“I wasn’t naked, it was just my top that came off. And it was an accident.”
I explained the whole story to him, but he didn’t sound mollified when next he spoke.
“Well, it’s got the school in an uproar. I’ve had a call from Principal Perez this morning. He said he couldn’t get hold of your mother.”
“I’m planning to explain everything to him. I’ll go in tomorrow afternoon.” Late tomorrow afternoon, hopefully after most of the kids had left for the day.
“We’ve already scheduled an urgent meeting for this afternoon at three-thirty. I’ll collect you on the way, and then we can go in together and sort this out.”
“You’re driving through? Today? To meet with my school principal?” I asked, seriously amazed.
“Peyton, you’re my daughter. Of course I’m coming. This is serious. I want to help you deal with it in any way I can.”
Wow.
“Are you alright?” he asked gently.
No. “Sure, just a bit embarrassed.”
“If you like, we can get you some counseling?”
“No, I’m fine, really.”
“Well, think about it. And if you’d like to get out of town and come stay with Lucy and me for a while, just say the word. We’d love to have you.”
“Okayyy.”
“But I’ll see you this afternoon. Maybe we could go out for a meal after the meeting, chat about this business, and catch up generally?”
“Sure, that would be …” Unusual? Unprecedented? “Nice.”
This was not my father’s usual behavior, but maybe having another baby was bringing out his long-dormant paternal streak. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I kind of liked it.
“See you at three-fifteen sharp.”
“I’ll be waiting. And, Dad? Thanks.”
“No problem, princess.”
“What did he say?” Chloe asked when I handed her back her phone. “You look sort of … stunned.”
“My father is being —” there was no other word for it “— supportive.”
“Good for him. And about time, too,” she said.
After we’d washed and put away our teacups, Chloe drew me back to the subject of school.
“So, when are you going back?”
“Not this semester. Maybe not ever.”
“You have to go back. You don’t have a choice about that. But you do have a choice about how you do it.”
I picked at a nail, but stayed silent, curious to hear what she had to say.
“You can go in victim-mode, if you like — head down and tail between your long legs, acting as if you’ve got something to be ashamed about.”
“I do!” I interrupted.
“No, you don’t. You didn’t do anything wrong. Well” — she paused as if reconsidering this statement — “not anything to do with the wardrobe malfunction, anyway. But if you act as if you did, the bullies and bitches will move in for the kill.”
“Yeah.” I could imagine that scenario all too clearly.
“Or,” Chloe said slowly, “you can go like a queen.”
“Come again?”
“Stand tall, hold your head up high, be proud. Of course some jerks will make fun of you — that’s inevitable. Jokers gotta joke, haters got hate.”
“Are you going to tell me to shake it off?”
“Hey, Swifty was onto something with that. No one can make you feel embarrassed without your cooperation. So you’ve got to have a sense of humor about this, or pretend you do. Laugh along with the jokes, smile at the envy.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Envy?”
“You, my friend, have great breasts. And now everyone knows it.”
That made me smile.
“The way I figure it, there’s nowhere to go but up. It doesn’t get more embarrassing than this, right?” Chloe said.
I sniffed and nodded glumly, still feeling sorry for myself.
“Stop hiding in your own life!” Chloe was growing annoyed. “For all your slouching, you’ve never been invisible. News flash: you’re over six foot. And now that everyone’s seen you topless, you may as well let them see the rest of you — the real you. And give them hell! Stop letting their jibes get to you, whether they’re about Boobgate or your height. Give as good as you get. It’s time to stand up, Peyton. It’s time to practice for the day when you’re queen of the world.”
~ 46 ~
Chloe was right. It had taken me most of winter break to fully accept it, but by the first day of the new semester, I was ready to face the music and laugh. Scratch that, I wasn’t ready. Nowhere close. But I was determined.
Taking no chances that I’d make a run for it, Chloe fetched me from my house on that Monday morning and frog-marched me through the freezing air to the corner where we caught the school bus, maintaining a steady barrage of encouraging pep talk all the way.
“Repeat after me: I can do this!” she said.
“I can do this,” I said, although the queasy mass of nerves in the region of my stomach said otherwise.
“Chin up, shoulders back, chest out.” She poked the various parts of my anatomy. “And game face on!”
