My Eyes Are Up Here Read online

  “Um, I thought so?”

  “Tyler, this is a nut cup. A plastic shield that slips into a pair of compression shorts to protect a player’s testicles.”

  He looks up, finally, and crinkles his nose. “Oh yeah. I guess.”

  “And you still think it’s mine? Seeing how I don’t wear a cup because I don’t have testicles that need protecting? And seeing how even if I did, I don’t play any sports anyway? And seeing how I’m not a vile slob who would leave a sweaty plastic thing that’s been inside my underwear on the table where people eat?”

  My voice gets higher and sharper, and both Tyler and I can hear how much I sound like Mom.

  “Or maybe you think I should wear a nut cup when I’m doing homework in case my calc book drops into my lap and crushes my imaginary nads. It’s a very heavy book. I’m sure it could do some damage. Are you offering this thing to me? Because that’s very sweet of you, Tyler.”

  And then Jackson Oates is standing in the archway to the dining room, waving awkwardly, greeting me with two syllables, “Hey-ay,” to acknowledge that this is a weird, weird conversation to be walking in on. Great. He’s going to think Ty and I hang out comparing our testicles all day. That’s just the impression I want to give.

  “Oh! Hi! My mom said your mom was stopping by—I didn’t know you’d be with her.”

  “We’re picking up my dad at the airport. Sorry to barge in.” Jackson pushes both hands deep into his pockets in a way that makes his shoulders spread out a little wider, and I wonder if he might be a swimmer or a baseball player or something.

  “It’s okay. Tyler and I were just deciding where to keep his cup: the middle of the dining room table or right in the refrigerator?”

  Tyler bumps me with his elbow. He is not embarrassed to leave his personal penis protector out in the middle of the room, but he does not want me making fun of him in front of other kids. At least he has some sense of decency.

  “Maybe you could find a crystal vase?” Jackson pronounces it vahz, with a flourish.

  “How would that even work?” asks Tyler. He’s so literal.

  “Jackson, this is my brother, Tyler. Ty, this is Jackson Oates.” I hope when I say Jackson Oates it isn’t obvious that I’ve been repeating the phrase Jackson Oates a hundred times a day since I met him.

  “You play lacrosse?” Jackson asks, nodding to a neon-pink ball. Jeez, Tyler, it’s not even the right season to leave a lacrosse ball on the table.

  Sulky Tyler brightens up under the attention. “Yeah—do you?”

  Jackson shakes his head. “When we lived in Virginia, I wanted to but we moved before the season started. I’ve played a lot of other things, baseball, soccer, swim team once, but the last couple of years I’ve mostly played tennis. Kind of depends on where we live. How ’bout you, Greer? What do you play?”

  I brighten up under the attention, too. “Oh. I don’t play anything.”

  I don’t explain that sports, unlike academics, require that your body cooperate with you, instead of bulging and jiggling and getting in the way. Just last night, Tyler stole my phone and I had to run after him with no bra on under my pajamas, and Mavis bounced up and almost gave me a black eye.

  “How’d the first couple of days go?” I’d spotted him a few times, first being led around by one of the deans, then by a couple of well-meaning student council members. By lunch today he was in the middle of a pack of guys who walk down to the taco trucks every day. I’m not surprised he found friends so quickly, but I’m a little disappointed he isn’t going to need me to shepherd him through our adolescence.

  “Pretty good. I haven’t gotten lost. I haven’t been beaten up. Nobody stole my lunch money.”

  “Good thing. The taco trucks don’t take the student meal cards.” He cocks his head and I blush. I don’t want him to know I’ve been tracking him. “I saw you leaving with Max and those guys. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t stuck at the wistful poetry counter.”

  “You should have come with us. The barbacoa was awesome.”

  I try to picture the tear in the universe that would happen if I invited myself to the taco trucks with Maggie’s brother and the other upperclassmen who have adopted Jackson. “I had some poems to finish up,” I say as wistfully as I can.

  “Nah-uh. Max said you always sit with his sister.”

  Jackson talked to Max about me? Now I cock my head, but he doesn’t blush. He just smiles. I mean, it was probably “I hope that weirdo with the giant boobs doesn’t follow me to the taco trucks, because she’s been stalking me all day,” “Don’t worry, she always sits with my sister, and they never leave school property because Maggie is too lazy to walk anywhere,” but at least he was thinking about me.

