The Nowhere Girls
Amy Reed
For us.
You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
—Alice Sebold, Lucky
US.
Prescott, Oregon.
Population: 17,549. Elevation: 578 feet above sea level.
Twenty miles east of Eugene and the University of Oregon. One hundred thirty miles southeast of Portland. Halfway between a farm town and a suburb. Home of the Spartans (Go Spartans!).
Home of so many girls. Home of so many almost-women, waiting for their skin to fit.
*
The U-Haul truck opens its sliding door for the first time since Adeline, Kentucky, unleashing the stale air from the small southern town that used to be Grace Salter’s home, back when her mother was still a dutiful Baptist church leader (though not technically a “pastor,” because as a woman in a church belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention, she could not technically claim the official title, nor its significantly higher pay grade, even with her PhD in Ministry and more than a decade of service). Everything in Grace’s life changed when Mom fell off that horse and bumped her head and suffered the concussion and subsequent spiritual experience that, according to Mom’s version of events, freed her mind and helped her hear the true voice of the Lord and, according to Grace’s version of events, got them booted out of Adeline and ruined their lives.
Couches, beds, and dressers are in their approximate positions in the new house. Grace’s mother starts unpacking the kitchen. Dad searches on his phone for pizza delivery. Grace climbs steep, creaking stairs to the room she has never seen before today, the room Mom and Dad only saw in photos their real estate agent sent them, the room she knows is meant to be hers because of the yellow wall paint and purple flower decals.
She sits on the stained twin mattress she’s had since she was three and wants nothing more than to curl up and fall asleep, but she doesn’t know where her sheets are. After five days of nonstop driving, fast food, and sharing motel rooms with her parents, she wants to shut the door and not come out for a long time, and she certainly doesn’t want to sit on boxes of dishes while eating pizza off a paper towel.
She lies on her bed and looks at the bare ceiling. She studies a water-damaged corner. It is early September, still technically summer, but this is Oregon, known for its year-round wetness, something Grace learned during her disappointing Web searches. She wonders if she should try to find a bucket to put on the floor in anticipation of a leak. “Be prepared.” Isn’t that the Boy Scout motto? She wouldn’t know; she had been a Girl Scout. Her troop learned how to do things like knit and make marzipan.
Grace turns her head to look out the window, but her eyes catch texture beneath the peeling white lip of the frame. Carved words, like a prisoner’s inside a cell, through layers of peeling yellow, then blue, then white, the fresh words sliced through decades of paint:
Kill me now.
I’m already dead.
Grace’s breath catches in her throat as she stares at the words, as she reads the pain of a stranger who must have lived and breathed and slept in this room. Was their bed in this very same place? Did their body already carve out this position in space where Grace’s body lies now?
How intimate these tiny words are. How alone a person must feel to cry out to someone they can’t even see.
*
Across town, Erin DeLillo is watching Season Five, Episode Eleven, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The title of this episode is “Hero Worship.” It’s about a traumatized, orphaned boy who becomes emotionally attached to Lieutenant Commander Data, an android. The boy admires Data’s superior intelligence and speed, but perhaps even more, he wishes he shared Data’s lack of ability to experience human emotions. If the boy were an android, he wouldn’t be so sad and lonely. If he were an android, he wouldn’t feel responsible for the careless mistake that tore his ship apart and killed his parents.
Data is an android who wants to be human. He is watching them from the outside. Like Data, Erin is often confounded by the behavior of humans.
But unlike Data, Erin is more than capable of feeling. She feels too much. She is a raw nerve and the world is always trying to touch her.
Mom says, “It’s a beautiful day! You should be outside!” She speaks in exclamation points. But Erin’s skin is almost as pale as Data’s and she burns easily. She doesn’t like being hot or sweaty, or any other discomfort that reminds her she lives in her imperfectly human body, which is why she takes a minimum of two baths a day (but definitely not showers—they feel too stabby on her skin). Her mother knows this about Erin, and yet she keeps saying things she thinks normal moms of normal kids are supposed to say, as if Erin is capable of being a normal kid, as if that is something she would even aspire to be. Mostly, what Erin aspires to be is more like Data.
If they lived by the ocean, Erin might not have the same reluctance to go outside. She might even be willing to subject her skin to the stickiness of sunscreen if it meant she could spend the day turning over rocks and cataloging her findings, mostly invertebrates like mollusks, cnidarians, and polychaete worms, which, in Erin’s opinion, are all highly underappreciated creatures. At their old house near Alki Beach in West Seattle, she could walk out her front door and spend entire days searching for various life-forms. But that was when they still lived in Seattle, before the events that led to Erin’s decision that trying to be “normal” was way more trouble than it was worth, a decision her mother still refuses to accept.
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.