Erin won’t think about eighth grade. She certainly won’t think about Casper Pennington. Not how he stared at her from the high school side of her private school’s small auditorium every morning during announcements. How it made her body feel hot and good and a little bit scared. How it made her forget about the mess at home. How he walked by her one day in the hallway and told her she was beautiful. How she simultaneously didn’t like his proximity to her but also wanted him closer. How his eyelashes were so long. How his blond hair was so blond. How his confidence and attention made her wonder if he could teach her how to be strong and not care about the world changing.
So what if she was only thirteen. So what if he was three years older than her. So what if she couldn’t look people in the eye and didn’t like to be touched most of the time and had an army full of specialists trying to teach her how to be normal. So what if her dad was gone and this Casper guy showed up telling her she was beautiful. You can always cram the wrong piece into the puzzle hole if you push hard enough and limit your definition of “fitting.”
No, Erin will not think about these things. These are the kind of memories that serve no logical purpose; they do not contain useful knowledge or skills. Erin theorizes that sadness and regret are maladaptive features of the human brain, something the species will eventually evolve out of. We will ultimately merge with computers and never have to feel again.
Remembering is not on Erin’s schedule. It has no place on her lists. If she let the memories in, they’d scramble all the order she’s worked so tirelessly to create; they’d throw her back to the chaos. Better to keep things predictable, stable, simple. Peaceful.
That’s all Erin wants: peace.
There is something soothing about doing homework at exactly the same time every day and having dinner at exactly 7:00 p.m. every night (the table almost always just set for two). But before dinner is the best time of day—time to watch Erin’s one daily episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when she can travel light-years away and explore the unknown expanses of the universe with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the whole crew’s father figure (especially Data’s, whose own father/inventor, Dr. Noonien Soong, was murdered by Data’s brother, Lore, who turned defective and dangerous after being programmed with the emotion chip intended for Data).
Except today’s episode is not one of Erin’s favorites. Not only is the whole crew of the Enterprise inebriated and acting foolish because of the Tsiolkovsky virus, this is also the episode where Data has sex with Tasha Yar. Even though he’s an android, he still caught the carbon-based virus (a plot inconsistency that, Erin notes with displeasure, has never been fully explained; she concedes that her beloved show is not perfect). Even though Data had direct orders to take Yar to sick bay, he fell under the spell of her seduction.
Data made a mistake. Data is not supposed to make mistakes. His logical android brain failed him and he became too human, too animal.
When Tasha Yar asked him if he was “fully functional,” he said yes. Even Erin knew what she meant by “fully functional.”
Casper Pennington never asked Erin if she was fully functional. Maybe if he had asked, Erin would have had a chance to think about it. Maybe she would have realized her answer was no.
After Data’s romantic interlude (which, thankfully, the viewer does not have to witness), after Dr. Crusher gives the crew of the Enterprise the antidote to the virus and everyone sobers up, Tasha Yar is embarrassed. She tells Data it never happened, then gets back to work. Is this the normal reaction after someone has sex with an android? To not want to speak to them ever again? To ignore them the next day? At least Tasha Yar didn’t go bragging about it to her friends while simultaneously acting like Data didn’t exist. At least Data couldn’t feel the pain of rejection. He could process what happened as part of his ongoing anthropological research of the behavior of the human species. He could file it away in his android brain, and move on.
It is never clear if Data enjoyed it. He told Tasha Yar that he was programmed in many “techniques.” He was born knowing how to give pleasure. But did he know how to feel it?
Was he programmed to feel fear? To feel the merging of these two opposite emotions until there was no more pleasure left, until it was just a body on top of him, holding him down, grunting into his ear, pushing and pushing, again and again and again as he waited for it to end, as he prayed to a god he didn’t even believe in to please make it stop, please make Casper stop, this is not what I wanted, I don’t know what I wanted, but this isn’t it, this is definitely not it.
Silence does not mean yes. No can be thought and felt but never said. It can be screamed silently on the inside. It can be in the wordless stone of a clenched fist, fingernails digging into palm. Her lips sealed. Her eyes closed. His body just taking, never asking, never taught to question silence.
Data’s mind is a computer. He can wipe entire memories out if he wants to. Mistakes don’t follow him, don’t lodge themselves in his synapses and travel with him wherever he goes. His mistakes don’t involve parents and school and courts. His mistakes don’t make him stop talking for two weeks. They don’t live in his body. Nobody has to call Data a victim. No one needs to place blame. That does not have to be a part of his story.
But it is part of Erin’s story. Before she finally convinced her parents to drop the charges against Casper, the courts were ready to make the labels official, to proclaim her passive, a victim; to define her as powerless, unable to consent. Because of her age. Because of her Asperger’s. Even though she is a sentient being. Even though she had wanted something, at some time, whatever it was. Even though she can’t remember when she stopped wanting it. Even though she can’t remember telling him one way or the other. It’s true, he never asked. But is that job really his? Is it hers? And if the court says she was incapable of saying no, what does that mean for her capacity to say yes? Who makes these decisions? Who writes these rules and defines words like “consent”? Who decides what makes something a “rape”?
She cannot say the word: Rape.
That word does not sound true. It wasn’t rape, but it was something.
Unlike Data, Erin’s emotion chip is not missing. Sometimes it feels like she was accidentally programmed with ten emotion chips, and they’re all constantly malfunctioning.
There is no word for what happened with Casper Pennington. Erin has not been programmed with this knowledge. She does not know the word for what she is supposed to feel.
ROSINA.
“Erwin told me you have a new friend at school,” Rosina’s mother says as she scoops a cup of oil into a giant pan. “He says she’s a white gordita.” The oil sizzles with tiny bubbles.
“What, you have Erwin spying on me now?” Rosina says. Even at school, Mami has her in her clutches. It’s like her family has invisible chains attached to Rosina; as soon as she figures out how to break one, another shows up.
“Is this new girl strange like your skinny friend?” Mami grabs a handful of gelatinous raw pink chicken out of a plastic bucket and throws it into the pan.
“You don’t even know Erin,” Rosina says.
“I know enough to know she’s strange.”