My Eyes Are Up Here Page 2

  Mom starts to rattle off my number, and I wonder if Jackson is only pretending to type.

  But before she finishes, he stops and hands me his phone. “Do you mind doing it?” and there I am, already added as a new contact: Greer Walsh. He spelled Greer right. No one has ever spelled Grier Garear Gruyere right the first time in my life.

  I retype the number twice to make sure it’s right, even though I figure a butt dial is the only way he’s ever going to use it. I hand it back, he taps a couple of keys, and there is the sweetest little ping! in my bag. “Now you’ve got mine, too.” He smiles, and I blush hard in every part of my body. I’m glad he can only see my cheeks turn pink.

  On the way out, Mom says, “You should have brought along your daughter, too!”

  The whole mood changes. Jackson and his mother look at each other like Mom has just said there would be anchovy and liver subs in the welcome basket.

  “We did,” starts Mrs. Oates. “She, ah, decided she’d rather stay in the car with the iPad.” She looks embarrassed, and Mom cringes in sympathy. “She gets a little nervous around new people.”

  It’s hard, even for my mom, to know what to say to that, knowing that they keep moving the kid around anyway. I don’t remember anybody being particularly compassionate as a third grader, so good luck at school on Monday, Oates Girl.

  “Actually, it works out perfectly,” Jackson finally says. “We like to save Quinlan for after people have already decided to like us. I mean, if they decide to like us.” He gives me a shrug and a goofy look.

  “Of course we like you,” says Mom through a little waterfall of a laugh, her eyes on me the whole time.

  And we do. We really, really do.

  CHAPTER 2

  Before the garage door closes on Mom’s Land Rover, I’m on my way to my room to do what I always do when I get home: lock my door, take off my shirt and bra, and lie flat on my back on my bed. I’ve got this old blanket, the kind with satiny trim that’s always slippery and cool even when the rest of the blanket is warm. I position myself so that the trim goes just along the indent where the back of my bra was and roll back and forth against it a few times. It’s like putting a cold cloth on a hot forehead. I spread out and feel everything I’ve held tight let go, my spine unfurling into the shape it’s supposed to be. Five or six minutes, that’s all. Five or six minutes to give my shoulders a break, to give my neck a break, to give myself a break. To breathe.

  Usually, I can almost turn off the outside. I don’t hear my dad streaming Wilco in the kitchen or my mom asking him for the thousandth time if that’s who they saw at Grant Park that time. I don’t think about what’s due in AP History, or if Tyler is the reason my toothbrush was already wet this morning, or about Maggie calling the vegan club hypocrites because their cats kill birds. I try to not think about anything at all, but just feel like this.

  But today, lying here half naked feels different. Because I’m still thinking about Jackson. I feel . . . open. Exposed. Poised. Not like I’ve unwound; like I’m even more wound up. In a good way. Like maybe I’d rather be in my body than out of it for once.

  My breasts slide out to each side, and I can see between them down to my belly button and to the top of my jeans, and all the way down to my feet. There is a whole body here that is not boobs. I forget that sometimes. I arch my back. I lift my legs and flop them down over the edges of my bed. I run a hand over my belly and it’s smooth and soft and cool. And then I imagine it’s someone else’s hand touching that same skin.

  And I stop.

  This is stupid. It’s stupid because I don’t even know him. And he doesn’t know me. He is nice because he’s new and if you are new and not nice, you’re going to have a very rough year. And even if he turned out to have some weird quirk or disease that means he likes awkward girls who don’t know how to dress, it’s stupid because you can only touch someone’s stomach for so long before you move your hand up and eureka! you’ve discovered the mountains. And not the lovely ski peaks they have in the Rockies. You’re lost in the Himalayas, which are inhospitable to life and give you altitude sickness. Which are lumpy and painful and sweaty. Okay, that’s not the Himalayas, that part is just me. But still, no one vacations at Everest. They scale it, snap a photo, and try to get the hell out alive with a good story to post.

