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

"That's nice, honey," Mom says. "But maybe it's not necessary to lay your clothes out since you wear the same thing every day." Mom is always trying to convince Erin to do things differently. There is always a better way than Erin's way.

"But it will add a cumulative one to two minutes to take each item out of its drawer."

Erin's wardrobe consists of three checkered flannels, four plain white T-shirts, two gray T-shirts, three pairs of baggy jeans, two pairs of baggy cords, one pair of black Converse All Stars, and one pair of blue Converse All Stars, everything with the tags cut off.

"Why don't you wear those new shirts I got you?" Mom says.

"They're too scratchy."

"I'll wash them a few more times. They'll soften up."

"I like my old shirts."

"Your old shirts have holes in them. They're stained."

"So?"

"You may not care about things like that, but other people notice," Mom says. "People will make judgments about you."

"That's their problem."

Erin knows that Mom thinks she's helping, that Mom thinks this is the key to happiness—belonging, finding a way to fit in. But Erin already tried that. She spent her whole childhood studying people, trying to figure out how to be a "normal girl." She became a mimic, an actor playing multiple parts—she had long hair, she wore clothes her mom said were cute, she even wore makeup for a short period in eighth grade. She sat on her hands to keep herself from rubbing them together when she got nervous. She bit her cheek until it bled to keep herself from rocking in public. Erin was a chameleon, changing herself to fit whatever group she happened to find herself in, constantly racing through the database in her head for appropriate things to wear, to not wear; to say, to not say; to feel, to not feel. But no matter how hard she tried, Erin was never quite appropriate. Her words were always either a little too early or a little too late, her voice always a little too loud or a little too quiet. The harder she tried to fit in, the worse she felt.

People know what boys with Asperger's look like, or at least they think they do. Boys rage and thrash and scream. They fight and throw themselves around. They punish the world for making them hurt.

But girl Aspies are different. Invisible. Undiagnosed. Because unlike boys, girls turn inward. They hide. They adapt, even if it hurts. Because they are not screaming, people assume they do not suffer. The girl who cries herself to sleep every night doesn't cause trouble.

Until she speaks. Until her pain gets so big it boils over. Until she has no choice but to emerge from her almost two weeks of silence to tell the truth about what she did with the boy named Casper Pennington—her final and most drastic attempt to do what she thought the other girls were doing. The event that led them here.

Erin shaved her head soon after. She vowed to never again care what anyone thought of her. She vowed to stop caring, period.

Mom sighs. "I just want to help make life easier for you."

"My old shirts make life easier for me," Erin says flatly. If she didn't wear the same thing every day, she'd have to decide what to wear every single morning. How do people do that? How do they even leave the house?

"Fine," Mom says. "You win." As if it's a war. As if it's Erin against Mom and the Normal Police.

Mom serves Erin a lunch of avocado-and-grapefruit salad with a side of raw almond butter and celery. It looks more like art than food—weird vegan chipmunk art. She put Erin on a raw food diet last year because she read somewhere it's supposed to help with mood stabilization and digestion issues for people on the spectrum. As much as Erin hates to admit it, it does actually seem to be working. But now, no matter how much she eats, she's almost always hungry again in an hour.

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.