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

rather than colors. It’s more nuanced, the difference between seeing pressure fronts on a weather map and standing in the middle of a thunderstorm. The analogy worries Carrie. He doesn’t talk about it, but Miquel is exposed by his ability. He gets inexplicably sad when they watch Marx Brothers movies in the common room with Hayden and Jonathan, and he knows it’s someone else’s sadness. Or he flies off the handle at Waylon for leaving clothes on the floor, a sin they’re both guilty of, then apologizes, looking out in the hall to divine who his anger came from. Carrie feels like a failure because she can’t provide whatever calm he needs. She can’t be the eye of his storm.

“I’ll go with you,” he says.

“No,” says Carrie. “My family is terrible.”

“It’s them or a shit ton of Jung,” he says. Miquel’s family lives in the Bronx, but his mother kicked him out when his abilities started, shouting brujo at him as she chased him down the street. He said it meant something between wizard and witch doctor, and nothing good. He hasn’t spoken to them in years.

“I’d take the Jung,” Carrie says. She worries about the emotions he’d be exposed to if she dragged him back to Deerfield with her for protection. She’s also embarrassed by her bland suburban roots. It’s impossible to explain to him what it means to come from a nowhere place, to invent yourself out of nothing. Hayden knows what it’s like; they’ve done a better job than Carrie building a version of themself that bears none of the dull marks of where they come from or who they used to be. Hayden and Carrie don’t talk about these things. One of the rules of reinvention is that you never speak about the person you’ve been out of fear you’ll summon that person like a ghost.

Just past noon on Thanksgiving, Carrie sits in the back of a cab in front of her parents’ house, listening to a wistful Springsteen song about getting out of your shitty hometown. She wishes she had taken Miquel up on his offer. The driveway is full, and Carrie identifies each car. The dark blue Suburban belongs to her aunt Chloe and uncle Jim, with their three little kids. The Mini Cooper is Susie, her divorced aunt from Chicago. The late-model compact with the Domino’s Pizza light perched on top must be her brother Brian’s, although the idea that he’s old enough to drive makes her squirm. The family station wagon, spots of rust around the wheel wells and the edges of the hood. It reminds Carrie of cramped legs and the smell of fast food. Family vacations driving someplace none of them wanted to be. Counting cows with Brian until their tally hit four digits while her mother picked CDs no one loved or hated and her dad stared fixedly out at the road like a trucker indifferent to his cargo.

Carrie lets her fingers trail along the station wagon’s bubbling blue paint, its flaking faux-wood paneling. It’s proper in this situation for her to ring the bell, request entry into what she thinks of as home. She feels the urge to disappear as she pushes the doorbell but wills herself to stay visible. She’s relieved when Brian answers, although he doesn’t look all that happy to see her.

“Hey,” he says. Adolescence has him over a barrel. His face is spotted with acne, and his body is assembled from mismatched parts. He’s growing like Jekyll becoming Hyde: in fits and starts. They stand at the door, unsure if they’re supposed to hug. “You have bags?” Carrie pats her army messenger bag. Brian nods and lets her in. Strains of Christmas music come from the living room. Her father spends Thanksgiving morning lugging holiday records out of the attic while her mother preps the turkey. “Mom and Uncle Jim are already drunk,” Brian says. “Aunt Susie’s on her way there. And the kids are fucking awful.”

“They were always fucking awful,” says Carrie.

“They got worse,” he says. She’s grateful Brian is taking her into his confidence this way. It reestablishes a sibling bond.

As proof of their awfulness, one of the cousins comes barreling out of the dining room and into the hall, blasting between Carrie and Brian with no regard for either. Carrie expects someone chasing behind him, but no one comes.

“Is that my daughter?” her mother calls from the dining room. She emerges, glass of red wine sloshing in her hand, a flush rising in her cheeks. She holds her arms out wide. “My little baby’s all grown,” she coos. Carrie allows herself to be embraced, enfolded. Through the salon-sculpted curls of her mother’s hair, naturally thick and straight as Carrie’s own, she sees the rest of her family watching this show. She hears that one syllable on the phone. Oh. Oh? Oh.

Oh: is that what you think you’re doing?

Oh: you’re still alive.

Oh: what will they say about my daughter the freak?

Uncle Jim, a ruddy-faced account manager for a meat company in Chicago who smells like cigarettes and salt, pushes past her father, standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Jesus Christ, you’re a foot taller,” Jim says. “Skinny as a bone. Don’t they feed you at that place?”

“They feed us fine, Uncle Jim,” she says, her face pressed into the armpit of his sweater.

“Matt, go get your daughter a beer,” says Jim. Her father turns toward the kitchen to comply.

“She’s in high school, Jim,” says her mother. Her father stops dead, a robot with a command glitch.

“We drank like fish in high school,” Jim says, wiping his gin-blossomed nose.

“We don’t know what effects alcohol has on special people like our Carrie,” says Aunt Susie. She’s Carrie’s favorite. Brian’s, too. She has the two best qualities you could ask for in an aunt: a tendency to give cash rather than gifts and a willingness to have them stay at her apartment in Chicago a couple of weekends a year when they were kids. She took them