The Nowhere Girls(55)

But what would that mean, if Grace let herself talk to Jesse? Would that mean she likes him? Would that make them friends? Would that mean she wants to be more than friends?

Grace cringes. She looks around her room, as if embarrassed that someone might have heard her thought, shamed that she even briefly considered something as ridiculous as that. She knows this line of thinking is off-limits to someone like her. She knows fat girls don’t get boyfriends in high school, especially semipopular ones like Jesse. No one has to tell her that her body makes her irrelevant to that entire conversation.

Grace has never questioned her body’s place in the world. She’s always believed the laws of movies and TV shows: Chubby girls are sidekicks, not romantic leads; sometimes they get to be funny, but more often they’re the butt of jokes; if they’re powerful, they’re evil—they’re Ursula the sea witch from The Little Mermaid; they are not heroines and they are certainly not sexy. These are the rules. This is the script.

But life now looks so much different. Maybe those rules don’t apply anymore. Maybe they never really did. Maybe real life is not like movies at all. Maybe in this one, in this life, fat girls get to be heroines.

How r u doin? the text from Rosina says.

Erin hates how Rosina doesn’t spell out words properly.

Fine. She texts back, period and all.

Want to talk bout what happened at mtg? U ok?

Let it go. She texts back. It’s so much easier to be rude in writing than in person.

I’m worried about u.

Busy now. See you tomorrow. Erin shoves her phone in her pocket. She hears it ding with another text as she walks downstairs, but she doesn’t check it. Spot rubs up against her leg like he’s trying to tell her something. Is he on Rosina’s side now?

Mom is at her station in the kitchen. “Oh, good, you’re here,” she says as soon as she sees Erin. “I want to talk to you.”

Erin opens the fridge and searches inside for something that will fill her stomach for the rest of the afternoon. It’s not looking good.

“I made you a snack,” Mom says. “It’s in the green bowl.”

Erin pulls out the unappetizing green-specked gray mush. She sniffs it. It smells like nothing. “I want something crunchy,” Erin says.

“Honey,” Mom says. “I’ve been working on figuring out a night for our next family dinner, but Dad’s schedule is pretty hectic with midterms and everything, and I know you must be terribly disappointed, but—”

“Why would I be disappointed?” Erin says, dipping a baby carrot into her mush. “Nobody likes family dinner.”

Mom looks at her blankly. “Carrots aren’t a part of this snack,” she says.

“Why do you keep trying to force these family dinners to happen?” Erin says.

“Because we’re a family, honey,” Mom says, trying to smile, but the corner of her mouth is twitching.

“That’s a stupid reason,” Erin says. Why can’t Mom just leave it alone? Why can’t Rosina leave it alone? Why is everyone always trying to tell Erin what’s good for her?

“Erin, I don’t think you should be eating carrots right now.”

“Trying to force people to be a family does not make them a family,” Erin says. She can feel her chest heating up, her shoulders tensing. Spot paws at her leg. “Pretending we are isn’t good for anybody. All we’re doing is lying. You’re lying. Dad’s lying.”

“Honey, don’t yell,” Mom says.

“You know he doesn’t want to be with us.”

“Honey, take a deep breath.”

Spot steps on Erin’s feet and leans into her shins, but his comfort can’t stop her.

“You should have gotten a divorce the first time,” Erin says, and she feels a brief flushing of relief, an emptying. And then panic. Then a locking, a sealing shut.

Mom’s face is red. “Erin, I think you need to go upstairs and cool down.” She sounds like she’s choking.

Erin couldn’t agree more. What she needs right now are her heavy blanket and her whale songs. What she needs is to be at the bottom of the ocean. Fish don’t have families. The babies hatch out of their eggs and are on their own. Sure, most of them are eaten up by predators, but that’s nature for you.

*

There’s a pack of those Nowhere Girls, probably on their way to one of their secret meetings. For a brief moment this girl considers following them, finding out their meeting place and who’s in charge, and turning them in. Maybe then her school could have some peace back. Maybe then it wouldn’t feel like going to a war zone every day. Maybe the students wouldn’t be so divided.

But it wouldn’t work, she thinks. The girls would see her and know she wasn’t one of them. They’d know she was a spy. Everyone knows she’s the president of Prescott High School’s Students for Conservative Values Club. They will judge and condemn her immediately. They’re so prejudiced, the girl thinks. They’re such hypocrites.

They keep talking about “rape culture,” but it doesn’t even exist. Rape is illegal in this country, isn’t it? Women aren’t all victims. Men aren’t all evil predators waiting to get them drunk and take advantage of them. How does that attitude empower women? What about girls’ own responsibility? All these Nowhere Girls are doing is jumping on the feminist bandwagon of blaming men for all their problems. They don’t believe in equality, they believe in crushing and humiliating men.