The Nowhere Girls

  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.

  “Because we’re a family, honey,” Mom says, trying to smile, but the corner of her mouth is twitching.

  “That’s a stupid reason,” Erin says. Why can’t Mom just leave it alone? Why can’t Rosina leave it alone? Why is everyone always trying to tell Erin what’s good for her?

  “Erin, I don’t think you should be eating carrots right now.”

  “Trying to force people to be a family does not make them a family,” Erin says. She can feel her chest heating up, her shoulders tensing. Spot paws at her leg. “Pretending we are isn’t good for anybody. All we’re doing is lying. You’re lying. Dad’s lying.”

  “Honey, don’t yell,” Mom says.

  “You know he doesn’t want to be with us.”

  “Honey, take a deep breath.”

  Spot steps on Erin’s feet and leans into her shins, but his comfort can’t stop her.

  “You should have gotten a divorce the first time,” Erin says, and she feels a brief flushing of relief, an emptying. And then panic. Then a locking, a sealing shut.

  Mom’s face is red. “Erin, I think you need to go upstairs and cool down.” She sounds like she’s choking.

  Erin couldn’t agree more. What she needs right now are her heavy blanket and her whale songs. What she needs is to be at the bottom of the ocean. Fish don’t have families. The babies hatch out of their eggs and are on their own. Sure, most of them are eaten up by predators, but that’s nature for you.

  * * *

  There’s a pack of those Nowhere Girls, probably on their way to one of their secret meetings. For a brief moment this girl considers following them, finding out their meeting place and who’s in charge, and turning them in. Maybe then her school could have some peace back. Maybe then it wouldn’t feel like going to a war zone every day. Maybe the students wouldn’t be so divided.

  But it wouldn’t work, she thinks. The girls would see her and know she wasn’t one of them. They’d know she was a spy. Everyone knows she’s the president of Prescott High School’s Students for Conservative Values Club. They will judge and condemn her immediately. They’re so prejudiced, the girl thinks. They’re such hypocrites.

  They keep talking about “rape culture,” but it doesn’t even exist. Rape is illegal in this country, isn’t it? Women aren’t all victims. Men aren’t all evil predators waiting to get them drunk and take advantage of them. How does that attitude empower women? What about girls’ own responsibility? All these Nowhere Girls are doing is jumping on the feminist bandwagon of blaming men for all their problems. They don’t believe in equality, they believe in crushing and humiliating men.

  They talk about women’s solidarity, but it’s only for certain kinds of women. There’s no place in their feminism for girls like her—for conservatives, for Christians, for people who are pro-life, for women who value family. They call girls like her an idiot. They say all girls who disagree with them are wrong. As if you have to call yourself a feminist, as if conforming to everything they believe in, is the only way to be a strong woman. But this girl knows she’s a strong woman. She doesn’t need their dogma or their labels to validate that.

  * * *

  Sam keeps telling herself the sex strike is just about the guys at Prescott High. It doesn’t include guys outside the school. So this is fine. She has nothing to feel guilty about. Plus she never wanted to do the sex strike in the first place.

  But she can’t help feeling a little bad. Even if she doesn’t agree with everything in the Nowhere Girls’ manifesto, does she have the responsibility to do it anyway, out of solidarity? Is there room for dissent? Is she a traitor for listening to her body?

  As soon as her boyfriend puts his mouth on her nipple, she’s suddenly confident the answer is no.

  She knows it is not just his body she is responding to. There is something inside him that seeps into the air and wraps itself around the something inside her. It is not just their skin touching. They are something more than flesh. Sam suspects that maybe she is starting to love him.

  She had always planned to go to UCLA or USC for college, but the University of Oregon has a theater department, doesn’t it?

  No, she thinks. She is not going to change her plans just because of some boy. But then he touches her in a brand-new way that gives her wings, and maybe, just maybe, she might consider it.

  * * *

  A girl searches on the Internet: Where is the clitoris?

  GRACE.

  The morning bell rings, but nobody’s quieting down. The class is way too animated for a Monday morning.

  “Oh my God,” Allison Norman says, and it takes Grace a second to realize she’s talking to her. She’s still not used to having friends. “Did you hear what happened over the weekend?”

  Besides Grace going to church on Sunday and avoiding Jesse Camp, reading two entire books, emptying the bucket under her leaky ceiling, and eating frozen pizza two meals in a row? “No,” Grace says. “What happened?”

  “The rumor is that Eric Jordan and Ennis Calhoun showed up at Bridget Lawson’s party over the weekend and, like, half the people there wouldn’t even talk to them,” Allison says.

