“That’s part of my charm.”
“So, you guys?” Grace interrupts. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.” If she doesn’t speak now, she knows she’ll lose her nerve.
“Slow down, man,” Rosina says. “Jeez, you both need to improve your social skills.”
“Is this going to be about personal stuff?” Erin asks. “Because I don’t like conversations about personal stuff.”
“Not really. I mean, sort of?” Grace stutters. She freezes. What was she was going to say? Where are those notes?
“Hello?” Rosina says. “We’re listening.”
“Hold on,” Grace says, pulling her notebook out of her backpack and flipping through the pages of her indecipherable handwriting.
Rosina shrugs, opens her bag of crackers, and throws a handful into her mouth. “So,” she says with a mouthful of orange crumbs. “While you’re trying to remember what you were going to say, I also have an announcement. I have decided that we do in fact have to do something to stop those assholes. Not just the assholes who raped Lucy, but all the assholes. We have to keep them from breeding more assholes.” She peels open her banana and takes a big bite. “I think castration seems appropriate.”
“Sounds messy,” Erin says.
Rosina smiles. “That was funny, Erin.”
“Thank you.”
Grace puts her notebook back in her bag. Her body feels tingly, her surroundings surreal, like she’s moving in slow motion while the rest of the world is speeding up.
“Are you serious?” Grace says. “What changed your mind?”
“It doesn’t matter. Stop asking me questions or I might change it back.”
Grace glances at Erin, who is chewing her food, watching them, listening. It is impossible to read her. She seems calm, but there is something else below the surface, something she is trying very hard to keep buried.
“What about you, Erin?” Grace asks her.
“Are you in?” Rosina says. “Do you want to be a part of our rebellion?”
Erin doesn’t say anything for what seems like a long time. She is swaying slightly, her head down, like she is thinking hard, feeling hard, like there is a lot more going on inside her than what they’re talking about. Finally she says, “That sounds like subversive activity.”
“Yeah, so?” Rosina says.
“Subversive activity almost always involves breaking rules,” Erin says, her voice growing agitated.
“That’s kind of the point,” Rosina says.
“We want to break the rules,” Grace says, an energy building in her chest. The feeling of something happening. The feeling of something inevitable. The feeling of something that matters. “The rules are what keep us silent. The rules are what didn’t get justice for Lucy. The rules are what’s broken.” Her words are full of fire, maybe not a full-on flame, but definitely at least a spark.
“Wow, New Girl.” Rosina lifts an eyebrow. “You’re just full of surprises.”
Tell me about it, Grace thinks.
“But we need rules to keep order,” Erin says, looking up for a moment with pleading eyes. “If everyone broke rules all the time, there’d be chaos. Then no one could get anything done.”
“We’re not talking about those kinds of rules,” Rosina says. “We mean like the unwritten rules of our sexist culture. Like the way girls and boys are expected to act, like double standards, women only making seventy-eight percent what men make, that kind of thing.”
“Guys getting away with rape even though everyone knows they did it,” Grace says. “Girls living in fear for no reason except the fact that they’re girls.”
Grace sees something shift inside of Erin. Her face makes a pained expression and she stops rocking. She shakes her head. “But we’re nobody,” she says. “How are we going to fix any of those things?”
“That’s what we’re going to figure out,” Grace says. “Are you with us?”
“With you for what? You don’t exactly have a plan. And who’s going to listen?”
Grace and Rosina look at each other. They deflate just a little.
Grace thinks about the messages Lucy left in her room. She thinks about telling Rosina and Erin about them. But something about that feels wrong, as if those words are secrets meant only for Grace, as if telling people about them would be betraying Lucy’s trust.
“Erin’s right,” Rosina says. “It can’t be just us. No one’s going to listen to three weird girls.”
“Let me state for the record that I still haven’t agreed to anything,” Erin says.
Grace bristles a little at the “weird” label, but then she reminds herself that she chose to sit with these girls at lunch. God led her here, He gave her a choice, and she made it.
“There has to be a way we can reach all the girls of the school and bring them together,” Grace says. “Like have a meeting or something.”
They sit in silence for a long time. No one is eating. The drama of the lunchroom goes on around them, a wall of white noise. They cannot look at one another. They don’t want to admit their idea is doomed just as it got started.
“You could e-mail them,” Erin finally says, like it was obvious the whole time.
“How are we going to e-mail every girl in the school?” Rosina says.
“Easy,” Erin says. “I can get their e-mail addresses from the office. I have access to everyone’s information.”
“So we’ll send everyone an e-mail that says, ‘Hi, it’s us, three nobodies, and we’re still pissed off about old news that everyone wants to forget about, and we’re bringing it up because we want to make everyone’s lives miserable. So who’s with us?’?” Rosina rolls her eyes. “Why don’t we just toilet paper the guys’ houses or something? That’d probably be equally as effective.”
Grace feels something open inside her, a tiny whisper, a tiny light. “What if it wasn’t us?” she says. “What if it was nobody?” She pauses for a second. “What if it was everybody?”
“What are you talking about?” Rosina says.
“The e-mail,” Grace says. She is spinning. She is electric. “What if we sent it anonymously? It’d be coming from, like, nowhere. Then no one would know it was from us. And people would be intrigued by the mystery, right? They’d come to the meeting just to see what it’s all about.”
“?‘The Nowhere Girls,’?” Erin says. “That’s what we can call ourselves. On the e-mails.”
“Yes!” Rosina says. “The Nowhere Girls! Erin, you are on such a roll today.”
“I am not rolling anywhere,” Erin says. “But thank you.”
They sit in silence, all trying to imagine what a meeting called by nobody, from nowhere, would look like.
“But what’s going to happen once everyone gets there?” Rosina finally says. “If we want to stay anonymous, who’s going to lead the meeting?”
“Anyone could,” Grace says.
“But what if nobody does? What if it’s awkward and no one says anything? Or what if it’s total chaos?”
“What if it turns into a riot?” Erin says.