The Nowhere Girls

  “Hey,” says a very large teenage boy coming her way, the only young Black face in a field of white. “Aren’t you the new preacher’s kid?”

  “Um, yes?” Grace mumbles, crumbs falling out of her mouth.

  “You don’t want to be part of the receiving line?”

  She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Before she can think of an answer, the guy extends his big, meaty hand to shake. “I’m Jesse Camp,” he says. Grace hasn’t met a whole lot of people who make her feel petite, but he is definitely one of them.

  “Grace Salter.”

  “You go to Prescott High?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too. I’m a senior. Your mom’s pretty cool.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This must be really different from where you’re from, huh?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve only been here a week so far.”

  “I guess high schools are kinda the same everywhere, huh?” he says. “Same cliques. Same bullhonkey.”

  “Bullhonkey?” Grace says, with what may be her first smile of the day.

  “I figured the word I really wanted to say wouldn’t be appropriate in a house of God.”

  “Yeah,” Grace says. “Same bullhonkey.”

  “Cool.” Jesse grabs a cookie. So does Grace. They stand there in silence for a few moments, chewing. It is not an uncomfortable silence. He reminds Grace slightly of a teddy bear—endearing while not particularly attractive.

  “My family used to go to a more traditional church when I was a kid,” he says. “Prescott AME? Across town? You know, the one where all the black people go? All ten of them.” He laughs at his joke. “My mom led prayer circles and everything. But then my sister—I mean, my brother—came out as transgender two years ago and it made my mom kind of reevaluate where she felt welcome. Mom didn’t like everyone calling her kid an abomination, you know?”

  Grace nods. She does know. She knows all about a church rejecting someone. But why is this guy telling her all this over the cookie table?

  “How many cookies have you had?” Jesse asks.

  “Um, I don’t know?”

  “Me neither. They’re not even that good, but I just keep eating them. It’s like the one thing I look forward to about going to church.”

  Grace laughs. “Me too.”

  “But now maybe I have something else to look forward to,” he says, smiling.

  Grace chokes on her cookie.

  “Are you okay?” Jesse says. He thumps her on the back with his pawlike hand. “Do you need some water? Here, have my lemonade.” Grace takes a sip from his paper cup of watery lemonade.

  “I’m okay,” Grace says when the coughing subsides.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she says, but it’s only half true. She may not be choking to death anymore, but she might die of embarrassment. “Tell me about your brother,” she says. Changing the subject is always a good idea.

  “He started taking testosterone and now he has a thicker mustache than me,” Jesse says as he swallows another cookie. “The only thing I don’t understand is the name he chose: Hector. I mean, if you get to choose whatever name you want, why the heck would you choose a lame name like that?”

  Grace thinks maybe she’s supposed to laugh, but Jesse’s face is serious, so she says, “Oh?” instead. She feels both a need to escape this conversation and also a desire for it to never end.

  “I’m sure it’d be way different if it was the other way around,” Jesse says. “If I decided I wanted to be a chick? No way my parents would change churches to support me and call me by my new name. My dad would kick my ass if I wanted to be a girl. It took a little time, but now he’s totally cool with having another son. Like how girls can wear pants, but dudes wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress? Total double standard, you know? Not that I want to wear a dress or anything.”

  “Okay,” Grace says.

  Jesse laughs. “Is it weird I’m telling you all this?” he says.

  Grace looks at his big, soft face, into his warm brown eyes. “It’s a little weird,” she admits. “But I’m glad you did.”

  “It just sort of came out.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m kind of embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Do people tell you a lot of stuff? Because you’re the pastor’s daughter? Do they, like, think you can give good advice or something?”

  Grace can’t help but laugh. No one in Adeline ever asked her advice about anything. She’s not like her mom, not someone whose thoughts have ever mattered. “No,” she says. “Not at all.”

  “Huh. Well, they should. You’re really good to talk to. You have, like, this totally calm energy or something.”

