Excerpt from The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Data is an android who wants to be human. He is watching them from the outside. Like Data, Erin is often confounded by the behavior of humans.

But unlike Data, Erin is more than capable of feeling. She feels too much. She is a raw nerve and the world is always trying to touch her.

Mom says, "It's a beautiful day! You should be outside!" She speaks in exclamation points. But Erin's skin is almost as pale as Data's and she burns easily. She doesn't like being hot or sweaty, or any other discomfort that reminds her she lives in her imperfectly human body, which is why she takes a minimum of two baths a day (but definitely not showers—they feel too stabby on her skin). Her mother knows this about Erin, and yet she keeps saying things she thinks normal moms of normal kids are supposed to say, as if Erin is capable of being a normal kid, as if that is something she would even aspire to be. Mostly, what Erin aspires to be is more like Data.

If they lived by the ocean, Erin might not have the same reluctance to go outside. She might even be willing to subject her skin to the stickiness of sunscreen if it meant she could spend the day turning over rocks and cataloging her findings, mostly invertebrates like mollusks, cnidarians, and polychaete worms, which, in Erin's opinion, are all highly underappreciated creatures. At their old house near Alki Beach in West Seattle, she could walk out her front door and spend entire days searching for various life-forms. But that was when they still lived in Seattle, before the events that led to Erin's decision that trying to be "normal" was way more trouble than it was worth, a decision her mother still refuses to accept.

The problem with humans is they're too enamored with themselves, and with mammals in general. As if big brains and live birth are necessarily signs of superiority. As if the hairy, air-breathing world is the only one that matters. There is a whole universe underwater to be explored. There are engineers building ships that can travel miles beneath the surface. One day, Erin aims to design and drive one of those ships, armed with PhDs in both marine biology and engineering. She will find creatures that have never been found, will catalog them and give them names, will help tell the story of how each being came to be, where it fits within life's perfectly orchestrated web.

Erin is, unapologetically, a science geek. She knows this is an Asperger's stereotype, as are many other things about her— the difficulties expressing emotion, the social awkwardness, the sometimes inappropriate behavior. But what can she do? These are parts of who she is. It's everyone else who decided to make them a stereotype.

One thing Erin knows for sure is that no matter what you do, people will find a way to put you in a box. It's how we're programmed. Our default is laziness. We categorize things to make them easier to understand.

That's what makes science so satisfying. It is complicated and massive, but it is also so tidy, so organized. What Erin loves most about science is the order, the logic, the way every bit of information fits into a system, even if we can't see it yet. She has faith in that system the way some people have faith in God. Evolution and taxonomy are comforting. They are stable and right.

But there's the pesky problem of chance, which never ceases to trouble Erin, and which she has made it her life's goal to figure out. The whole reason there are humans, the whole reason there's anything more than the very first single-celled organism, is because of mutation, because of something unpredictable, surprising, and unplanned—the exact kind of thing Erin hates. It's what makes chemists and physicists and mathematicians look down on biologists as inferior scientists. Too much relies on powers outside our control, outside the laws of reason and logic and predictability. It's what makes biology a science of stories, not equations.

Excerpted from The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed. Copyright © 2017 by Amy Reed. Excerpted by permission of Simon Pulse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.