The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

chance. She’s shit as a spy. But it’s like Waylon said: What does she have to say to him anyway? What makes her opinion so all-fucking important? She puts in her earbuds and clicks on a Sleater-Kinney album that blares into her ears, sweetly obliterating all thought. She’s about to head upstairs to self-recriminate when she spots the reporter in an empty hallway on the sixth floor. He leans back against the wall, looks both ways, then puts his head in his hands and sinks down into a crouch. She yanks the earbuds out. She can hear him breathing in deep, panicked breaths. She comes up to fully visible and squats down next to him.

“Mr. Hirsch,” she says. “Are you all right?”

Avi jumps, then turns to her, wiping his eyes. He examines Carrie’s face.

“You were in Sarah’s class,” he says. “I kept…I kept almost seeing you.”

Carrie shrugs. “That’s my thing,” she says.

“You were invisible?”

“More like ‘relatively nonperceptible,’ ” she says. “Where’s your kid?”

“She’s with Sarah,” he says. “She’s getting a tutorial in Hivesomething.” He takes out a manila folder full of papers and pamphlets. Some of them Carrie’s seen before. The dull, information-heavy documents about the school given to prospective students, the shiny brochures given to their parents. The truth and the half-truth. It’s interesting they’ve handed Avi both sets. “I’ve got it in here somewhere. I feel like I’m learning a foreign language.”

“They’re teaching her to form a Hivebody,” says Carrie. “It’s so she can talk to people in the Hive. It’s good. It’ll keep her connected to us after she leaves.”

“I’m wondering if she should leave,” Avi says.

Carrie looks around. Posters for field trips to the Met, movie night in the common room on the tenth floor, Spanish club. Sometimes Bishop is exactly like any other high school. Then Lloyd Tynion’s face phases through a sign-up sheet for choir auditions. He looks both ways down the hall, then emerges from the wall and runs toward the cafeteria.

“It’s a good place,” she says. Avi nods, though he looks skeptical. Carrie knows this is her moment, the spotlight waiting, the microphone gleaming. She doesn’t have a thought formed, so she decides to start talking, to learn the road by walking it, just as Miquel knew she would.

“The first thing anyone asks when you start here is, What was your first time like?” she says. “First week, you answer that a hundred times. The best thing is to get an audience. Tell everyone in one shot. Savvy noobs hold out their whole first day and spill in the student lounge postdinner. Or they wait until after lights-out, when anyone who’s not fucking or getting high meets up in the Hive to shoot the shit.

“If you’re real lucky, you have a first-time story so bizarre that it spreads on its own. My friend Leticia, her first time was during her first time. Her other first time. She levitated the bed she was fucking on until her boyfriend’s ass was bumping the ceiling fan of her room. He screamed, then she screamed, then the bed came crashing down. Her mother was downstairs saying her rosary and busted in on them. Everybody knows that story. I think it’ll stay here after we’re gone. Like the way third-graders are always telling the same jokes you told when you were in third grade. You ever notice that?”

Avi nods, but Carrie’s talking not so much to him as through him. He’s a line out, a conduit to the larger world she’s been quietly coerced into hiding from. “My first time is less racy, but it’s different enough that Fahima Deeb uses it as an example in her Ability Theory class,” she says. “Like a thought experiment. Can you have your ability fully manifested and not know about it? Your first time is an event. A bird talks to you. Your hand bursts into blue flames. You sprout a second face on the side of your regular face, and it starts singing show tunes.”

“Wait, is that real?”

“Huh?” says Carrie, broken out of her trance. “Oh, yeah, Francis? He lives at the Commune. Obviously.” She watches Avi nod again, although the look on his face is still confused. “So after it happens, you react. You freak out. Or the people around you freak out. Maybe you get beaten. Maybe you go nuts. And then someone in the Hive spots you and tells you what’s happening. You’re saved.

“I didn’t notice. Not all at once. I was thirteen. I lived in Deerfield, Illinois. It’s sort of near Chicago but not near enough. I started to notice people were paying less attention to me. I stopped getting called on in class or picked for teams in gym. I wasn’t superpopular or anything. Sort of in the middle. These things happen, and I didn’t think much about it. Then my so-called boyfriend ghosted me in the hall between classes. I texted him right from the next class. He said didn’t see you, but that was bullshit because he looked right at me. I thought at. I guess through. Anyway, I didn’t want to come off like a stalker. I texted k, and I didn’t think about it for a while.

“It got worse. My parents started leaving me out of conversations at dinner. My brother stopped pestering me all the time. It was nice at first. Everything was quieter.

“And there were the dreams. At least I thought they were dreams. Every night I dreamed I was at a huge party. It was packed with people, but none of them could see or hear me. The dreams wouldn’t come just when I was asleep. I drifted to the party in class or listening to music in my room. It made things worse, the isolation. Even in my dreams I was invisible.”

Carrie pauses, remembering just how bad those weeks were. The worst parts get lost when you’re telling a story. The lesson of a story is that you lived to tell it. If that’s the end, how