The Nowhere Girls(87)

But then she sees Amber Sullivan next to him, standing very close. Erin has spent years studying body language and personal space, and she knows Amber is standing closer than a friend is supposed to stand. Erin knows friends do not tuck stray hairs behind each other’s ears. They do not rub their boobs on each other’s arms.

Girls like Amber are the ones boys like. Girls with curves and smiles, with compliments and eye contact. Not weird androgynous freaks like Erin. Not girls who only know how to feel too much or too little.

So, just like that, as quickly as Erin discovers her feelings for Otis Goldberg, she vows to shove them away, to make them not exist. She can will herself to stop feeling. Her mind is stronger and more stable than the volatile and unpredictable chaos of her heart. Not the actual organ, of course, but the mysterious muck around it, the oddly placed neural cells in the middle of her chest that connect to her brain and mysterious other things that cannot be observed or measured, the place in her body that feels panic and love and cannot tell the two apart.

Erin should have known better. She was not thinking like an android. She let feelings infect her. She was not doing what Data would do.

It is true that an android can get its wires crossed. It can perceive something without complete information and come to an incorrect conclusion, but these occasional inaccuracies should not lead to emotions, which may or may not lead to further conclusions that could lead to other, even stronger, emotions, and thoughts, and even actions, but then maybe another observation interferes with the first and throws the whole series of previous neural firings into question, and the wires get stretched and tangled and extremely uncomfortable, which may or may not lead to other, completely different, emotions, and everything turns into a big fat mess.

Erin wonders if this is a metaphor. Erin hates metaphors.

She just needs a little time, a little space. She will hide here behind this stairwell until the halls empty, until everyone is in class. She will use the silence to recharge herself. All she needs is a few minutes. She will be a little late for class, but she has weighed the pros and cons of that transgression and has come to the conclusion that it is more important that she be sturdy and in one piece than be on time for class.

There. Better. Otis and Amber are gone. Everyone is gone, even the ubiquitous security guards. It is now safe for Erin to emerge from her hiding place and make her way to class.

But then footsteps. A throaty laugh. Erin looks around to find Eric Jordan at the other end of the hall, more tired and bedraggled than she’s ever seen him. His sunken eyes are focused intently on her. His signature smirk has lost all charm.

“Stop looking at me,” Erin says.

Eric laughs. “I know you don’t mean that.” He keeps walking. He gets closer and closer. “You like me looking at you, don’t you?”

“No,” Erin says.

“Even someone like you must have needs,” he says, nearly upon her. She can smell the stale liquor on his breath, his unwashed body.

Erin knows she should run. She should get away. But she can’t let him know she’s afraid. She can’t give him that satisfaction. She wants to hurt him back.

“Why are you even talking to me?” Erin says. “Now that you can’t get any of the girls here to talk to you, you’re talking to me, the school freak? You must be really desperate. How pathetic.”

Then something crosses his face, something terrifying, a look of such rage and hatred, and for the moment Erin sees herself reflected in his pale eyes, she forgets she’s even human. He is not looking at something human.

Erin feels the pressure in her chest and her feet leaving the ground as he shoves her across the hall and into the lockers. She feels a locker handle dig into the small of her back.

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.” He spits the words in her face. She feels them stick to her skin.

“I can talk to you however I want,” Erin says. She doesn’t know where the words come from. Somewhere down deep, somewhere with the pain and memories and dark corners, but also with light that slices through the shadows, somewhere where fear turns into courage.

“You think I need the bitches at this school to talk to me? You think I want to talk to them?” He is half laughing, half choking. He is verging on hysterical. “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you. I can get what I want without talking.”

He pushes her against the lockers with his left hand and grabs her crotch with his right. Through the thick denim of her jeans, Erin can feel his muscular fingers grabbing, tugging, trying to tear through her. It is not sexual. There is nothing sexual about it. He wants to hurt her. He wants to turn her into nothing.

She is back in Seattle. Casper Pennington’s distant eyes look through her. She disappears under the weight of his body. She stops fighting. “No” may have never left her mouth, but her body said it. It is Casper who chose not to hear.

Erin cannot move even though all she wants to do is move. She cannot make him stop. She cannot scream. She cannot cry for help. This is what it is to be caught, to be powerless and frozen, to be turned into nothing. This is when your own body, your own voice, becomes your enemy, when it won’t even listen to you because it’s his now, because he’s stolen it, because he controls it with your own fear.

First, you are an object. Then you are taken. Then you are destroyed and pounded into dust.

Then a sound down the hall, a walkie-talkie the security guards carry around. Eric lets go, but only part of Erin is free.