“What?” Rosina says. “How is that relevant?”
“I imagine your success in school is important to them. They would be very disappointed if you didn’t graduate, for instance.”
“My grades are fine.”
“Surprisingly, yes,” Slatterly says. “But your attendance is abysmal. That can be grounds for suspension. Even expulsion in extreme cases.”
“I doubt I’m an extreme case.”
“Well, that’s the thing, Miss Suarez. You are not the judge of that. I am.”
Rosina says nothing. Here’s the principal she knows. Here’s the royal bitch.
“You don’t want to disappoint your family by not graduating, do you?” Slatterly says. “There aren’t a whole lot of opportunities for uneducated women out there. I suppose you could spend the rest of your life waiting tables at your uncle’s restaurant.”
Slatterly’s face is blank as she lets that sink in, as she lets it fester and poison Rosina from the inside. “So,” she says, “what do you think, Miss Suarez? Do you want to take those risks? Do you want to keep making trouble for yourself, for your family?”
“No,” Rosina whispers.
“Then I think we are in agreement. No funny business, right?”
“Right,” Rosina says between clenched teeth.
Slatterly smiles. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“Can I go now?” Rosina says.
“Yes,” Slatterly says. “Please send in the next student, will you, dear?”
Rosina stands up, her muscles a tangle of knots and snarls. She walks out without saying anything, out of the front office, down the hall, and out the school’s front doors. She unlocks her bike and rides through the rain as fast as she can. She doesn’t care about getting wet. She doesn’t care about mud puddles. All she needs is to get to her destination, one of her favorite hiding places on the edge of town, a place where no one but her ever goes, a place where she can sing and scream as loud as she can and no one will tell her what to do, and no one will tell her to be quiet.
ERIN.
Tonight’s big event is a rare dinner at home with both of Erin’s parents. Mom has gone all out with a baked lentil loaf and mashed cauliflower. It’s a special occasion when Erin gets to eat cooked legumes. Dad drove straight home after his Friday afternoon class. He does try once in a while, but usually only after serious badgering by Erin’s mom.
“I can’t believe you still have Erin on this crazy diet,” Dad says, picking at his food.
“If you were ever around,” Mom says, “you’d have noticed that it’s actually made a huge difference in her mood and behavior.”
“Did you know there’s a group of sea slugs that feed on algae and can retain the chloroplasts for their own photosynthetic use?” Erin says. “It’s called ‘kleptoplasty.’ Get it? Klepto?”
“That’s nice, honey,” Mom says.
“How’s school, kiddo?” says Dad. “Still acing all your classes, of course?”
“Erin has a new friend,” Mom says.
“Oh, yeah?” Dad says. “That’s great.”
“She’s the daughter of that new pastor at—what is it, honey? The Unitarian church?”
“Congregationalist,” Erin says. Spot follows the conversation from his place next to her on the floor.
“Well, at least it’s not one of those backward churches they have around here,” Dad says, sipping his wine. “You can’t go a block without running into some idiot who actually thinks the world was created seven thousand years ago.”
“Jim,” Mom says. “That’s not nice.”
“What? It’s true. There’s nothing wrong with me not wanting my daughter to hang out with ignorant and willfully anti-intellectual people. Those people are destroying this country. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to not want them to brainwash my daughter.”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with your daughter,” Mom says.
Neither does this dinner, Erin thinks.
“Honey,” Mom says. “Quiet hands at the dinner table.”
Erin stops rubbing her hands for approximately five seconds before her anxiety feels like it’s going to kill her. She stands up, even though she’s still hungry, but she’s used to being hungry. “I’m going to my room.”
“No, sweetie,” Mom pleads. “We’re having a nice dinner.”
“I started my period,” Erin says, and walks away, Spot following close at her heels. That always works.
“Look what you did,” Erin hears Mom say as she heads upstairs.
“You’re the one who turned this into a fight,” says Dad.
“Why can’t we just have a nice dinner as a family? Just once. That’s all I ask.”
“That’s all you ask? You can’t be serious.”
Erin closes her door, finally safe in the familiar order of her room, where everything is precisely placed, all her books organized by subject and then alphabetized by author. Spot goes to his usual place on the foot of the bed. Erin turns on her white-noise machine to the preset station of waves and whales singing, lies down on her side on her perfectly made bed, and presses the soles of her feet against Spot’s warm, sturdy body. She closes her eyes as she rocks back and forth, as she imagines herself deep underwater, in a ship of her own design, so far down that sunlight can no longer reach her.
But thoughts still creep in. Even this far underwater. Even inside her submersible with steel walls nearly three inches thick. There are the usual things. There is this Nowhere Girls business, how it makes her think about things she’s worked so hard to push away, how some strange urge makes her keep showing up for meetings even though they terrify her. But fresh in her mind is a newly troubling issue: the boy named Otis Goldberg in her AP American History class.
While Erin will reluctantly admit it is pleasing that Otis Goldberg slightly resembles Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation, he also has a man-bun, which is unacceptable. But because he is only a teenager, he is technically not a man, so the term is not completely accurate. He is closer to a boy. Otis Goldberg has a boy-bun.