  “Thanks.”

  A woman who must be Jesse’s mother calls him from across the room, where she stands second in line to meet Grace’s mom. “Looks like it’s almost our turn,” Jesse says. “It was nice meeting you. What was your name again?”

  “Grace.”

  “Grace. I’ll see you at school, I guess. Thanks for the advice.”

  He turns around and his wide back blocks Grace’s view of her parents. How strange that he thanked her for her advice when all she did was listen.

  * * *

  Dad and Grace walk home while Mom stays behind to meet with some committee or other. One thing all churches, conservative or liberal, seem to have in common is they have a lot of committees.

  “Wasn’t she great?” Dad says. He hasn’t stopped grinning.

  “Yeah, Mom did really good.”

  “I have to start transcribing her sermon. There was definitely some stuff in there that deserves to go in her book.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You okay on your own for a while? Mom’ll be home in a couple of hours and we’ll all have supper together. I think I’m actually going to cook tonight instead of getting takeout. Can you believe it?”

  “Sure,” Grace says. “Yeah.”

  She climbs the stairs to her room and lies down. Over the past week since they arrived in Prescott, Grace has unpacked enough to put sheets and a blanket on her bed, but she is still living out of her suitcase. Unopened boxes are still piled throughout the room.

  Grace turns on her side, toward the wall without the window. A mirror lays flat on her dresser packed in a misshapen bundle of towels and packing tape. She sees no reason to unwrap it. The wall is warped, bulging near the corner. And there, near the bottom where the wall meets chipped trim that used to be white, are little scribbles, minuscule, like graffiti made by a mouse.

  Grace rolls off the bed and kneels in the corner for a closer look.

  Hear me, the scribbles say.

  Help me.

  She stays on her knees, in a position of prayer, reading the words over and over.

  ROSINA.

  There are so many shitty things about a shift at La Cocina, it’s hard to know where to begin. Maybe it’s the coming home smelling like grease and smoked chiles, how the odor seeps so deep into Rosina’s clothes, she can’t wash it out, how the pores of her skin absorb it, how she leaves work feeling as if she herself has been deep fried and covered in stringy white cheese, mole sauce congealing in her nostrils, her ears, between her toes.

  Maybe the worst thing about working at La Cocina is the boss (Tío José) yelling at Rosina all night for breaking a plate, even though it was an accident, even though she offered to pay for it. Sometimes he just has to yell, and sometimes Rosina just has to take it. It’s not like she can go on strike or anything. It’s not like there’s a union for underage, under-the-table employees of a family business run like they’re still in some village in Mexico where kids don’t go to school past sixth grade. It’s not like Mami’s ever going to back Rosina up or take her daughter’s side over the family’s.

  Maybe the worst thing is watching Mami slaving away in the kitchen, seeing her hunched over in the corner with back pain but saying nothing. Maybe it’s find
ing dead mice behind the forty-pound bags of cornmeal. Maybe it’s refilling the hot sauce, how it makes Rosina cry even though she’s trained herself to do it with her eyes closed. Maybe it’s how Tío José is the boss even though Mami does all the real work. Maybe it’s how he treats everyone like shit and gets away with it. Maybe it’s how it’s a scientific fact that people tip people of color less. Maybe it’s everything.

  Rosina rides her bike home fast and imagines the work grime flying off her, absorbed into the dark sponge of night. She is especially filthy after the final bag of garbage ripped just as she lifted it into the Dumpster, spilling raw chicken juice all over her leg. Maybe she should just lick the putrid mess, get salmonella, die of food poisoning, and end this joke of a life right now.

  Snap out of it, Rosina tells herself. Suicide jokes are so cliché.

  What she wants to know is if everyone else lives their lives in a constant state of humiliated fury, or if this is a particularly Rosina condition.

  Whatever. One day this will be over. One day Rosina will graduate from high school and crawl out from under this layer of grease and run off to Portland to start her all-girl punk band, and she will never step foot in Prescott, or a Mexican restaurant, ever again.

