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

York. I had one suitcase. They were supposed to mail me my books, but they never did. While we were waiting at the gate, my dad kept forgetting why we were there. My flight got called, and I hugged my parents and my brother. They all seemed relieved. Like it was hard work to notice me and they were glad they didn’t have to do it anymore. They could just let me go.”

“It must have been better for you here,” he says. It hovers between a statement and a question. He needs to know that this place is the right choice for his kid, that the minute she arrives, everything will be fixed. She considers lying to him but doesn’t.

“It was Deerfield Middle all over again. At first. Fahima promised we’d start training together, but she forgot. I got thrown into classes. People looked past me in the hallways. Teachers didn’t notice I was there. Then Miquel, he’s my friend. He’s an empath. He got a feeling when he walked by me in the hall. He stopped and looked right at me. He was the first person who did. And he said, I’m sorry. You’ve been here the whole time, haven’t you?

“It was special,” she says. “It meant a lot.”

What she doesn’t say is that she threw her arms around him and cried into his shoulder, and he hugged her back without hesitation. She keeps that part to herself. Carrie’s never been able to separate her feelings for Miquel from the relief she felt in that moment. Sometimes she hears it thrumming underneath their conversations, a bass line: Thank you for seeing me. Thank you.

“I want to make sure you know what you’re doing is important,” she says. “Superimportant. It’s going to decide how I live the rest of my life. I don’t want to go through my life hiding. I don’t want to worry every day someone will figure out what I am. It’s not that much to ask to be able to be who you are. To go through the world as a whole person without keeping a part of yourself back. But it’s important. I think.” She hates herself for adding this, for pulling something she knows to be a fact into the watery realm of opinion.

“I want that for Emmeline,” he says. “For my daughter.” He shifts forward, peering down the hall as if she’s coming back. “Do your parents know? What you are?”

Carrie stares at her shoes. She thinks about her parents’ befuddlement the month she went vegetarian. How they thought she was a lesbian because she went out for JV volleyball. “They didn’t know what I was before,” she says. “They weren’t those kinds of parents.”

“Did they love you?”

“That’s different from understanding me,” Carrie says. “They loved me even if they didn’t understand me.”

“Do you wish you could tell them?”

“I could tell them,” Carrie says.

Avi nods. “So you don’t want to tell them.”

Carrie thinks about it every time she calls home, which isn’t more than once a month. Her parents set up a debit account for her, and sometimes they need to be reminded to put money in. Other than that, they don’t talk much. She can’t imagine what she’d tell them. Her parents wouldn’t have the language for what she is.

“I don’t want to give them more than they can handle,” she says.

Avi glances back toward the faculty cafeteria. “I don’t know how to talk to her about it.”

Carrie laughs. “She doesn’t know how to talk to you about it either,” she says. “I guarantee it. Be there for her when she’s ready. That’s the best you’ll be able to do.”

A trample of feet heralds the kid’s arrival, barreling down the hall toward her dad.

“Daddy, I almost did it,” she says, throwing her arms around him. He totters but rights himself with his hand. “I can’t talk in there yet, but I can hear what people are saying instead of just wah wah wah wah.”

“That’s great, Leener,” he says. “You ready to go?”

“I guess. If we have to,” she says. She stops, noticing Carrie for the first time. “You’re the invisible girl from the art class.”

“I was being superinvisible,” says Carrie. “And you saw me anyway.”

“Maybe I have x-ray vision,” Emmeline says. She narrows her eyes down to little slits and stares hard at Carrie, who grins at her.

“Anyway, welcome to Bishop,” Carrie says. “Glad you survived the experience.”

“I had fun,” says Emmeline.

“I hope I see you around sometime.”

“I hope I see you around sometime,” Emmeline says, pointing from her eyes to Carrie with two fingers. Then she grabs her dad’s hand and hoists him up off the floor, steadying him when he momentarily wavers.

Kay brings home two plastic bags heavy with Chinese food and sets it out for them. When Avi asks what’s the rush, she says she wants to take Emmeline Christmas shopping, which is not a thing they ever do. The fact they’re keeping secrets from him is less troubling than the idea of Kay and Emmeline spending the evening together without him there. He worries she’ll slip and say something that hints at where they went last week. As if she knows, Emmeline gives him a smile of feigned innocence. Whatever they’re scheming, it’s minor and harmless.

“I’m meeting someone later downtown,” he says, “but I can take a cab.”

“Hot date?” Kay asks.

“It’s for this piece I’m working on,” he says.

“I noticed you’re working this week,” Kay says. What she means is that the house is a mess. “What’s the piece?”

“It’s for the Trib,” he says. “Nothing big.”

“That’s the way to get back into it,” says Kay. Dinner is friendly, full of small talk, but they’re dancing around each other like boxers at the start of a bout. Kay and Emmeline are out the door a second after the fortune cookies are cracked, and Avi heads to the attic to go over his notes one more time. He’s just gotten