  I roll off the bed and dig my clean bra out of the drawer. The other one’s too sweaty. I pull on a supersize tee and the rest of me disappears under it, too.

  You know who gets to touch my stomach all they want? My breasts. They can hardly help themselves.

  CHAPTER 3

  Maggie is outraged. As usual.

  We were supposed to turn in one page on a poem about dying and not wanting to. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s basically summed up in the famous lines about raging against the dying of the light.

  Maggie turned in five pages about how terminally ill people should have the right to doctor-assisted suicide.

  “Maggie, this is AP Lit. The assignment was to analyze the poem, not argue with it.”

  “How am I supposed to analyze it when I disagree with it?”

  “How do you disagree with a poem?!”

  The rest of the class has already left, so it’s just Maggie, Ms. Mulder, and me. I spend half of my time with Maggie listening to her argue with a teacher. Or a student. Or a parent. Or an eight-year-old trick-or-treater who says Hermione isn’t as cool as Harry and Ron because she doesn’t play Quidditch.

  This is why I didn’t tell her about meeting Jackson this weekend, even though now he’s here somewhere in the building—because she is too busy arguing with people. Or maybe it’s because she will want me to ask him out, and I will say, “No, I prefer to bury my feelings deep inside this giant sweatshirt so I won’t be embarrassed when he rejects me for a regular-shaped girl,” and then it will be me that Maggie is arguing with. As a general rule, I avoid arguing with Maggie.

  “So if you assigned a poem promoting torture, I should just dissect the rhyme scheme and talk about the descriptive language? You’re saying I should not stand up against torture?”

  “I didn’t assign a poem about torture. I assigned a classic Dylan Thomas poem about a universal human experience.”

  Maggie is looking at Ms. Mulder like she’s asked us to dig a mass grave and fill it with teacup puppies. Ms. Mulder is looking at an insulated lunch bag on her desk. She’s never going to get to that sandwich if she doesn’t give up.

  “All right. You didn’t do all the analyses I asked for, but your writing was quite good, and clearly you thought a lot about the poem. I’ll give you a B plus, but the next one had better be perfect. Ask Greer if you need help.”

  This is why I don’t want to talk to Maggie. Maggie makes people do what they don’t want to do. Like change a C minus to a B plus or admit they have a huge crush on their mom’s client’s son.

  “That seems like a good compromise,” I say before Maggie can say anything else. I slip my finger through one of the loose loops in her scarf and tug. I can’t argue with her, but I can unravel her knitting if she doesn’t get moving. “See you tomorrow,” I say to Ms. Mulder as I lead us out.

  “Do not go gentle to fourth period!” Maggie says, once we are in the hallway. “Rage, rage against—”

  “Everything?”

  “At least something, Greer. You’ve got to rage against something.”

  CHAPTER 4

  What would I rage against if I was a raging sort of person? Maude and Mavis.

  And who are Maude and Mavis? They are my breasts.

  My boobs.

  Jugs.

  Knockers.

  Mammos.

  Hooters.

  Melons.

  Rack.

  Simon & Garfunkel.

  Lovely lady lumps.

  Ta-tas.

  Remember what I said about me an
d math? If breasts were math, I wouldn’t just be ahead of all the kids in my grade, I’d be one of those freakishly gifted kids who had to bring her breasts to college because they were too big for high school. They’d give me a year’s worth of AP credits just for putting on a tank top.

  They are not going to set any world records, but to put it in simple math terms, they are significantly larger than the mean, the median, and the mode.

  Not everybody realizes this immediately, because I’ve been wearing size XXL shirts since ninth grade. Men’s XXL shirts. Even XXL ladies aren’t supposed to have honkers like these.

  If I tried to put on the kind of shirt my friends wear, the fabric would burst Hulk-style.

