My Eyes Are Up Here Page 4

  Leaving the stall, I stand in front of the mirror. The shirt drapes over the squeezed-in superboob, my shoulders curve forward and in, and my arms cross low. I pull at the shirt, wishing it could just float out a half inch around me on all sides instead of obeying whatever laws of physics or apparel tell it to cling to me. I look like a big shapeless blob, with stick legs poking out below. I look like a giant, featherless chicken.

  Which I am, clearly.

  “Walsh! Let’s go!” says Ms. Reinhold, breezing through the locker room, not even looking at my chicken body. I slump out to the gym, hearing her rounding up stragglers behind me. “Woster, noooo. Jeggings are not gym clothes. You can wear school sweats.”

  A minute later, Nella Woster and Ms. Reinhold appear in the gym, Nella in a pair of saggy maroon sweats cinched tight around her waist. “Nice sweats, Nella!” yells Griffin Townsend. Nella sticks out her tongue at him and catwalks to the warm-up stretches.

  She’s not showing off; she can’t help having exactly the body that whoever decides what’s perfect decided is perfect. She could show up in a clown wig and look hot. I could show up in a clown wig and it still wouldn’t be the funniest-looking part of me.

  We are divided into two lines to learn the underhand serve. Except for Jessa Timms, who plays on the volleyball team, most people’s balls go wide, fall short, or fly high, coming down on the other side of the net like a gently falling leaf, which would give the other team time to sit down with a notebook, track the trajectory, discuss who was going to return it, take a bathroom break, and then smash the hell out of it.

  My serves coast just over the net, one after another. Ms. Reinhold nods her approval.

  “Let’s try some overhand.”

  Again, a handful of kids make it, most do not. After a couple of tries, I understand where the toss has to be in order to meet my hand at the right point. Most people are throwing too high or too close. Even though I haven’t played, the weight and the pressure and the curve of the ball feel right. I’m able to get most of them over the net. Jessa Timms drills every ball like a machine gun, jumping to meet the ball in the air.

  Ms. R is watching me closely, and I shift a little uncomfortably. I know she’s the volleyball coach, and I know that since the volleyball season changed to winter, not as many girls go out for it. A part of me wants to mess it up, so she stops thinking I’m good, because I don’t want to have to explain why I’m not interested in playing any sports.

  But another part of me keeps hitting them over the net, swinging my arm harder and harder, because it feels good to be good at something besides math.

  “Why don’t we try a little real-world practice, gang,” she says. She puts half the kids on one side of the net, half on the other, and shows them how to rotate players through. “Just see how long you can keep the volley going.” I line up with my class but she says, “Not you, Walsh. Timms, come over here, too.”

  She pulls us to a corner of the gym. Behind us there are slaps and cries of pain and roars of laughter as people hit the ball with no understanding of technique. Someone shouts “Fuck!” and Ms. Reinhold yells back, “You should not be passing with an open palm. And watch the effenheimers!

  “You ever play?” she asks me.

  I shake my head.

  “I want you to see where the real power in a serve comes from.” She tosses Jessa the ball and says, “Show her the run-up, but don’t actually hit it.”

  Jessa tosses the ball up and kind of launches herself at it. I cringe like she’s going to spike it down on my face, but she just catches it and grins.

  Ms. R has her show me a couple more times, then we both try it. The first time I make the leap, the unibreast heaves up and down, feeling like it’s doubling the pull of gravity. The sports bra has pulled halfway up and stopped, so there is essentially a tight horizontal band of elastic bisecting my chest in the middle. I tug it back into place and steal a look at the class, but everyone else is playing or grabbing at Nella’s sweats.

  Coach Reinhold and Jessa Timms are watching my feet, asking me to jump again and again while they correct the steps. I’m pretty sweaty, and between every jump I have to readjust my bra. There’s a pain in the sides of my breasts every time I hit the ground, and the bra is pulling on my shoulders like if you stuffed a backpack with bricks and wore it backward, but I can feel I’m getting it. They decide I’m ready to try an actual serve.

  My first try with the ball, I miss it altogether.

  The next, it jams my folded pinky and careens directly to the right.

  The third, it rockets from my hand and smacks into the ground with enough force to crater the gym floor. (Okay, no, but hard.) The only way it would have made it over a net would be if the net was a foot high and right in front of me, but the sound of that smack gives me a tingling rush anyway.

  Reinhold laughs. “Now you get it? It’s not about your arm. Power comes from your whole body.” I pull both sides of my bra back into place as Reinhold shouts to the class, “That’s it—locker rooms.” The others leave the balls rolling around the court and file down to change.

  “That was pretty cool, right?” Jessa offers me a fist bump before she heads toward the locker room.

  “Walsh,” Ms. R calls. I turn to her brightly. I assume she is going to ask me to try out for the volleyball team and for a moment I am happy. But already my neck and shoulders are starting to ache from the strain of jumping around, and then I remember what the volleyball uniform looks like.

  She doesn’t say anything about the team, though. She doesn’t even say I did a good job. She asks me for an email address. She has her phone out and says, “I’m sending you a link.” She hits a couple things with her thumb and slides it back in her pocket. “It’s not strictly school related, though, so don’t get me in trouble,” she says and winks.