  “Well, if Max or anybody else tries to steal your lunch money, you know where to find me. First period, room one-thirteen,” I manage.

  There’s a sick thump as a blond elf whacks Jackson in the back. He reaches around and grabs her arm before she does it again.

  “OWWW!” she growls.

  “Knock it off, Q.”

  “I. Didn’t. Do. Anything.” My mom told me she was in third grade, but she’s tall for her age and wire thin. She could almost pass for a middle schooler if it weren’t for her outfit: pink Uggs—in Kathryn Walsh’s house! on Kathryn Walsh’s carpet!—and too-short leggings with a T-shirt that says YOU DON’T LIKE MY ATTITUDE? I DON’T LIKE YOUR FACE! in sparkly balloon letters. She jerks her arm out of Jackson’s grasp and glares at him.

  Jackson doesn’t bother to introduce us to Quinlan. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Being boring.”

  “We’re being boring, too. Go find Mom.”

  Tyler and I don’t like each other; he’s disgusting and I’m not. But it’s not like we hate each other. Not usually, anyway. I get mad when he leaves things that have touched his nads on the table, and he thinks I shouldn’t mention the constipation medicine he sometimes takes in front of his friends, but we can usually tolerate each other.

  The tension between Jackson and Quinlan is different. Jackson’s usually kind of loose and lanky, like if you happened to bump into him, he’d sway a tiny bit one way then another, then wrap those long arms around you to make sure you didn’t fall. Once Quinlan showed up and belted him, it was like he turned to an iron beam. Braced. Tense.

  “Did everybody meet everybody?” asks Mom, floating into the room. What she means is, “Greer Eleanor Walsh, I raised you to be a good hostess, even to violent elf girls, and I expect that you will have offered refreshments to the Oates children.” Her eyes glide to the contraband on the dining table and she flinches.

  “You’ll have to excuse the mess.” She sighs to Mrs. Oates. “Boys!”

  Mrs. Oates, tall and fair like Quinlan but perfectly tailored and comfortable like Jackson, smiles sympathetically, though I bet Jackson files his old homework assignments in folders like I do and puts his sports gear in labeled cubbies as soon as he’s done with it.

  “Does anybody want something to drink? We have homemade sodas—raspberry or blueberry vanilla, I think,” I offer, too late.

  “We’re out of blueberry,” says Tyler, and burps. Ever since we got the SodaStream, he is full of carbon dioxide bubbles all the time. Mom gives him an I-could-kill-you-with-my-bare-hands look, which is how we all feel about Ty much of the time.

  “We have to get going,” Mrs. Oates says. “We’re picking up Ben. He’s been in Dubai for two weeks.”

  “We’re not actually picking him up in Dubai,” says Jackson, but I am too distracted to be amused. Quinlan is standing in front of a bookcase with her back to us. She’s doing something on the shelf, but I can’t see what.

  “I hope not!” roars Mom, as though it’s the funniest idea ever, rather than just a throwaway line. She glances over at me, presumably to see if I’ve noticed that Jackson is charming.

 
; The Oateses leave, Mom starts in on Tyler about cleaning up his stuff (sounding an awful lot like me), and I head straight for the bookcase.

  In front of the books, there sits a row of little glass Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs figurines, Mom’s from when she was a girl. They are handblown and very fragile. She gave them to me when I was seven or eight, but I could only play with them at the table, with a flour-sack towel spread underneath, not mixed in with any other toys or Legos, and none of the pieces were allowed to touch each other. So not really play with them so much as move them from the shelf to the table and look at them. Preferably without breathing.

  I loved them. I still do. I love that they are tiny and predictable and perfect. This one is always falling asleep. That one is too shy to speak. The fellow on the end is pissed at everything all the time. Life would be less complicated if everything about you could be summed up so easily. If all you ever had to be was Sleepy or Grumpy or Happy. But even Tyler’s not Dopey all the time. Sometimes he’s Stinky.

  My stomach turns. There is Snow White, two bunnies, a nest of tiny bluebirds, and six dwarfs.

