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.
The front door opens. One of the babies squeals with delight at the appearance of his mother, returned from working the lunch shift at the restaurant. “I’m out of here, Tía,” Rosina says, leaping up from the couch and out the door before her aunt can even close it behind her. Rosina steps over the scattered pieces of hand-me-down junk that pass as toys, jumps on her secondhand bike, and gets the hell out of there without noticing the spit-up on her leg and something brown on her shirt that is either smashed banana or baby poop.
*
A mile east is a neighborhood without an official name, but which most Prescott residents openly refer to as Trailer Town. It is home to double-and single-wide trailers and small houses tilting off their foundations, yards that have been overgrown for so long, the weeds are as tall as young trees. In one of these trailers, a popular boy is kissing the salty neck of a girl whose neck is used to being kissed. She is not his girlfriend. She is used to not being anybody’s girlfriend.
The little electric fan inside the trailer is on full blast, but the heat of both their bodies inside the metal box is making the girl sleepy and a little nauseous. She wonders if she had anything she was supposed to do today. She wonders if the boy would notice if she took a little nap. She resigns herself to the answer as she closes her eyes and waits for him to finish. None of these boys ever takes very long.
There was a time when, like so many girls, she was obsessed with princesses, a time when she believed in the power of beauty and grace and sweetness. She believed in princes. She believed in being saved.
She’s not sure she believes in anything now.
*
In a very different neighborhood, a very different girl closes her eyes and lets go, feels the boy’s head between her legs, painting pleasure on her body with his tongue, just like she taught him. She smiles, almost laughs with the joy of it, how it takes her by surprise, how it bubbles up and makes her weightless.
She has never questioned her entitlement to this. She has never questioned the power of her body. She has never questioned her right to pleasure.