“I would like to talk about nudibranchs now,” Erin announces, kneading her hands together anxiously.
“Go for it,” Rosina says. Grace looks to Rosina for a clue, but Rosina takes a bite of her sandwich as if this is a completely normal turn for the conversation to take.
“Nudibranchs are sea slugs,” Erin says. “Which is a misleading name, because they are in fact some of the most beautiful and graceful creatures in the sea. Nudibranch is Latin for ‘naked lung,’ because their lungs are on the outside of their bodies, like feathers. They are gastropods, like mollusks and octopi. Gastropod means ‘stomach foot.’?”
“Gastropod,” Rosina says, ripping the crust off her sandwich. “Great name for a band.”
Then Grace hears a familiar kind of laugh nearby, the kind she got so used to at the end of her time in Adeline, the kind of laugh that has a target, a victim. Mean girls getting ready to be mean.
“Don’t get too close to the freak table,” a girl says in a fake whisper to her friend as they walk by.
Rosina’s arm shoots into the air, her long middle finger outstretched. “Fuck off, pod people,” she says calmly. “I don’t want to catch what you got.”
The girls roll their eyes and laugh as they walk away, and Grace feels something inside her collapse. A familiar pain surfaces, along with the fear that she picked exactly the wrong table.
“Fucking cheerleaders,” Rosina says. “Can they be any more of a stereotype?”
“I’m leaving,” Erin says, standing up abruptly with a pained look on her face and swaying slightly on her feet. She throws her things into her bag.
“See you,” Rosina says as Erin turns and walks quickly down the hall.
“Wait,” Grace says. “Where’s she going?”
“Probably the library.”
“Why?” Grace asks.
“Fucking cheerleaders,” Rosina says, shaking her head, but Grace doesn’t know if that’s supposed to be an answer to her question or a comment on the state of the world. Either way, Grace is not feeling very optimistic.
US.
This girl joined the cheer squad because she loves dancing and the game of football. She didn’t know that’s not why most girls join the squad. She didn’t think much about the uniforms, didn’t think about the Fridays she’d be required to wear them to school, how the performance lasts way beyond the games, how it is part of her job to obsess about the cellulite on her upper thighs that no number of squats can get rid of, how the entire school has a right to judge her ass in close-up.
She holds her head high as she struts down the hall. It is her job to be confident and cheerful. So what if people are starting to talk about how she never seems to have a boyfriend? Someone so pretty should have a boyfriend.
The girl smiles so no one will suspect what she’s thinking: What if this wasn’t my life? What if I didn’t have to think about my body all the time, if I didn’t have to be on display? What would it be like to be a different kind of girl?
*
Prescott High’s student body president wonders if maybe at Stanford girls are allowed to be more than one thing. Since everyone there has to be smart by default, maybe it’s something you get to stop trying to prove all the time, so then you get to try being other things. Like maybe she can try wearing her skirts a little shorter, her shirts a little lower. Maybe she can wear some of that makeup her mom keeps buying her that she refuses to wear out of fear that people would stop taking her seriously. Maybe she can do something with her hair besides tying it up in this tight ponytail every day.
What would that be like, to be noticed? To be looked at? To be wanted as something besides a lab partner? To not have to choose between pretty and smart?
*
What guy wants a jock for a girlfriend? What guy dreams of hooking up with the school softball star, with her thick arms and legs, her drab orange ponytail, her see-through eyelashes and perpetually sunburned nose? They don’t even see her in the locker room as she collects dirty towels from varsity football practice—a girl, in the locker room. She thought signing up to be team manager would help her meet guys, but the only time they ever talk to her is to ask her where Coach is or if she can get grape-flavored Gatorade for next practice.
So they certainly don’t notice her in the corner disinfecting mouth guards as they towel off. They certainly don’t know she’s listening to their discussion comparing how many girls they slept with over the summer. Of course they’re all probably lying. It’s primal, their need to compete, this need to fight over territory.
“Let’s make a bet on who can bag more this year,” Eric Jordan says. No surprise there. Even if he hadn’t been one of the guys Lucy said raped her, everyone can agree he’d certainly be capable of something like that. “Virgins count double,” he says. Most of the guys laugh. The ones who don’t laugh look away or roll their eyes but say nothing. “Start with the freshmen. They’re the easiest.”
“Knock it off, man,” one guy says. “My sister’s a freshman.”
“Is she hot?” says Eric Jordan.
The guy says a halfhearted “Fuck you,” but it can barely be heard above the laughter. Maybe not all the guys are participating in the conversation, but certainly none of them is stopping it.
She knows the thought is wrong as she’s thinking it, but she wishes, just once, a guy would try to take advantage of her.
*
If Erin DeLillo tolerated figures of speech, one might say she could do her homework with her eyes closed. Literally, of course, this is not true, but she does her homework quickly and with ease, even AP Calculus and AP Chemistry. Mom always reminds her how lucky she is to be so bright; few Aspies are so exceptional, so special. As if they need to be. As if that’s the only way to be forgiven for the rest of what they are.
She sits on the couch with Spot and a snack of carrot sticks and homemade raw cashew “cheese” spread, having earned today’s episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Episode 118, “Cause and Effect,” starts with the senior crew playing poker. Data is particularly good at poker because his face shows no emotion. He has no tells. His poker face is permanent.
Erin has been working on her poker face. She doesn’t cry as much in public anymore. She’s gotten better at hiding when she’s hurt. The worst of the bullies have mostly gotten bored with her and moved on to other unfortunate victims. But there are still the looks when she says something weird, the snickers when she trips or does something clumsy, the ignoring, the exclusions, the talking to her like she’s a child or hard of hearing—and that’s from the nice people.
This is the episode of TNG where the Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop and keeps repeating the same day over and over and over again, and no one knows how to make it stop.
GRACE.