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So here she was, facing reality, and right now reality was the tall, hawk-faced Christian dude talking about his CD collection. His glasses hung unevenly on his face, one side lower than the other. She’d pointed this fact out to him once, and he’d told her that one of his ears was higher than the other. “There’s a real disparity in terms of how many recorded minutes there are on different kinds of albums,” he told the group. “There are twenty-two minutes on average for secular sound tracks and only fifteen for Christian music.” He made this statement in the same flat voice he made every statement.

The rest of the guys in the group—there were six of them—didn’t really listen to one another, but waited for a pause in the speeches to give their own. They were supposed to be learning conversational skills, but what they were doing wasn’t having conversations. They were taking turns holding forth.

The man with the beard complained that Christian bookstores didn’t carry any Christian computer games.

Then the group leader, the Teva sandals guy with the kooky name—Sumpter—started in about how Northern milk is better than Southern milk because Northern cows have different digestive systems.

What Ava wanted, more than anything, was to find true love.

So far she hadn’t had any luck on this front. Sometimes she went out on a date or two or even three with some “typical” guy, and she’d get all panicked and excited and ask her mother, and even Suzi, for advice about what to wear. But after a few dates the boy would start backing away, and her mother told her that it was probably because of her Asperger’s. According to her mother, who grilled her after every date, Ava did everything wrong. She smiled too much. Either stared too intensely or wouldn’t make eye contact. Began pacing and twiddling her fingers. Stiffened up when she should’ve been cuddly or made awkward, sloppy physical overtures out of nowhere. Talked about mundane, unrelated subjects in an overpersistent way—the albums of Elvis Presley or the health benefits of eating walnuts, for example—and failed to ask questions of her dates or interrupted them when they were talking.

Her mother had it all figured out; and she always emphasized that it wasn’t Ava’s fault. The typical young men just didn’t understand, her mother explained to her, that Ava didn’t have the inner resources to think much about other people when she was nervous, not because she didn’t care, but because she was focusing very hard about how she was supposed to behave, which caused her to come across as either strange and wooden or as strange and random. Like her mother’s explanation would make her feel better. Her mother always seemed relieved that things hadn’t gone well. She didn’t really want a boy to fall in love with Ava. Ava’s mother had married young, when she and Ava’s father were still in college, but she didn’t want that for Ava. She wanted Ava to live at home for the rest of her life.

It looked like her mother might get her wish, because any normal boy who showed interest in Ava would soon drift away, never giving her any satisfactory explanation as to why, but leaving her feeling that she’d failed yet again, that she would always fail because she was defective. Even though she was pretty! Everyone said so.

“I’m going to be on America’s Next Top Model,” Ava announced, interrupting the guy who was mumbling about movie popcorn and how bad it was for you. There was silence. The coffeepot in the corner hissed and sputtered and stank. All the men, with their hairy nostrils and asymmetrical eyes, were looking at her, not into her eyes but at parts of her—her breasts, her bare toes, her hair—and not saying anything. The new guy, Travis, the tall guy with fat cheeks, was staring at her mostly bare legs. Probably none of them cared about what she was saying, but they were making a space for her, which, for them, was something.

“I made a new friend,” she explained. She didn’t need to tell them that her new friend was seventy-seven. “She’s going