I tried, but when I saw the big yellow bus of vulgar insults and rude laughter lumbering up the road toward us, I nearly bolted.
“I don’t think I can do this, Chloe,” I whimpered, white-knuckling my coffee travel mug.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lane! You’re an actor, aren’t you? This is just another role. Fake it till you make it.”
“But I don’t know the lines. I don’t know what to say,” I wailed.
“Then pretend it’s like that whatchamacallit — where you make it up as you go along — impromptu?”
“Improv?”
“That’s the one. You don’t have to know the lines, you just have to get into character, and the character will improvise the lines for you,” Chloe said as the bus stopped in front of us.
If I didn’t have to be me, then maybe I could do this.
“Just be someone cool and sassy, like Rebel Wilson, or Ellen DeGeneres.”
“You’re a genius!” I said to Chloe’s back as she climbed onto the bus.
She gave me a quick grin and said, “Ready, and action!”
I straightened my shoulders and stood tall, took a calming breath, and followed.
About a second later, it began — cheers and jeers, catcalls and wolf-whistles from the boys; sniggers, snide comments and judgy looks from the girls. I had no idea how to respond.
But Ellen did.
I smiled widely, winked broadly and swept into a deep, dramatic bow, even giving a flourishing twirl of my hand out front. Then I pulled up straight and held my coffee mug to my chest like a winning actress clutching her Oscar, and said loudly, “I’d like to say a special thank you to my director and my wardrobe mistress, without whom none of this would have been possible. Thank you all!”
The bus driver told me to quit fooling around and take a seat, but most everyone else laughed and clapped.
Chloe gave me an approving nod and mouthed, “Boom!”
As we walked down the aisle to our usual spot, a spotty-faced senior called Dave made boob-fondling gestures in the air and said loudly, “I enjoyed your lady-display at the play, Big P.”
“Glad to hear it, Little D,” said my inner Ellen, “because that’s as close as you’re ever going to get to my ladies.”
“Smack down!” The girl sitting beside him snickered.
We took our seats — Chloe at the window and me on the aisle as usual — and I was amazed to see that most of the kids of the bus were already returning their attention to their phones and friends.
Not Brooke, though. She called to me from two rows back, “Hey Peyton, hang onto your shirt there. We don’t need to see you letting it all hang out again.”
I turned in my seat so that I could look her in the eye and said, “Why not?”
“Yeah, why not?” said Will — the freshman we’d met on the first day of
school, who was sitting directly behind us. “I mean, I’d like to see it all hang out.”
Brooke seemed stumped for a moment, then said, “Because it’s gross, that’s why.”
“Ayyy,” said a guy on the opposite side of the aisle, “you couldn’t call those puppies gross, Brooke. I thought they were mighty fine.”
Brooke ignored this. “I mean, like, who wants to see that?”
Will and all the guys nearby — plus one keen-looking girl — stuck their hands into the air. The boy sitting next to Brooke, presumably her boyfriend, also tried to lift his hand, but she grabbed it and forced it down.
“Oh, shut up, all of you,” snapped Brooke.
“Sounds like you just want to keep the competition covered up,” I said, with a nod at Brooke’s chest, on display in a tight knitted top with a low neck. “I think you got yourself some boob envy there, Brooke.”
“As if!” she bit out, but I was pleased to see her turning red.
I turned back around in my chair and directed a so-how-am-I-doing glance at Chloe.
“Like a boss!” she said, grinning widely.
There was no more boob-banter on the bus until we pulled up outside Longford High, but no sooner were we all walking toward the school entrance than Brooke’s boyfriend, presumably at her urging, made a point of coming up to me.
“How’s the weather up there above the clouds, Big Bird? It looked like you found it a bit chilly the last time I saw all of you,” he said, staring meaningfully at my chest.
I stared down my nose at him and replied sweetly, “It’s lovely up here. How is it down in the Shire, Bilbo?”
Chloe cackled loudly at that. “Girl, you’re on fire!”
A bunch of people were waiting to give me a go inside the school, but my inner Ellen was on a roll.
When a junior I’d never met rudely yelled at me to “Show us your tits, Juliet!” I called back loudly, “Only if you show us yours first.”
This came across much meaner than I’d intended — the junior was an obese kid who had man-boobs double the size of mine.
“I’ve created a monster,” Chloe said, giving me a shocked look.
