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

to museums and Indian restaurants and Cubs’ games. Things Deerfield couldn’t offer.

“I saw a special on NightTalk the other day,” she continues. “They were talking to that man from your school, Carrie.”

“Headmaster Bishop,” Carrie says.

“It’s not fucking Hogwarts,” Brian mutters quietly enough only Carrie hears.

“They were saying how they don’t know what the differences are in physiology between people like Carrie and people like us,” says Susie.

“I can drink beer,” Carrie says. “I won’t explode or anything.”

“See that, Suze?” Jim says, poking his baby sister in the ribs. “They’re not any different from normal people. Matt, where you at with that beer?” Carrie’s father vanishes into the kitchen. “Kids,” Jim bellows. “Come see your cousin before she disappears.”

—

During pie, a discussion about crime rates in Chicago boils over into something ugly, one of those arguments that aren’t about what they’re about. Carrie’s discovering she has a secondary ability to become subtext. Every racial dog whistle Uncle Jim throws at Aunt Susie points at the new other he’s been forced to accept, one more foreign or threatening than the black kids he’s okay railing about as long as he calls them “urban youth.” He mentions something he heard on the radio, and Carrie knows what radio show he’s talking about. She’s been listening to Jefferson Hargrave’s Monster Report since Public Day. They found dozens of episodes archived on the shooter’s laptop. She wants to know where their hatred comes from, but as she listens to her uncle, she understands the disconnect. He can hate what she is while loving who she is. The issue is impersonal for him in a way it can never be for her.

Carrie’s mother is a guitar string tuned taut. She takes her wine in massive gulps. Carrie’s father hasn’t spoken to Carrie since she arrived. As Uncle Jim gets ruddy-faced, edging closer to saying what he really thinks, her father leans over to Brian.

“You and your sister go play with your cousins in the other room,” he says. He doesn’t look at Carrie, but she’s grateful for his intervention. With a sigh of teenage inconvenience, Brian leads the three small kids out of the dining room. Carrie tags behind. In the living room, Brian clicks on the television.

“You guys like video games?”

The kids erupt in a clamor of yeses.

Brian turns on his Xbox. The sharp white letters of the logo burn in the black of the screen. “Keep the sound low,” he says. “If I hear you fighting, I come turn it off.” He turns to Carrie, makes an okay sign, and presses it to his pursed lips, the universal sign for do you want to smoke up? Carrie follows him upstairs to the room that used to be hers. Brian has marked his territory. High school textbooks wrapped in brown paper covers, Red Emma comics, and discarded socks litter the dark green rug Carrie picked out to make her room feel like Fangorn Forest. Her bookshelf is gone, and there’s hardly a patch of wall that isn’t covered by posters of bands Carrie can’t stand. She notes the Dark Side of the Moon poster, the same one Miquel used to have. They must issue it to boys when they buy their first dime bag.

Brian cracks the window and sits down on the floor next to it. Carrie sits across from him, cross-legged on a mound of tee shirts. The air through the window bites at her wrists. He pulls a cigar box out of a desk drawer. Inside is a Ziploc bag full of gray pot, a glassie and lighter, and the obligatory homemade blow tube: a toilet paper roll with a dryer sheet rubber-banded over one end.

“It’s ditchweed,” he says, packing the glassie. “This guy that works in the kitchen at the D grows it. He’s a shithead.” Carrie winces to hear him call Domino’s Pizza “the D,” one of those nicknames each generation of Deerfielders claims to have invented. “You must smoke better stuff in New York.” He hands her the gear first.

“I get good stuff off a friend of mine,” Carrie says.

“There’s a carb on the side,” Brian says, trying to take the pipe back to show her. She yanks it away and glares at him. She presses her thumb over the tiny hole of the carb and circles the flame around the little pile of weed. It burns too fast when she inhales, tinder dry, and she coughs like a rookie. “Here,” Brian says, handing her the blow tube and taking the pipe. Carrie blows pale smoke into the toilet paper roll and out the window, ostensibly scrubbed of its telltale smell.

“Christ,” she says. “That’s awful. Are you sure he didn’t sell you pencil shavings?”

Brian shrugs and lights the pipe. It’s the kind of shrug you see from people when you ask why they’re living in their hometown; equal parts don’t know and don’t care. If I hadn’t left, would I have noticed this passivity of his growing? she wonders. Would I have been able to stop it?

“They never talk about you,” Brian says. “Mom and Dad. I think before you called they forgot you existed.”

“I talked to them in January,” she says. “When the news came out.”

“Yeah,” says Brian. “I saw the pictures on the Internet.” His hand drifts to a pile under the desk, then pulls back. Sticking out of the stack, Carrie sees the corner of the Atlantic issue that ran the photos of the parade. The one of Nolan towering over the shooter. Carrie saw it from the same angle, crouching with Emmeline just under the photographer’s lens. Every time she sees the photo, there’s an echo of what she was feeling, terrified and protective. Like an echo, it gets weaker with each iteration. Someday she’ll be able to look at the photo without feeling anything at all.

“So are you going to show me?” he says, watching the smoke drift toward the power lines outside. “Your superpower or whatever?”

“We don’t say superpower,” Carrie explains. “We say