“Which ones?” Krista says, wide-eyed.
“It’s none of our business,” Melissa says with an uncharacteristic sharpness in her voice. “Come on, you guys. Those girls don’t deserve that.”
The table is silent.
“Do you think one of the girls on there is Lucy?” Trista says softly.
The bell rings but the girls don’t move. They stay seated, silent, while the lunchroom erupts into its usual chaos. Slowly, they begin to pack up. They grab their things and head to class, weighted down by the unfinished conversation.
Melissa and Rosina both stay behind, Melissa looking at her phone, Rosina poking around in her bag. “Um, bye?” Melissa says. Rosina thinks she hears something in her voice, a hint of not wanting to leave, too. But she doesn’t know if she can trust her ears, if hope and want are making her hallucinate.
“Bye,” Rosina says, and then the inches between them turn into feet, into yards, and magnets pull at Rosina’s heart and pound it against her rib cage as it tries to follow Melissa out of the lunchroom.
* * *
A girl sits in her classroom, her body pulsing with a formless, pressured yearning. She looks around at the boys, some of them hot, some of them mildly disgusting, and she thinks to herself, I’d probably hook up with any of these guys if they asked me.
She wonders if this makes her pathetic, if the desire to be wanted is some sign of weakness.
She wants to make someone hungry. She wants to be devoured.
* * *
Rosina, Grace, and Erin are standing next to the third-floor girls’ bathrooms, which have been out of order since the beginning of the year. It is a place nobody goes, which makes it an excellent location for a clandestine meeting.
“Let’s make this fast,” Erin says. “We only have three minutes and twenty-eight seconds to get to our next class.”
“Okay.” Grace scans the hall and sees no one within earshot. “The group never decided on a time for our next meeting.”
“Large groups are not capable of making decisions,” Erin says. “I liked it better when we made all the decisions.”
“But that’s not how democracy works,” Grace says.
“But aren’t we the leaders?” Erin says. “I thought we were the leaders.”
“We’re not the leaders,” Grace says. “We just started it.”
“Doesn’t that make us the leaders?”
“It makes us the founders, that’s all,” Rosina says. “I think we should have a meeting on Saturday night. We can make it like a party. I know the perfect spot.”
“But the meetings aren’t supposed to be parties,” Erin says. “We’re supposed to talk about serious things.”
“I think the last meeting was serious enough to last at least a couple of weeks,” Rosina says.
“Maybe we don’t have to be serious all the time,” Grace says. “Isn’t being happy part of empowering ourselves?”
“But parties don’t make me happy,” Erin says.
“Erin, honey,” Rosina says, holding Erin’s shoulders for just a moment before Erin wiggles away. “This is a good time to practice being flexible and compromising.”
Erin sighs an epic sigh so Rosina will understand how hard this is for her. No matter how many times Erin explains it, Rosina will never truly understand the sensory overload of the crowd and the unfamiliar surroundings, the exhaustion of processing how to act in front of so many people who already think she’s weird. But maybe the last meeting wasn’t so bad, at least until her meltdown. Maybe it’s actually kind of nice to have something to do on a Saturday night besides read and take a bath and watch TNG. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll compromise. But I won’t like it.”
But they are not the only people in this forgotten corner of the hallway.
Grace notices Amber Sullivan hovering nearby, within hearing range. How long has she been there? What has she heard?
Grace smiles, and Amber smiles too. There is something like trust in her eyes, something like light. Grace decides they have nothing to worry about. Grace has faith that their secret is safe.
GRACE.
“Hey, Grace,” someone yells. “Wait up.”
Grace’s instinct is to freeze. Most of her semirecent experiences with people yelling her name in a school hallway resulted in either tripping or name-calling, or the occasional cruel-eyed promise to pray for Grace’s soul that sounded a whole lot more like a threat than Christian compassion. But that was a different school, a different school year, a different state, and what Grace is starting to think of as an entirely different Grace.