  “Then Fiona and Rob had a huge fight because she was mad at him for still being friends with them,” Connie Lancaster adds. “And then she totally dumped him. In front of everyone.”

  “Pipe down!” Coach Baxter yells, but the room quiets only slightly.

  “And did you hear about Friday’s football game?” a boy sitting near them says, a member of the marching band. “The team was practically laughed off the field. The other school made signs making fun of them. One of them said something like, ‘Prescott can’t score any kind of touchdowns.’ ”

  “Hey,” Connie whispers, leaning forward. Grace and Allison follow, unt
il they are almost touching foreheads. “Do you know when the next meeting is?”

  A loud bang silences the room. A metal filing cabinet is dented from where Coach Baxter just kicked it.

  “Do I have your attention now?” he growls.

  “Yes, sir,” say a couple of jocks in the front row. The rest of the class is silent.

  “Everybody open your books,” Coach Baxter says. “Silent reading for the rest of the class.”

  “He’s really going for teacher of the year, isn’t he?” Connie says, and Grace doesn’t even try to mute her giggle.

  “You!” Coach roars at Connie. “To the principal’s office. Right now.”

  “Are you serious?” Connie says.

  “Take your bag and get out of my face.”

  “This is crazy,” Connie says as she stands up. She looks out at the class, as if they might have some answers for her, some explanation of what she did wrong. All Grace can think to do is say a little silent prayer, God, please help her to not get in trouble. And then Connie is gone, the door whispering shut behind her.

  When Grace gets to lunch, her usual table is almost full. Rosina’s practically glowing, but Erin’s face is buried deep in a book. Sitting with them are a handful of people Grace recognizes from the Nowhere Girls meetings, including Elise Powell and Melissa the cheerleader. A popular girl. At her lunch table.

  “Hi, Grace,” Melissa says as Grace sits down.

  “Um, hi?” Somehow it feels different to be talking to her at school, outside the meetings. Here, Grace is just her normal, boring self. But at the meetings, she’s becoming someone different. Someone who can talk to people without everything being a question. Someone with ideas. Someone with an identity.

  “Melissa was just telling us how she quit the cheer squad,” Rosina says.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Some of the girls are kind of mad at me right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace says.

  “They’ll get over it.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  Melissa crunches thoughtfully on a chip. “I think I finally got honest with myself and realized I didn’t really like it. I thought I was supposed to like it, and I kept waiting to like it. But it wasn’t anything like what I thought it would be. Most of the girls don’t even know anything about football. Like they literally have no idea what is going on at the games. That’s crazy to me.”

  “Football’s crazy to me,” Rosina says.

  Melissa nudges Rosina with her shoulder. “You’re crazy,” she says with a grin. Are they flirting? Grace notices Erin bury her face even deeper into her book.

  “Cheer squad isn’t really about the games, at least not at this school,” Melissa continues. “It’s about this role you have in the school, and it’s something you have to do all the time, even when you don’t feel like it. And, I don’t know. I guess I realized that I don’t ever really feel like it.”

  “Good for you,” Rosina says. “Now you can hang out with us peasants.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to sit at our table all the time now?” Erin mumbles from behind her book.

  “Don’t be rude,” Rosina says.

  “It’s just a question.”

  Melissa laughs. “I haven’t really made any plans beyond today.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to sit here whenever you want,” Rosina says, giving Erin the stink eye. “Regardless of what that one says.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Looks like the troll table has had some defections too,” Elise says.

  Grace turns around to see that the usually full table has a handful of guys at it now, and only two girls.

  “Kayla Cunningham and Shannon Spears,” Elise says, shaking her head. “They’ll never come over to our side. They’d probably deflate if you separated them from their boyfriends.”

  Ennis is nowhere to be seen. Grace’s eyes search the lunchroom and find Jesse Camp, sitting with a new group several tables away. Their eyes meet just as she realizes she was in fact looking for him.

  “Dammit,” she says, turning around as fast as possible.

  “What?” Melissa says.

  “Nothing.”

  “Your friend Jesse switched tables too, huh?” Rosina says.

  “Jesse Camp?” Melissa says. “You guys are friends? He’s a great guy.”

  “No,” Grace says. “We’re not friends.”

  Melissa shrugs. Rosina lifts her eyebrows like, Yeah, right.

  Erin says, “Do you want to know the longest fish name?”

  “No,” says Rosina, at the same time Melissa says, “Sure.”

  “It’s humuhumunukunukuapua’a,” Erin says. “It’s the Hawaiian state fish.”