  Nella is still standing under the basketball hoop with a few boys around her. Ms. R yells over, “The last one in this gym will take down the nets and put away the balls, and no, I will not write you a late pass.”

  The boys scatter, except for Griffin. Nella has him by the arm, preventing him from leaving the gym before me. “Run, Greer! I’ve got him!” she yells and laughs. “Go!”

  CHAPTER 10

  The summer after second grade, I saw a video of Emma Watson when she had really short hair and I told my mother that I wanted a haircut. Right before school started she took me to get a pixie cut. They clippered up past my hairline in the back, and over my right ear, leaving long bangs on one side, the kind that are always falling into one eye. I remember how light my head felt when I walked out, and how fast it dried after a bath. When I see pictures now, I love it. I look like an adorable little boy.

  Nella, who had had superlong hair when we left school in June, also happened to return with a short pixie cut, one side longer than the other. It wasn’t exactly the same, because her hair is darker than mine, hers fell into her right eye and mine into my left, and because she already had her ears pierced so no one ever thought she was a boy.

  It was close enough, though, that for most of that school year, parents and substitute teachers mixed us up all the time. They’d call me Nella and her Greer (or they’d call me Ella and her Gwen, because we both have the kind of names people don’t quite believe). Kids in other grades would say “You look exactly like that other kid.” And anybody who didn’t know us would say, “Did you plan it?”

  With some kids, that would be enough to start a rivalry. The cooler or cuter or meaner kid would resist the comparison. She’d try to distinguish herself or say the other one copied her. It happens when other people try to lump you in with someone else. The two shortest boys in the grade always hate each other. The three kids at the peanut allergy table can’t stand each other.

  But Nella ate it up. Right away on the first day when we saw each other, she came up to me and said, “Greer! We’re haircut twins! WE’
RE HAIRCUT TWINS!” and held the sides of my arms and bounced like this was the best news she ever heard, even though we only knew each other from school. “AND WE HAVE THE SAME BACKPACK ALMOST!” Her Fjällräven pack was light green with yellow straps; mine was bright blue with yellow straps.

  It didn’t make us friends exactly, but for the next few months at least, we were, in her mind and everybody else’s, the haircut twins.

  So that’s why it’s especially weird for her to be the most perfect-looking person in my school, and for me to be me. The idea that anyone would ever mistake me and Nella at this point makes as much sense as mistaking a gazelle and a rhinoceros. (I’m the rhino, obviously. A Sumatran—the kind with two horns.)

  We both grew out our cuts, because having that kind of hairstyle when you’re a kid kind of sucks. There’s not enough to make a ponytail, which means there’s always hair hanging in your face, which turns out to be annoying as hell. If I hadn’t discovered headbands I never would have made it through third grade. Nella’s hair grew faster, and she could actually do tiny French braids by the time fourth grade started. Everything else on Nella grew faster, too, but on her, it stopped where it should have.

  We’ve never talked about it, but I think she still feels like we have some connection. Or at least history. Not enough that we’d hang out or be friends outside of social media. But something. That’s how it is with Nella and everybody. She has this way of responding to a person that makes them feel like it’s nice to be in her orbit. Not just that they want to date her, but also that they just want to sit by her or joke with her or be her haircut twin. All are welcome in the universe she sits so perfectly comfortably at the center of.

  And maybe it’s that, even more than the perfect boobs, that I’m most jealous of.

  If I could wake up in Nella’s body one morning, I might still be an awkward mess. But, god, would I love to try.

  CHAPTER 11

  Since we came together over Tyler’s nut cup last week, Jackson has been stopping to talk before first period every day. German III is three doors down from my math, and we’re both usually early. He updates me on adjusting to the new place, and I try not to stare at the cowlick he has over his ear, which is beckoning me to touch it.

  We are talking about Quinlan’s third grade troubles. Everybody was supposed to make a poster about a state with three facts on the page.

  “I remember that project.” Quin’s school is where Tyler and I went, but a lot of the teachers are different. “Everybody wanted Illinois, so my teacher said no one could have it. I finished Delaware fast and then I did Illinois too.”

  “You didn’t do all fifty?”

  “Markers ran out.”

  “Quin decided she wanted Maine for some reason, but there were already two girls doing Maine, so the teacher gave her Ohio. I think she thought she was being nice, since we just came from there. But Quin drew poops all over Ohio, cut it into tiny pieces, and put them in the guinea pig’s cage. And then she called the teacher a moron and walked out.”

  Judging by the call Jackson’s mom got from school, no one else thought it was as funny as I do. I would never have done anything like that. I wouldn’t have even drawn a poop on an assignment if I could erase it after. “Your little sister has balls.”

  “Gross. Also true.”

  “Wait, how did two kids have Maine? You could have partners?”

  “I guess if two people picked the same state.” He shrugs.

  “Maybe Quin just wanted a partner. Maybe that’s why she wanted Maine.” What kind of teacher doesn’t assign the new kid a partner?

  “Well, nobody’s going to want to be her partner if she acts like that.” He sounds exasperated, like they’ve been through this before. Like Maine or no Maine, nobody likes the kid who shits on Ohio and shreds it over the class pet.

