“Breathe,” Rosina whispers to Erin. “Eighty-eight, eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five . . .”
“I think I know how you feel,” says another girl. “At least a little bit. Even though I’m really lucky. My first time was actually really romantic, and my boyfriend is awesome and totally supportive of what we’re doing. I’ve never been abused or raped. I get along with both my parents. My mom’s a strong woman. My dad isn’t an asshole. But just being a girl, I get nervous sometimes, like I don’t know what could happen.”
“Look around the room,” Rosina whispers to Erin. “Look at the corners. Feel the floor under you.”
“We can’t keep living like this,” someone says.
“We’re not,” Grace says, and her clear voice reverberates around the room. “What we’re doing here, right now. Just being here with each other and talking about what we’re talking about. We’re changing everything.”
“I need to go,” Erin says.
“You’re okay,” Rosina says. “The meeting will be over soon. Can you wait till then?”
“No,” Erin says, on the verge of tears. “I need to get out of here.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No,” Erin says, standing up.
“Are you sure?”
“Rosina, leave me alone!” Erin shouts, and she stumbles over the mass of people sitting on the floor, out of the room, and out the front door. The room is silent for a moment in her wake.
“Well,” Lisa Sutter says, standing up. “I guess the meeting’s over.”
“Oh,” Margot says as people start moving. “Unless anyone else has anything they’d like to say—”
“I need ice cream,” someone says.
“I need beer,” says someone else.
“I guess the meeting is adjourned?” says Margot, but no one is listening.
The house empties, so many things still unsaid.
The rain has stopped. The night brightens in increments as a couple of dozen cars turn on their headlights. Rosina finds Erin standing next to Grace’s mom’s car in the muddy makeshift parking lot on the side of the hill not visible from the road.
“I just want Grace to give me a ride home,” Erin says before Rosina has a chance to open her mouth.
“She’s on her way,” Rosina says. “But can we talk about what happened?”
“There were too many people in too small a space,” Erin says. “I made a mistake not sitting by the door. I feel much better now that I’m outside.”
“Okay, but—”
“It’s better than in there with all those people and their perfume and scented deodorants.”
“You didn’t raise your hand when Grace asked about being a virgin,” Rosina says. “And you got really upset about what Serina was saying. And—” Rosina has to stop talking. There is something in her throat, something not made out of words. Her eyes are stinging. She is fighting the urge to do something Erin would never forgive her for—throw her arms around her and hold on tight and never let go.
“I’m done talking,” Erin says.
“But—”
“Rosina, I said no.”
“Okay, but—”
“And I don’t want to talk about this later. I don’t want to talk about this at school. I don’t want to talk about it ever.”
“Okay.” Rosina sighs.
“Why would Grace lock her car?” Erin says, pounding on the door with her fist.
“I don’t know.”
“I want to go home,” Erin says.
“I know,” Rosina says, even though she has little clue what that feels like.
US.
Grace tunes out during most of Mom’s sermon about the renunciation of worldly goods. That doesn’t seem too relevant to her life right now since she doesn’t own much of anything.
She notices Jesse looking at her a couple of times during the service, but quickly looks away before having to admit to herself how nice his smile is. As soon as the service is over, she runs home without stopping at the bathroom even though she has to pee like crazy. That’s how desperate she is to avoid talking to Jesse Camp.
As she sits on her bed, ready to lose herself in the current book she’s reading, it suddenly hits her that, outside of what was required in classes or church activities, Grace has hardly ever talked to boys. Something in her softens. Maybe, deep down, she’s not so much angry at Jesse as she is scared—he’s a boy and she has no idea how to talk to him. What makes it worse is she suspects she probably wants to.
But what would that mean, if Grace let herself talk to Jesse? Would that mean she likes him? Would that make them friends? Would that mean she wants to be more than friends?
Grace cringes. She looks around her room, as if embarrassed that someone might have heard her thought, shamed that she even briefly considered something as ridiculous as that. She knows this line of thinking is off-limits to someone like her. She knows fat girls don’t get boyfriends in high school, especially semipopular ones like Jesse. No one has to tell her that her body makes her irrelevant to that entire conversation.
Grace has never questioned her body’s place in the world. She’s always believed the laws of movies and TV shows: Chubby girls are sidekicks, not romantic leads; sometimes they get to be funny, but more often they’re the butt of jokes; if they’re powerful, they’re evil—they’re Ursula the sea witch from The Little Mermaid; they are not heroines and they are certainly not sexy. These are the rules. This is the script.
But life now looks so much different. Maybe those rules don’t apply anymore. Maybe they never really did. Maybe real life is not like movies at all. Maybe in this one, in this life, fat girls get to be heroines.
How r u doin? the text from Rosina says.
Erin hates how Rosina doesn’t spell out words properly.
Fine. She texts back, period and all.
Want to talk bout what happened at mtg? U ok?
Let it go. She texts back. It’s so much easier to be rude in writing than in person.
I’m worried about u.
Busy now. See you tomorrow. Erin shoves her phone in her pocket. She hears it ding with another text as she walks downstairs, but she doesn’t check it. Spot rubs up against her leg like he’s trying to tell her something. Is he on Rosina’s side now?
Mom is at her station in the kitchen. “Oh, good, you’re here,” she says as soon as she sees Erin. “I want to talk to you.”
Erin opens the fridge and searches inside for something that will fill her stomach for the rest of the afternoon. It’s not looking good.
“I made you a snack,” Mom says. “It’s in the green bowl.”
Erin pulls out the unappetizing green-specked gray mush. She sniffs it. It smells like nothing. “I want something crunchy,” Erin says.
“Honey,” Mom says. “I’ve been working on figuring out a night for our next family dinner, but Dad’s schedule is pretty hectic with midterms and everything, and I know you must be terribly disappointed, but—”
“Why would I be disappointed?” Erin says, dipping a baby carrot into her mush. “Nobody likes family dinner.”
Mom looks at her blankly. “Carrots aren’t a part of this snack,” she says.
“Why do you keep trying to force these family dinners to happen?” Erin says.