  Grumpy is gone.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Uh, hi, Jackson. It was really great to see you and meet your wonderful sister. By the way, I’m pretty sure the darling cherub stole a tiny glass Disney dwarf that is important to me for very mature and rational reasons and I was wondering if I could get him back? Siblings, am I right?”

  Yeah. That’ll totally work. He’ll probably say, “I was wondering where this little guy came from!” and pull out a box with Grumpy safely swaddled in dodo down. “I went ahead and polished up his hat and fixed the chip at the tip of his pickaxe, too. I hope that’s all right.” And then he’ll tell me that he’s always wanted to go out with someone who wears bigger T-shirts than he does.

  “You didn’t tell me you know the new kid.” I jump as Maggie bangs her lunch tray on the table.

  “You mean Jackson?” I say it like there are tons of new kids she might be referring to, not like I’ve just been watching him across the cafeteria, making his way out with Max Cleave and another senior.

  “He told my brother you were the first person he met here. He said you were really helpful.”

  “Helpful? I’m not sure I was helpful. My mom made me come with her to meet them. You know how she does that. It’s so annoying.” False. Meeting Jackson was the least annoying thing she has ever asked me to do. “Why’s Max hanging out with a sophomore?”

  “Max wants him to play baseball next spring. They need a new second-base inner-fielder or whatever because what’s-his-butt graduated and Max doesn’t think the kid with the furry beard is any good.”

  “I think he mostly plays tennis.”

  Maggie shrugs. All sports are the same to her. Once I said I was going to Tyler’s hockey game and she said, “In the winter?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Jackson?”

  “No. Max,” she says sarcastically.

  “Oh, right. He’s nice.”

  Maggie frowns at me. “‘Nice’?”

  “I mean he’s friendly. And funny.” She keeps looking at me. “I don’t know. Obviously better at making friends than I am?” She is still looking at me. “I can introduce you to him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you met him?”

  “I thought I mentioned it to you.”

  She looks skeptical but lets it go. “Maybe you did and I forgot.”

  I breathe a sigh of successful avoidance.

  Then she adds, “Don’t you think he’s kind of cute? The new kid?”

  “Oh. I never really thought about it,” I say. Now she sighs, because she thinks I never think about it.

  It’s not that I don’t think about it. It’s that I think about it and then I think of all the reasons not to think about it.

  CHAPTER 8

  When we were in middle school, Maggie and I kept toothbrushes at each other’s houses. It was the only thing we couldn’t share if we decided at the last minute to sleep over. Maggie would have gone without brushing or just finger brushed, but the routine was too firmly etched in me to skip it, even for a day. Mine at her house said “GEW” in permanent marker. Hers at my house had a yellow mini hair band wrapped around the handle to identify it, in case the bite marks on the end weren’t enough.

  Everything else, though, we could share: pajamas, pillows, face soap, phone chargers, stuffed creatures, plantar wart treatments, hairbrushes, and clothes. Now the idea of trading tops or bottoms with Maggie is ridiculous. Besides the monumental size difference of our upper bodies, I am three and a half inches taller than Mags, and three and a quarter of that is just legs. It doesn’t seem like that big a difference because I am always slouching and she is always standing up tall like she’s trying to see over someone’s head at a gun control rally.

  The last time I wore anything of Maggie’s besides a headband was the first weekend after school started in ninth grade. Maude and Mavis had moved in but hadn’t become the hoarding slobs they are now. I went to Maggie’s after school on Friday, which rolled into Saturday which rolled into Sunday. It seemed too much to wear my Friday clothes all the way into Sunday brunch, so I borrowed a tank and a jean jacket when her mom sent us out for bagels. I was still wearing one of the bras I’d gotten when Mom took me shopping that summer (the last time we ever shopped lingerie together), a pale blue eyelet balconette, cute, not sexy, which in retrospect should have already been dumped in the giveaway pile. I was either too naïve to realize that the thing didn’t fit anymore, or too embarrassed to admit it, or both.

  Maggie was already off gluten, so I was in charge of choosing a bagel assortment for the Cleave family while she went to the coffee shop next door for drinks, and Max waited with the car running. It would be a lot of pressure even if her family didn’t have strong opinions about everything.