She turns around and finds none other than Margot Dillard, two-term Prescott High School student body president, striding in her direction. Grace didn’t know Margot even knew her name.
“How are you?” Margot says. “Got any exciting plans after school?”
“Not really,” Grace lies. For some reason, she has decided to keep her real plan a secret. It’s embarrassing how excited she is, and how terrified. It’s confusing how the combination of these feelings is making her feel something strangely similar to happy.
“I have a favor to ask you,” Margot says.
“Okay,” Grace says. People ask favors of their friends. That means Margot considers Grace her friend.
Margot leans in closer. She smells like watermelon candy. “I can’t make it to the meeting tomorrow night,” she whispers. “The debate team is traveling to Salem for a really important meet, and I can’t get out of it. I’m so bummed. Can you lead the meeting for me?”
Grace’s first instinct is this must be a joke. A cruel trick. Like that movie Carrie. A bucket of blood will be waiting for her at the meeting, ready to dump on her head for thinking she could possibly lead anything.
“Grace?” Margot says. “Can you do it?”
The only thing Grace can think to say is “Why me?”
Margot smiles. “Your comments are always thoughtful and smart. You seem really steady and calm, and not swayed by people’s disagreements and emotions and everything.”
“But I’m too quiet,” Grace says.
“You don’t have to be loud to be a leader,” Margot says. “People respect you. That’s what’s important.”
Grace is light-headed. Her body, which usually feels so heavy and cumbersome, is suddenly made out of feathers.
There are so many things running through her mind, so many ways to respond. In her brain, new synapses are firing, working frantically to make connections where none had been before. They are trying to rewire her, trying to make sense of the disparity of how others see her versus how she’s always seen herself. They are trying to let Margot’s words in, trying to make them stick, trying to make Grace believe them.
A tiny spark ignites inside her, a soft voice finds its way through her depths, through the previously empty expanses that are slowly filling, through the place in her throat where so many thousands, maybe millions, of words have gotten stuck over time. The spark finds Grace’s tongue, her teeth, her lips, finds Grace’s voice, and opens her mouth: “Yes,” Grace says. “Yes, I’ll do it.”
“Great!” Margot says, and hugs her quickly before bouncing away. “You’re going to do great!” she calls when she’s halfway down the hall. Grace knows Margot is rarely wrong about anything.
But still, the question remains: Why her? Why Grace? Of all people? Margot could have asked Melissa or Elise, born leaders. Even Rosina would have been a stronger, though possibly volatile, choice. Was it because Margot was in a hurry and Grace was simply the first person she saw? Or was it something deeper, one of God’s mysterious workings, one of His miracles? Was Margot right? Is Grace a leader? Is there something of her mother in her after all?
Is there any use in asking these questions? If it’s God’s will, it’s God’s will, plain and simple. If it’s not, Grace will certainly find out when the meeting turns out to be a disaster and she lets everyone down.
Grace is shocked to realize this thought does not fil
l her with the usual terror. Somehow all the potential catastrophes of failure and humiliation she can imagine do not actually feel like the end of the world. Perhaps she will be embarrassed in front of a few dozen girls from her school. Maybe they will never want her to lead the meeting again. And so what? When she asks herself what’s the worst that could happen, the answers are not that scary. Because even if she fails, it is a small failure. Even if she’s embarrassed, it will not last forever. The girls will still be her friends. The Nowhere Girls will still meet, still plan, still make each other stronger. No matter what happens, she will still be part of them.
Grace stands alone in the empty hallway. It seems like just seconds ago that she was surrounded by hordes of students slamming lockers and running to catch their buses. She does not know how long she’s been standing here, feeling the ripples of Margot’s wake. Echoes of noise and movement fill the space around her, carry her down the stairs and out the door as she remembers what she was on her way to do before Margot intercepted her.
