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

do you communicate the point where you were pretty sure you wouldn’t or didn’t even want to? The time in the middle when surviving was unlikely or even hateful? For weeks Carrie knew what was happening but didn’t have a name to put to it. She was fading out of the world and couldn’t find a way to stop it. And she gave up. She became convinced that she would disappear entirely and that this was the best outcome. The alternative was to stay as she was, a ghost, haunting her own life. Unable to voice that to Avi, she picks her story up on the other side.

“Fahima and Sarah found me in a diner,” she says. “I used to go there because there was one waitress who would always see me. I used to try to figure out when she was working. Not because I was going to starve otherwise. It just felt good. Having her see me.

“She wasn’t there that day, so I was just sitting. Fahima and Sarah stood out right away. Sarah had Cortex with her, which is a total health code violation. But they walked right in and sat down in the booth across from me. I remember Cortex snuck under the table and lay down on my feet.

“Sarah said they’d been looking all over for me. We knew you existed, she said. We kept looking in the wrong place. Then Fahima said they had to look at all the places I wasn’t, and when they ruled those out, they knew I’d be here, in this booth at the diner.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Avi says.

“No,” Carrie says. Being found was a miracle. The fairy tale quality of it, the dreamy strangeness of that day in the diner is precious to her. She never thinks to interrogate it, to make sense out of it. It’s enough that it happened. “They told me about what I was. That there were others like me. That they were like me. They told me about the Bishop Academy. Fahima said there was a place for me there if I wanted it. You grow up reading fantasy novels where some poor girl in a drudging life finds out she’s a princess. The whole world makes you ready for a moment like this to happen. Even before I started to disappear, my life felt ill-fitting, maybe, designed for someone else. I was attached to it because, you know, it was mine. Watching my own life from inside it, I saw its limits. My boyfriend was cute, but he didn’t give a shit about music or books or anything. My parents were nice, but they just ended up with kids, like you do. If they wanted them, they hadn’t wanted one like me. Fahima and Sarah offered me a way out. I never wanted anything more.”

“So they just took you away?” There’s a look on his face somewhere between fear and anger. Carrie never thought about how it might feel from a parent’s point of view. No one worries about the farmer whose daughter, secretly a princess the entire time, finally is whisked away to the castle.

“They didn’t just kidnap me,” she assures him. “They came to my house the next day. They were wearing business suits. They looked like salespeople. My mom let them in and told my dad to go make coffee. Fahima gave her a brochure.”

“Like these?” Avi asks. He fans out brochures like he’s about to do a card trick.

“Yep,” Carrie says. She’s starting to see why they brought him here. It’s not about him; it’s about the kid. They could have picked any reporter, but they picked this guy. It’s got nothing to do with him. He’s the get-one-free that comes with the buy-one. Carrie feels bad for him.

“The Bishop Academy for the Gifted and Talented,” he reads.

“That’s the one they used,” Carrie says. “Some kids’ parents get the Academy for the Arts pitch, but I’ve never been all that arty. My mother even asked what my talent was, and Fahima said, She falls more on the gifted side.” Carrie laughs, although it isn’t funny. It hurts to remember her mother essentially asking a stranger, What’s so special about my daughter? Weren’t parents supposed to know? Shouldn’t she have had a list? Just as bad is remembering the look of surprise on her parents’ faces when Carrie’s name was brought up. It was as if they’d forgotten her completely and were mildly inconvenienced to be reminded.

“My mom asked how much it cost,” she said. “Nothing about college placement or extracurricular activities. I don’t even know if she asked where it was.”

She clears her throat, pushing the worst parts aside. “I spent the rest of the week wrapping up things at my old school. There wasn’t much to do. I’d slipped off the radar of my friends. My teachers had to be reminded they had me in class. Boyfriend was dating someone else. My last day at Deerfield Middle, I walked through the halls, trailing my fingers along the lockers. Like I was trying to make good memories to come back to later. But it was just the place I went to school because my parents got jobs in Deerfield and bought a house in that school district. It wasn’t special. So I stopped.

“At the end of my last day, I sat in a stall in the girls’ bathroom and wrote CARRIE WAS HERE and the date on the door in red Sharpie. It was a stupid thing to do. I watched the ink, thinking it would fade. When it stayed, I started to cry.”

I should stop, she thinks. It’s all so fucking embarrassing, and she’s lost the point somewhere. There’s something in her story bigger than her, something that should matter to him, but she hasn’t found it. She can tell by the way his eyebrows are pinched together. Maybe the only way is to keep telling.

“My parents drove me to Chicago for the flight to New