  There is at least some solace in arriving home. Abuelita is there, asleep on the couch in front of the television, her soft face illuminated by her constant stream of telenovelas. Rosina pulls the throw blanket up to Abuelita’s chin, then heads to the shower, where she peels off her sticky work clothes, turns on the shower as hot as is reasonable, and scrubs the evening off her skin, washes it out of her hair, watches the boredom and rude customers drain away in the soapy swirl. Her skin is hers again. She smells like herself.

  She sits on her bed wrapped in a towel. She is at least grateful for her single bedroom, while all her cousins have to share. She can decorate it however she wants, paint the walls midnight blue and put up posters of her favorite bands, play her guitar and write her songs without anyone listening. But Rosina feels a twinge of shame at the thought that she benefits from the fact that her mother hasn’t had the chance to have any more children, that, as far as Rosina knows, Mami hasn’t even had sex since her father died seventeen years ago. Maybe that’s why she’s so grumpy all the time.

  The house is silent. Mami is still at the restaurant, cleaning up the kitchen, prepping for tomorrow. Her uncles are probably in one of her neighbor’s backyards, all the men home from work in the restaurants and fields, sitting in plastic chairs and drinking cervezas while their wives tend to the children and houses and everything else. The solitude is a welcome change from the whining crowd of her cousins or the demands of customers, but it is also lonely. Rosina suspects there is a place between these extremes, something besides loneliness and hating everyone around you. She pulls on a pair of leggings and an old T-shirt, shoves her phone in her waistband, not that anyone will call her, not that she’ll call anyone. But there’s always hope, isn’t there?

  Maybe that girl will actually call, the one she met at the all-ages show in Eugene she sneaked out of her house to go to last weekend. In a parallel universe, one that wasn’t so small and backward, she probably wouldn’t even care about that girl from the show. She wasn’t really Rosina’s type, and she wasn’t really that nice or cute or interesting. But she was a girl. A queer girl. And Rosina hasn’t hooked up with anyone since Gerte, her first and only real girlfriend, the German exchange student who left in June. Before her, there were a few tipsy make-out sessions with curious straight girls freshman year, but they fizzled out as soon as the girls sobered up. Those girls could just shrug and giggle, collect a story to tell later, and be proud of themselves for being open-minded and adventurous, but what Rosina got was heartbreak. After the third time that happened, she swore off school parties—and straight girls—altogether.

  Rosina pads downstairs and sits on the couch next to her grandmother. Even though Abuelita’s asleep, the simple proximity of her body is a comfort. She is the only person in the world that Rosina doesn’t have to fight.

  “Alicia,” Abuelita says in her sleep, calling Rosina by the name of her long-dead daughter.

  Rosina squeezes her bony hand, breathes in the sour warmth of her breath. “Sí, Abuelita?” Rosina says. “Estoy aquí.”

  Abuelita mumbles something that Rosina doesn’t understand but that she hopes means “I love you.”

  Rosina’s phone rings. Erin rarely calls, but when she does it’s to rant about something, to tell her about some fish she read about or an episode of Star Trek she just watched. With Rosina’s luck, it’s probably Mami calling to tell her to come back to the restaurant. Definitely not the girl from the show, who told Rosina she was too young and only reluctantly accepted the slip of paper with Rosina’s phone number written on it in bloodred lipstick.

  “Rosina?” the female voice says, from a number she does not recognize. Rosina’s heart opens, just a crack. The world is suddenly a place that might include her.

  “This is Grace? From school? You gave me your number at lunch the other day?”

  It’s just the plain girl who speaks in questions, Rosina and Erin’s puzzling new lunch buddy. The rusty mechanism inside Rosina’s chest closes back up again.

  “Yeah?” Rosina says, running her fingers through her patchy wet hair. Maybe she should just chop it all off, shave her whole head like Erin, start over from scratch.