Grace goes the long way home. It is not her usual route through the carefully manicured front yards and white fences of the neighborhood around the school, into the more modest houses and smaller lots of her own neighborhood. This route takes her onto the busy street lined with chain stores and fast-food restaurants that leads to the highway. She inhales five blocks’ worth of exhaust fumes until she reaches her destination just before the street empties into the on-ramp.
Grace is nervous as she approaches the Quick Stop. It’s weird to have spent so much time thinking and talking about someone she’s never met. The distance has kept Spencer Klimpt somewhat hypothetical until now. She needs a face to attach to the stories. She needs to see him in the flesh, needs to remind herself that The Real Men of Prescott blog is more than words. It is the weapon of a man who hurts girls, of a man who teaches other men how to hurt girls. She needs to make him real. On her own. Alone.
When she finally sees him for the first time, the experience is anticlimactic. She expected a sadistic rapist to look a little more like a cartoon version of a bad guy than what she finds when she enters the Quick Stop. She imagined his face in a mug shot, his eyes dead and cruel, the lighting around him dramatic and sinister instead of these too-bright fluorescents. He just looks like a guy, the boy next door, someone who could even be handsome if his eyes weren’t so sunken, if his skin wasn’t so greasy, if he were wearing something besides a gas station uniform and a scowl on his face. Nothing about him says “rapist.” Nothing about him is particularly intimidating. There’s no clue to stay away from him besides his crappy job and unfortunate haircut. There’s nothing about him that screams evil. Someone like him could be anyone.
But still, Grace’s skin prickles with the knowledge of him. He is not just some guy behind a counter writing notes on a clipboard, taking inventory of the cigarettes. Grace knows what he did. She’s reminded of it every second she spends in her bedroom, Lucy’s pain scratched into the walls of a place she is supposed to feel safe.
“Do you need something?” Spencer says, and Grace jumps. She feels his eyes bore into her, and it makes her skin crawl. Just his gaze is a violation.
“No,” she mumbles. “I mean, yeah.” She starts to panic. She reaches for something, anything, to make her look like a normal shopper, not some weird girl who came just to stare. She grabs a pack of gum, a candy bar. She walks up to the counter, puts the items in front of him. His hands are dirty, scabbed at the knuckles, his chewed-up nails black with grime. Grace imagines those hands touching Lucy’s body, her friends’ bodies, her own. So unclean. So marked by violence.
He says something. She cannot look at him. She did not hear it.
“Hello?” he says again. “That’ll be two sixty-five.”
Grace fumbles for her wallet, pulls out a five, hands it over. His fingers brush hers, and a surge of rage pulses through her. How can he be in the world so easy like this, selling girls candy, touching their hands?
Grace runs out as soon as he hands over her change. She tries to do what Erin does when she feels anxious. She counts backward as she walks away from the store, focuses on the feeling of her feet hitting the ground, the smell of gasoline in the air, the wet breeze of a coming rainstorm. Then without thinking, before she turns the corner toward her house, she turns around for one last look at Spencer Klimpt.
She is still close enough to see that he is typing something onto the smart phone in his hand, an amused smile on his face. Then he looks up, his face turned in her direction, and for just a moment their eyes meet. A shiver runs down Grace’s spine; she feels caught, trapped, like a deer in headlights who sees danger coming but is incapable of moving. He could walk out of the store right now and grab her. But he just laughs and looks back at his phone, releasing her. Grace speed walks the rest of the way home.
Grace is sweaty and out of breath when she gets home. She knows Mom and Dad are at a meeting at church all afternoon, so she opens the candy bar and sits down in front of the computer in Mom’s office. There’s a picture of Grace on the desk from early last year. In the picture, Grace still has braces and is even chubbier than she is now. Her outfit is atrocious—pink leggings, a yellow T-shirt with a kitten on it, a frizzy ponytail on the top of her head. She looks like a little girl, so naïve, so ignorant. That girl looks happy. She hasn’t yet lost her friends and moved across the country. She hasn’t lost her mother to more important things. That girl doesn’t even know what rape is.