  My mom thinks that wearing baggy clothes makes me look fat. Not fat. “Heavy.” That’s Mom’s word for fat. (She would never say “fat,” though I’m sure she has an idea of what the optimal ratio of pounds to inches should be.)

  She has average-size breasts. C cups, probably. I must have inherited these things from some chesty old lady on my dad’s side.

  Here’s what my friends say about them:

  That’s right. Nothing. We don’t talk about them. Not my mom. Not even Maggie. Maggie knows I’m not thrilled, but if I told her how I really felt, she’d be disappointed in me. She’d either try to get me to show up to first period in a bustier to deliver a lecture to certain individuals about harassment or decide there’s no time like age almost-sixteen for permanent body-altering reduction surgery and start interviewing plastic surgeons about how much breast tissue to chop off. I’m not ready to do either of those things right now. I would just like to finish high school.

  I’m not the only person who doesn’t want to talk about their body. I mean, little things, sure. Someone tall might say, “I can’t find any pants long enough,” or each of us might point out our own zit. But when something gets worse or weird or whatever, we don’t talk about it anymore.

  An example. During Eating Disorders Awareness Week every February, a nurse from the district comes to an assembly to tell us to be on alert for eating disorders. She makes it sound like it will be easy to spot them. Like kids are standing in the lunchroom saying, “I am only going to eat eraser dust from now on. And if that becomes too much temptation, I will start using those stubby pencils from Ikea that don’t have any erasers at all.” And then we will form a trust circle around her and she’ll eat a sandwich.

  But it’s not like that. Most people keep their stuff to themselves.

  We had a swimming unit in gym during the fall of freshman year. I was already feeling self-conscious about my shape, but at least they separate boys and girls for anything that involves sex education, swimsuits, or sleeping bags (like the service learning retreat at Camp Hide-Yer-Weed). They made us wear these old Kennedy team suits from 1975, because some of the girls only own triangle bikinis, which do not stay up well when you’re trying to learn the fly. The Kennedy suit is a maroon one-piecer cut so high around the neck it’s practically a turtleneck and so stretched out that the crotch hangs to your knees. I could still squeeze myself into a 36 then, as long as I didn’t try to breathe too deeply.

  We got ready, ran through the shower, and lined up against the wall freezing our butts off while Ms. Reinhold lectured us about water safety.

  I was trying not to stare at Nella Woster, but it was hard to figure out how she put on the same ugly, old suit as the rest of us and made it look like she was an extra in a rum commercial. Every curve was perfect. It must be hell to shop with her. I bet she has a hard time ruling anything out because it all looks good. “I guess I’ll have to take everything.” “You can have it all for free if you’ll just Instagram yourself in our brand.”

  It was about at this point that Jessa Timms, super jock and possible bodybuilder, started to walk past me, stopped, looked at my chest, and said, “Whoa, Greer! You’re built, girl! I thought you were just a little big.”

  My face turned the same color as the swimsuit. I was slouching so much I was practically bent in two. No one laughed, just kind of gasped, like they couldn’t believe Jessa would say that. We have rules, Jessa! We don’t say things about people’s bodies in front of them. But for the rest of the hour, I noticed girls checking me out, confirming. Yeah, she’s right. Greer Walsh is stacked. Even though honestly, I was nowhere near the size I am now.

  That one day on the pool deck freshman year is as much of a discussion as I’ve ever had about them. But I bet other people talk about them a lot.

  CHAPTER 5

  There’s this questionnaire online called “Is breast reduction surgery right for your teen?” Half the questions are about “your teen’s” pain, growth, genetics, scarring, “onset of menarche and regularity of menstruation,” “motivation and psychological readiness,” “emotional maturity,” and a bunch of other stuff that’s none of anybody’s business. There’s a list of things you’re supposed to ask your doctor, too, and even though I’d rather not ask her any of them, I know I have to get over it if I want to know more about the surgery. So when we went for physicals just before school started, I decided that when she said, “Greer, would you like your mother to step out of the room while we do the exam?” I was going to say yes.