  A pause, then: “I need you to tell me what happened to Lucy Moynihan.”

  The girl’s voice—definitive, solid. The girl suddenly demanding, not asking permission.

  Rosina sighs. If she could unknow the story of Lucy Moynihan, she would, in a heartbeat. Why this girl wants to know so badly, she has no idea.

  Fine, she thinks. She’ll tell Grace the story of the disappearing girl. She’ll tell her the story no one says they believe.

  LUCY.

  She was not beautiful. She was small and mousy. Her hair was always frizzy and her clothes were always somehow wrong. She was a freshman at an upperclassman’s party, accompanied by the default friends she’d had since kindergarten, Prescott natives like her. They were nothing special. They grasped on to their red plastic cups for dear life and huddled in the corner where they would not be seen.

  But then. Her friends were gone and she could not find them. The room was dark and loud and tilted. He found her. Spencer Klimpt. He looked at her from across the room and she was suddenly someone: a girl, wanted.

  He refilled her red cup. One time. Two times. More. He looked into her eyes and smiled while her wet mouth formed nervous words. The music was so loud, she could not hear her own voice, but she knew she was flirting. She was giddy with it.

  She was a windup toy and he was waiting for her time to run out. He was patient, so patient. He was such a good listener, so chivalrous, so good at getting her drinks, so good at watching her eyelids get heavy, at watching her power down, slowly, slowly, until she stopped speaking, until she was soft clay to be molded, perfectly malleable.

  He took her hand and led her upstairs. He said things she could not hear to someone she could not see. Was there someone else in the room? She was laughing with her eyes closed. The world shook with her inside it. His strong arms kept her from falling. She thought: This is it.

  When he laid her down on the bed, she was somewhere watching, narrating the shadowed events:

  This is really happening. I’m fifteen and I’m about to make out with one of the most popular seniors in school. I should be so happy. I should be so proud. A little fear must be normal. I’m okay I’m okay everything is okay. Even though the bed is spinning even though I can’t keep my eyes open even though I’m not even sure he knows my name even though even though even though his body is so heavy on top of mine and I can’t move I can’t breathe I don’t want this I don’t want this anymore I want to push but my wrists are pinned down and my pants are off and it’s too late it’s too late it’s too late to say no.

  Her last solid
memory is pain.

  Then black. Then nothing. Then her brain shuts off and scrambles the memories, rips them, tears them apart. There were so many red cups. So much darkness in the murky water, her head submerged. Her body torn apart by violent waters. She is nowhere. She is nothing. She disappears.

  Then brief gasps for air, tiny moments, bright flashes in the darkness. Memories surface like tight bubbles.

  Hands. Bed. Pain. Fear. A searing inevitability. A life taken and redefined.

  A thought: I did this to myself.

  A thought: It will be over soon.

  Stillness. A heavy blanket of flesh, unmoving. She lets herself hope it is over.

  Then movement. His voice: “Did you lock the door?”

  Another voice: “Yeah. No one’s coming.”

  His voice: “You ready, Ennis? Or are you going to be a pussy?”

  Another voice. She knows this voice. Everybody knows Eric Jordan’s voice. “Fuck Ennis. It’s my turn.”

  A rhyme for children: One, two, three: How many can there be?

  A thought: I’m going to die.

  Rocking, thrashing, a violent sea. Then more. So much more. More than could possibly be imagined.

  A voice: “Turn on the lights, man. I want to see her.”

  A hand on her mouth, shoving her voice back inside.

  She sees nothing. She is dying. She is dead. She is a whale carcass being torn apart by eels at the bottom of the sea.

  A voice: “Fuck, she’s puking.”

  A voice: “Just turn her over.”

  Then a place even darker than black. Then time cut out of history. Then her mind is gone, her memories are gone. She is pulled underwater. They take her body, her breath. They bend and break and use her up until she is a memory no one can remember.