  “You look like a woman in need of a bagel.” The guy behind the counter was probably a year or two older than us, with a mass of thick curls held back by his bagel-shop visor. If this bagel-shop thing didn’t work out, he could probably be an Abercrombie model. He gave me a hungry-looking half smile.

  “I am in need of a bagel. I need a dozen bagels, actually.” I returned his half smile with a whole one.

  “A dozen comes with thirteen. Most people think it’s gonna be twelve, but here it’s thirteen. You get a bonus bagel.”

  Now I would probably say, “It’s called a ‘baker’s dozen’ and it’s not that special. Everybody does it. Fourteen bagels would be a bonus.” But his cheekbones were so chiselly and his arms looked like they’d been kneading a lot of heavy bagel dough, and I was still hopeful about boys and breasts and bagels. “I love bonus bagels!” I chirped.

  I asked for two each of the classics: plain, poppy, egg, sesame, everything. But for the others, would Maggie’s mom like flax and apple? Pepper parmesan? Was her brother a cinnamon raisin guy?

  “Do you have someone to share all these bagels with?” He puppy-dogged his eyes at me. I ate it up.

  I leaned over the counter guessing what kind of bagel eaters the Cleaves were, and liking that this guy was flirting with me, even if his lines were terrible. Pepper parm, cinnamon raisin, this jacket must look good on me. Another sesame, can’t go wrong with plain, my hair really does look better when I haven’t washed it. Whole wheat’s boring, try something new, I wonder where he goes to school. I couldn’t decide, except to decide to keep not deciding.

  Parents and teachers always loved me. I got along with most girls, unless they hated Maggie enough to be mad at me, too. But boys, especially older ones, had never noticed me. Or at least they never seemed to notice I was a girl. But maybe that was changing. Or maybe it was just this kid in the bagel shop who liked how I was independently deciding the breakfast fates of up to thirteen people. Bialy, honey oat, salt, maybe he’s here every Sunday.

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nbsp; At some point, I noticed that while I was peering over the counter at the wire bins of bagels, the hot guy with the plastic serving gloves was staring straight down my shirt, still wearing that same half smile. I followed his look down to my chest to see that not only were the tops of my breasts popping over the tank like a couple of freshly baked bagels, they were spilling out of the bra enough that there was a slice of deep pink areola visible on each side. I wasn’t charming and adorable. I was nip-slipping the bagelmeister.

  “The rest plain,” I said, pulling the jean jacket closed. That’s when I discovered that it didn’t really close all the way, something Bagel Boy probably realized before I did.

  “You sure? Those honey-oat ones are—”

  “Yeah. Just plain. And a tub of cream cheese.”

  “Okeeee,” he said. And packed up everything with no more flirty smiles.

  I put my own dirty Friday shirt on as soon as we got back to Maggie’s.

  This doesn’t happen anymore because I don’t let it happen anymore. I shut down the flirting before it starts, with a big gray sweatshirt and no tolerance for overly friendly conversation. I shut it down before it peers down at Maude and Mavis and either gets stupidly excited or morbidly curious. Before I have to wonder whether it’s me or them.

  Or I did, anyway, until Jackson showed up in the re-lo binder’s number one Starbucks and I let myself wonder.

  CHAPTER 9

  We are doing a unit on volleyball in gym.

  Volleyball includes a lot of jumping.

  I avoid unnecessary jumping.

  Most girls do a quick change in the locker room—pulling off sweaters, pulling on T-shirts right over their usual bras. It’s just gym. I, on the other hand, head to a bathroom stall, take my last deep breath for the hour, and wrestle a black overhead sports bra, at least a size too small, directly over my regular bra. I need all the support I can get. The sports bra squeezes and compresses everything into a single mound—kind of a unibreast. Or a superboob. I pull on my dad’s old 2008 Run for the Zoo 5K shirt. He has a good collection of race-day shirts going back years. When I was smaller I used them as sleep shirts because they were worn in and soft and made from that breathable athletic fabric, but this is the only one that fits now. That year when Dad checked in late, there were only XXLs left. Now I wear it pretty much every time I know the Illinois Department of Education’s obsession with daily phys ed is going to make me sweat.