  I hadn’t talked to anybody about my breasts or how I felt about them, and it wasn’t like Dr. Garcia would be easy to talk to, but at least I knew she’d have to keep our conversation secret. She’d probably had patients say a lot weirder things to her. I planned to be super professional about it, so she’d know I had the “emotional maturity” you were supposed to have if you were fifteen and walking around with boobs the size of baby manatees. (Apparently if you want any kind of plastic surgery after you are an adult, you don’t have to be “emotionally mature” at all. You just have to pay for it.) As soon as my mother left, I was going to say, “I was doing some research about surgical options for breast reduction and I am interested in exploring this for myself.” She was going to pull up a chair, answer my questions, and neither of us was going to blush or stutter at all. Maybe she’d even give me a pamphlet titled Secret, Free, One-Hour Breast Surgeries You Can Have Done During Your Study Period.

  I was sitting there, trying to get that paper they cover the table with to absorb some of the sweat from my palms, when Dr. Garcia pulled out her stethoscope. I almost thought she was going to forget to ask, and then I’d have to ask Mom to leave. But then at the last minute she said, “Greer, would you like your mother to step out of the room while we do the exam?” My heart raced. I was going to have this conversation with a real person, instead of just reading WebMD and watching a couple of YouBoobers describe their experiences. I was half dying to and half dying not to.

  Only I must have forgotten who my mother was, because before I answered, she said, “Oh, that’s right! I forgot you ask that. Greer, do you have anything private you want to talk to the doctor about this time?” She looked up at me like she was modern and supportive and respected my privacy, but didn’t move to put her phone back in her purse or grab her jacket. She said it like she already knew the answer, and the answer was, of course, “Of course not.” Dr. Garcia kept looking at me, though, and all that went through my head was that this was why people who are supposed to be on birth control don’t end up on birth control: because you’d basically have to say it in front of your mother to get your mother to leave anyway. I shook my head. And really, once you think about it, if I’m too self-conscious to tell my mother to get the hell out so I can ask the doctor if I’ve stopped growing enough to have my boobs lopped off, how would I get through the next sixteen rounds of questions with nurses, surgeons, insurance providers, hospital staff, my dad, and for the love of god TYLER?

  Mom stayed put. I stayed quiet. Dr. Garcia said my heart and lungs sounded healthy, I should remember sunscreen, and I had gained four pounds in the last year. (At least three of them were probably breast tissue.) And then she printed out a copy of the form you need fr
om the clinic if you’re going to play a sport. Yeah, right.

  CHAPTER 6

  “My client is stopping over here. Get your stuff off the table.”

  Tyler scans the dining room table, which is holding one Scandinavian wood platter, and approximately 450 cubic feet of Tyler’s electronics, homework, books, paper footballs, wrappers, socks, and half-empty water bottles. He moves on to the kitchen.

  He opens the fridge and pulls out another water bottle, then stands looking inside like he’s waiting for a package to appear in the crisper drawer. I’m sitting at the kitchen island watching this whole scene, reminding myself that this is not my responsibility. Tyler being an idiot is Mom’s problem, not mine. I tried to tell her that when they brought him home from the hospital thirteen years ago. But I can’t stand it.

  “Mom said to pick up your stuff.”

  Tyler glances back over his shoulder at the table.

  “It’s not all mine.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  I push back my stool and walk to the table. Tyler wanders over to stand next to me.

  “What part’s not yours?”

  He eyes the spread critically. “Well, that’s not mine.”

  Yes. Agreed. The Kjerstønagsrud turned wood platter that Mom bought for 175 dollars at a museum gift shop is not Tyler’s.

  “I think that’s yours,” he tries, waving toward the table with one hand while scrolling through his friends’ stories with the other.

  “This is mine?” I can’t even stand the thought of touching it. I just let my finger hover an inch above it.

  “Isn’t it?” He’s still looking at his phone.

  “You honestly think this is mine?”