The Nowhere Girls(44)
“How’s school, kiddo?” says Dad. “Still acing all your classes, of course?”
“Erin has a new friend,” Mom says.
“Oh, yeah?” Dad says. “That’s great.”
“She’s the daughter of that new pastor at—what is it, honey? The Unitarian church?”
“Congregationalist,” Erin says. Spot follows the conversation from his place next to her on the floor.
“Well, at least it’s not one of those backward churches they have around here,” Dad says, sipping his wine. “You can’t go a block without running into some idiot who actually thinks the world was created seven thousand years ago.”
“Jim,” Mom says. “That’s not nice.”
“What? It’s true. There’s nothing wrong with me not wanting my daughter to hang out with ignorant and willfully anti-intellectual people. Those people are destroying this country. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to not want them to brainwash my daughter.”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with your daughter,” Mom says.
Neither does this dinner, Erin thinks.
“Honey,” Mom says. “Quiet hands at the dinner table.”
Erin stops rubbing her hands for approximately five seconds before her anxiety feels like it’s going to kill her. She stands up, even though she’s still hungry, but she’s used to being hungry. “I’m going to my room.”
“No, sweetie,” Mom pleads. “We’re having a nice dinner.”
“I started my period,” Erin says, and walks away, Spot following close at her heels. That always works.
“Look what you did,” Erin hears Mom say as she heads upstairs.
“You’re the one who turned this into a fight,” says Dad.
“Why can’t we just have a nice dinner as a family? Just once. That’s all I ask.”
“That’s all you ask? You can’t be serious.”
Erin closes her door, finally safe in the familiar order of her room, where everything is precisely placed, all her books organized by subject and then alphabetized by author. Spot goes to his usual place on the foot of the bed. Erin turns on her white-noise machine to the preset station of waves and whales singing, lies down on her side on her perfectly made bed, and presses the soles of her feet against Spot’s warm, sturdy body. She closes her eyes as she rocks back and forth, as she imagines herself deep underwater, in a ship of her own design, so far down that sunlight can no longer reach her.
But thoughts still creep in. Even this far underwater. Even inside her submersible with steel walls nearly three inches thick. There are the usual things. There is this Nowhere Girls business, how it makes her think about things she’s worked so hard to push away, how some strange urge makes her keep showing up for meetings even though they terrify her. But fresh in her mind is a newly troubling issue: the boy named Otis Goldberg in her AP American History class.
While Erin will reluctantly admit it is pleasing that Otis Goldberg slightly resembles Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation, he also has a man-bun, which is unacceptable. But because he is only a teenager, he is technically not a man, so the term is not completely accurate. He is closer to a boy. Otis Goldberg has a boy-bun.
What Erin is specifically not comfortable with about Otis Goldberg is the fact that he keeps talking to her in class when it is obviously not academically required. She purposely sat in the back of the class to avoid situations like this. Also so no one would notice her stimming, which would make her self-conscious, which would make her anxious, which would make it impossible to pay attention. Sometimes she just has to flex her fingers or rub her hands together or rock slightly. Sometimes moving her body is the only thing that can still her mind. The “quiet hands” Mom always wants her to have are a meltdown waiting to happen.
Otis Goldberg is always doing strange things like asking how Erin is or saying he liked her presentation on the Iroquois Confederacy. Today was by far the worst, because he kept asking about the Nowhere Girls, if Erin is in the Nowhere Girls, if she’s been to the meetings, if she knows who started it; and Erin had no idea if he was talking to her because he was trying to get information, or if he actually wanted to talk to her, and she didn’t know which one was worse, or which one was better, and she certainly didn’t know which one she wanted, or if she’s allowed to want anything, if it’s safe to want anything. So she just forced herself to keep her mouth closed, which just made him talk more, so he started talking about himself, and how he thinks the Nowhere Girls are great, how he totally considers himself a feminist, how he has two moms who would kill him if he didn’t consider himself a feminist, and by then Erin couldn’t keep her mouth closed any longer, so she blurted out “Can you please be quiet?!” so loud the whole class turned around to stare at her, and Mr. Trilling said, “Erin, are you all right?” in that way all the teachers do, even nice ones like Mr. Trilling, which really means, “Erin, are you about to get all Aspergery on me?”
Then Otis was quiet. And Erin was confused because she thought she was supposed to be happy because silence was what she wanted the whole time he was talking, but then when it finally happened, something about it didn’t feel good, something hurt inside and Erin had no idea why, so she told Mr. Trilling she had to go cool off, which means go to the library to read about fish, which is what she says when everyone is acting so stupid she has to leave, except this time she had to leave because she’s the one who acted stupid, and all she wanted was to take back what she said to Otis Goldberg because she realized he did nothing but be nice to her.