Grace takes a bite of her candy bar, but it doesn’t taste as good as she wants it to. She turns on Mom’s computer, types a web address in the browser window. The Real Men of Prescott blog opens.
A new entry was posted five minutes ago.
The Real Men of Prescott
Homely and kinda fat girl just walked into my work, was totally checking me out. Obvious she wanted me. If I wasn’t so hungover, I would have played that. She probably wouldn’t have been too bad with the lights out. Nice lips, lots of nice pieces to hold on to. A lot of the time, plain girls can be way better fucks than 9s and 10s because they know they have to work harder. Sometimes the hottest girls don’t even try. They think they just have to lie there.
This one would have been an easy score. Am now regretting not picking her up. Unless she’s one of those ugly girls with a feminist mommy who raised her to have more self-esteem than she deserves. But if she makes you work for it and then pulls some shit later saying she didn’t want it, she’s the kind of girl everyone will know is lying through her fat face.
—AlphaGuy541
US.
“You guys are crazy,” Rosina says. “This is a great place to have a meeting.”
“It’s not structurally stable,” Erin says. “And it’s a fire hazard. It is highly likely that it’s going to catch fire and we’re all going to be burned alive.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a great idea to tell people to bring candles,” Grace says.
“But we need light, right?” Rosina says. “And who knows when this place last had electricity?”
“Flashlights,” Erin says. “Battery-operated lanterns. We should have specified no open flames.”
The old Dixon Mansion has been sitting uninhabited on the edge of town for as long as anyone can remember. The three girls stand on the porch of the crumbling three-story building as it towers in front of them, the ornate columns framing the entrance tilting at an unnerving angle. Pale light flickers from inside, through cracked and scum-coated windows. The wind is hard tonight. A strong gust might tip the whole place over.
“You ready?” Rosina says to Grace.
“No,” Grace says.
“You’re going to be great,” Rosina says. “Right, Erin?”
“Do you want my honest answer?” Erin says. “Or do you want me to be supportive?”
“What do you think?” Rosina says.
“Grace, you’re going to do great,” Erin says flatly.
Grace sighs. “I can’t screw it up too much, righ
t? Because the meetings usually pretty much lead themselves?”
“Or they end up like the first meeting at the library,” Erin says.
“Erin,” Rosina says softly.
Erin blinks. “I’m sorry, Grace,” she says, looking away. “I want to encourage you because you are my friend and I care about you.”
“That was really sweet,” Rosina says.
Erin shrugs. “Even if Grace totally bombs, it’s okay. Because we’ll still like her and so will everyone else.”
Grace looks at Erin with the beginning of tears in her eyes. “Erin, that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Yeah, well,” Erin says. “Don’t get used to it.”
“I kind of want to hug you right now,” Rosina says.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I love you guys,” Grace says with a quiver in her voice.
“Ugh,” Erin says. “You are both unbearable.” And she pulls open the creaking front door.
The inside of the mansion looks like the set of a horror movie, complete with a rotted, half-collapsed grand staircase leading to a second-floor landing, the rusted metal carcass of a car-size chandelier in the middle of the floor, the crystal ornaments stolen long ago. The girls follow light and voices into the adjoining ballroom, where a few dozen girls cast ghostlike shadows.
“This place is so creepy!” someone squeals.
“Whoever had the idea to meet here is crazy,” says someone else as she guzzles a can of beer.
“This house is definitely haunted,” says another.
“See, Grace,” Erin says. “You’re not the only one who’s scared.”
“I think it’s great,” says a possibly tipsy Samantha Robeson, leaning against a stone fireplace that is at least a foot taller than she is and could fit at least five of her inside it. “It’s a perfect metaphor, if you think about it. The house symbolizes our fears, and we’re joining here to face them.”