  “They’d want to be her partner if she had Delaware. Cool people pick Delaware.”

  “I would always pick you for my partner,” he says, and all my internal organs stop working. “You’d do all the work.”

  “Right,” I say, and hope there’s an all-school poster assignment so Jackson and I can work on Delaware together.

  “Almost forgot.” Jackson kneels to unzip his backpack. “I have something for you.”

  I assume it’s something boring like a note for my mom from his, but I hold my breath hoping it’s Grumpy. I haven’t asked about him and I’m not going to. The only way I’m ever seeing that dwarf again is if I break into Jackson’s house. Or I’m invited. Hah.

  Max Cleave stops in front of us and says, “You coming to the cages?”

  Jackson stands up and I see that he’s got a balled-up paper towel in his hand. Definitely not a note, but it seems like a bad way to keep a miniature glass diamond miner. Maybe Quinlan stole something else, too. Maybe he’s returning Tyler’s nut cup.

  “Yep. I’ll meet you by the west door.” The minute bell rings to move the cattle along to class. I don’t know what I’m more curious about—the thing he’s got in his hand or what he’s doing with Max Cleave.

  Jackson watches me watch Max walk away. “Off-season batting practice. I guess I’m going out for baseball next spring.”

  “I thought you played tennis?”

  He shrugs. “Might be nice to do a real team sport again.”

  Apparently, it’s that easy for him, coasting from sport to sport, team to team, school to school, friends to friends.

  The halls are emptying. A teacher across the hall leans out to shut the door and give us the stink eye.

  Jackson holds out the wadded paper towel. “I hope it’s not too squished.” I take it from him and peel back the sides. It’s a chocolate chip muffin. Given to me. By Jackson Oates. “My mom made them.” I blink at that beautiful muffin, and I want to stuff it in my mouth all at once, and also never eat a bite of it. “Seemed like something you’d like,” he adds, since I still haven’t said anything. Of course I like it. It’s a homemade muffin chockful of chips, smelling like butter and vanilla and brown sugar. Plus it could have been Quin’s class guinea pig fried on a stick and I would still love it, because Jackson Oates wrapped it up in a paper towel and brought it to school for me. But the fact that it’s a muffin just pushes everything over the top.

  “Thanks,” I manage.

  “Guten appetit!” And then he’s gone, and I’m carrying that muffin into math like a baby guinea pig. (A delicious baby guinea pig.)

  CHAPTER 12

  Volleyball tryouts are next week. Jessa Timms has reminded me four times. Ms. Reinhold has mentioned it zero times. I told Jessa I’d think about it. I will. I’ll think about how I’m not going to try out for volleyball.

  I open the link from Ms. R on my phone again. She was telling the truth: It is not school related. Or even volleyball related.

  It’s a website called Sports Supports.

  The logo looks like it was made on a home computer from when my parents were in school. Sports Supports is written in a font like NASCAR’s, and they’ve highlighted all but the U and one P in Supports so at first it looks like it says Sports Sports. A lot of the text on the site is yellow against a blue background. It is the cheapest-looking website I’ve ever seen, including the one Tyler and his friends made in third grade so they could post videos of Matchbox cars smashing into each other.

  It is a cheap-looking website that sells one very expensive thing: a sports bra.

  Only it’s not just any sports bra. It has a name. It’s called the Stabilizer and it says it’s designed for “active women with cup sizes from DD to J.” It says its “unique design” and “patented fiber blend” “provides multi-angled support and stabilization.” It “eliminates neck and shoulder pain,” “minimizes movement,” “wicks away moisture,” and “provides a slenderizing and flattering fit.” It comes in one color: beige. There is a picture of it. It looks like a giant knot of ace
bandages with two big beige shields sewn into it. It looks neither flattering nor comfortable.

  The Stabilizer sounds like the title of a Denzel Washington movie, not like something I’d like to strap my boobs into.

  But there are 267 reviews averaging 4.9 stars out of 5.

  I’ve been reading and rereading the raves since I first opened the link:

  Age: 30–35

  Size: 32 DDD/F

  I just finished my first half marathon in the Stabilizer and I can’t believe how good I feel! No pain whatsoever. And no adjusting the whole time!!! Everything stayed put. And no monoboob! U won’t believe it!! Totally worth the price.

  Age: 50–59

  Size: 42G

  I have tride every lady’s bra on the market and when this one came out a friend said “waht can it hurt just try it theres a garuntee you can get your money back.” I can tell you I WON’T be asking for money back. This is the best bra Ive ever wore in almost 50 years of wearing braziers. I don’t do any sports but I have it on all the time except sleep. If their was a white one I would get that to.

  Age: 12–18

  Size: 32H

  Love love love this bra! Okay it’s not cute. Like SERIOUSLY not cute. But I haven’t been able to wear a Victoria’s Secret or Perk Up bra since I was 11. It keeps everything locked down so when I’m running or cheering my boobs aren’t flying all over. LOL. Plus everyone asks if I lost weight. Would rather have a bra that works than a cute one that doesn’t do the job. And I can always get cute panties!!! LOL