mother, a widow whose husband died only five months after they were married, six months before baby Rosina was born. Instead of a father, Rosina has an extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins who move in and out of her house as if it were their own. Her mother’s two sisters-in-law, who live in the identical townhouse apartments to the left and right of Rosina’s, have been blessed with living husbands and large families. Their children do not complain or talk back or wear dark clothing, do not paint their faces with unflattering makeup or shave the sides of their heads or listen to loud music from the 1990s that consists mostly of girls’ screaming.
Rosina’s family is from the mountains of Oaxaca, with deep indigenous Zapotec roots, with short, sturdy bodies and smooth dark brown skin, round faces and flat noses. Rosina’s father was a mestizo from Mexico City, more European than Indio, and Rosina is tall and thin like him, towering over her family, an alien among them in so many ways.
As the eldest and only daughter, Rosina’s mother has inherited the duty to house and look after her grandmother, who has a tendency to wander off when no one’s looking. And because Rosina is her family’s eldest daughter, it is also her duty to look after the entire brood of cousins, in addition to her regular shifts at her uncle José’s restaurant, La Cocina, the best Mexican restaurant in Prescott (some would say the entire extended Eugene metropolitan area), and the center of the family’s economy. Rosina spends the two and a half hours between the end of school and the start of her shift at the restaurant at her other uncle’s house watching her seven young cousins while Abuelita somehow takes a nap on a chair in the corner despite the screaming horde of children, and Rosina’s eldest cousin, Erwin, who is a senior at Prescott High and, in Rosina’s opinion, the biggest waste of breath in the state of Oregon, sits around playing video games and popping his zits, with periodic trips to the bathroom, which Rosina suspects are masturbation breaks. Rosina’s second-oldest cousin is a boring girl with no interests who is almost thirteen and perfectly qualified to take her place as primary babysitter. But Rosina is, and always will be, the oldest girl, and it is, and always will be, her responsibility to be her mother’s assistant and take care of the family.
How is Rosina ever going to form a band if she’s busy every afternoon changing diapers and keeping the toddlers from sticking sharp knives in electrical sockets? She should be rocking, she should be screaming into a mic onstage, not singing lullabies to her unappreciative little shit cousins while they smear boogers on her favorite pair of black jeans, which she has to hang outside to dry because the dryer’s broken again, where they’re going to get faded and absorb the smell of so many neighbors’ tortillas frying.