  “That’s interesting,” says Melissa.

  “Don’t encourage her,” says Rosina.

  * * *

  “Hey!” Jesse says, catching Grace in the hall just as she’s about to step inside her fifth-period class.

  Her stomach does something strange, like she’s on an elevator that dropped down too fast. Is it indigestion? Did she eat something bad?

  Grace’s head is suddenly crowded with questions. How can someone’s face be this friendly? How can his eyes be so warm? Is it normal to simultaneously feel both dread and a sense of relief around the same person?

  “I tried to find you after church yesterday,” Jesse says, “but I guess you had already left.”

  Grace doesn’t tell him it’s because she ran straight home afterward for the sole purpose of avoiding him. “I’m going to be late for class,” she says.

  “There’s still like four minutes until the second bell rings.”

  Grace tries not to feel bad as Jesse’s face goes from cheery to perplexed to disappointed. “Oh,” he says. “You’re still mad at me.”

  “I don’t really have time to talk right now,” Grace lies.

  “I’m not friends with them anymore,” he says.

  Grace says nothing. She’s afraid if she looks him in the eye, she’ll accidentally forgive him.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so mad at me,” he says. “You know I’m on your side, right?”

  Grace has no response. The truth is, she doesn’t know why she’s so mad at him either. Or why she wants to be. But she’s not about to tell him that.

  Jesse sighs. “I was trying to be friends with everyone. It’s one of my faults, I guess—wanting people to like me. But I should have let some of those guys go a long time ago. You wouldn’t believe some of the racist shit that comes out of their mouths. I just pretend I don’t hear it. I pretend it doesn’t hurt. And some of the stuff they said about my brother when he was transitioning?” Jesse looks away. He swallows. “I didn’t stick up for him. I didn’t stick up for my own brother.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Grace says, and she hates herself for sounding so mean.

  “I thought I could remain a neutral party. I thought if I didn’t say or do anything, then everyone would like me. But I realized that wasn’t going to be possible. Now I know there’s more important things than trying to be liked by everyone. So I picked a side. I picked the right side.” He tilts his body so that his face is at the same level as hers, so she has no choice but to look at him. “I picked yours.”

  Grace doesn’t understand what she’s feeling. Part of her wants to forgive him, to be his friend, to get to know him. But then part of her is terrified by that entire train of thought and where it might lead, so terrified that staying mad at him for questionable reasons, and pushing him away even though all he’s doing is trying to be nice to her, seem like completely logical things to do.

  “I don’t know if I believe people can just change like that,” Grace says.

  She can’t read the look on his face. It’s something like pain, something like confusion, but also something almost like pity.

  “If you don’t think people can change,” he says slowly, as if he’s trying to make sense of the words as he says them, “then what’s the point of
any of this?”

  The bell rings. “I have to go,” Grace says. But she doesn’t really care about getting to class on time. All she knows is, she doesn’t know the answer to his question.

  The Real Men of Prescott

  Guys, we have to stop putting bitches on a pedestal. The more you get to know them, you realize there’s no such thing as sweet and innocent. They’re all selfish, lying manipulators who want stuff for free. They’re the original players, but they get mad about us having game? They’re just begging to be put back in their place.

  I’m going to be totally honest with you—girls are good for fucking and making sandwiches. That’s it. This may sound shocking, but in your hearts you know it’s true. The feminists have been ruling things for so long they’ve made us ashamed of speaking the truth.

  I, for one, will not be silenced any longer.

  —AlphaGuy541

  ERIN.

  “Miss DeLillo,” Principal Slatterly says, with a smile on her face that Erin knows does not mean what most smiles mean. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” Erin says. She knows Slatterly does not want to know how she’s doing. All morning, Erin has watched everybody file in to talk to the principal, one by one—Mrs. Poole, the vice principal, guidance counselors, everyone who works in the office. Now it’s Erin’s turn. For the past thirty minutes, she’s been doing her best to prepare, scribbling an if/then flowchart of possible scenarios and complications. She lost track of the number of times she’s counted backward from one hundred. She’s even had to do the alphabet backward, which she reserves for truly serious situations. And this is serious.

  “Are you getting all the support you need this year?” Principal Slatterly says with a tone that Erin would normally associate with kindness, but right now she’s not so sure. Slatterly is the enemy, right? And enemies are usually not known for being kind. “How is your IEP working out?”

  “Fine,” Erin says, but she is uncomfortable with the fact that Slatterly technically asked two different questions. “Yes,” she says, to answer the first question. But now the two answers are out of order.