“Hey, if he can’t take it, then he shouldn’t dish it out,” I said defiantly, even though I felt bad.
“Eh-oh.” Chloe nodded in the direction of the small crowd grouped around my locker. Judging by the shoving and sniggering, something offensive was waiting for me.
Sure enough, when I got closer, I saw that someone had stuck a caricatured sketch of me, with full, naked breasts and saluting nipples, onto my locker door. The picture was titled “Pert Peyton’s Pointy Puppies.”
The smirking crowd watched to see how I’d react. Part of me — the mortified part —wanted nothing more than to rip the picture off the locker, crumple it up, and ram it down someone’s throat — preferably Zack’s since he was standing right up front and making a ridiculous show of ogling the image. But I was prepared for this.
Chloe and I had discussed the possible forms of taunts I was likely to encounter, and we’d both agreed that it was a dead cert someone would stick a bare-boobed sketch of me up somewhere at school — though we’d predicted a notice board or stairwell wall. And we’d brainstormed how best I should respond.
So now I was able to smile slyly, remove a red Sharpie from my bag and lean in to make some additions of my own to the sketch. When I stepped back, the picture-Peyton sported stars and tassels on her nipples, and in a speech bubble, she declared, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”
Everyone gathered around burst into laughter, but it seemed more good-natured than mocking.
Zack nodded admiringly at me. “You impressing me, girl. No shame, no fear! Respect.”
“No shame, no fear,” was overstating it, but I did feel proud. Before my public humiliation, any comments about my appearance, especially about my height, had upset me and made me blush, but now I either laughed along with them, ignored them, or gave snappy comebacks. Frankly, I was amazed at how well the strategy was working. And I was astonished to realize I was enjoying myself. It was fun — no, more than that, it was exhilarating — to fight back.
Why had I never tried it before?
~ 47 ~
There were fewer and fewer comments and wisecracks as the day wore on. It didn’t escape my notice, however, that two individuals were paying neither my chest nor the rest of me any attention.
Tim had caught my fierce look in history class and then studiously avoided me for the rest of the day. He even scuttled out of my way when he saw me walking in his direction in the hallway. I was sad to see that he wasn’t limping or wearing casts on his legs.
“I obviously didn’t kick him hard enough,” I told Chloe.
And Jay stayed away from me too. We had only one massively awkward encounter when we both turned up at our lockers at the same time. My foolish heart, forgetting it had been torn in two and was now dead and beyond repair, fluttered into exaggerated life, just as it always had in his presence.
“Peyton,” he said. His voice was perfectly polite, but his look was flat and hard.
“Jay.”
“Thanks for sorting it out with Perez and Ms. Gooding,” Jay said.
“Of course.”
Ellen’s cockiness evaporated, and all my hurt, angry bitterness — plus a wave of guilt — resurfaced. I stared hard at one of his freckles until the tears that had been threatening receded. I had my pride. I would keep the sadness and loneliness out of my voice, and I wouldn’t beg. This wasn’t the first time I’d been ditched, or left behind — hell, I’d coped with that all my life. The strange and unbelievable part of Jay was not that he’d dumped me, it was that he’d ever wanted me in the first place.
When he caught sight of the sketch on the door, Jay seemed momentarily disconcerted. Then with another quick glance at me, he turned and left. I saw so little of him after that that I wondered if he’d commissioned a report on me from Tim — strictly for avoidance purposes.
In English and Psychology, we both gave each other the cold shoulder, though it wouldn’t be true to say we ignored each other. You have to be hyper-aware of someone to not so much as glance in their direction, to be sure you’re never the one handing out papers on their side of the classroom, not to let your eyes stray in their direction or your face light up when you catch sight of them, and to time your exits and entrances from a room so that you’re never near each other.
Jay and I both played our parts with cool, indifferent perfection.
It helped that at least part of my mind was worried about the wager. Although it was only the first day back, prom suddenly didn’t seem so far off. There was only one name left on my tall boys list, and I needed to get cracking immediately if I was going to win the bet. And I was going to win that damn bet.
For one thing, I was determined to stick it to Tori. For another, I could not afford to lose any money. Plus I’d need the eight hundred dollar win to replenish my college fund which was already seriously dented by the utilities bill, and would be more so after the shopping trip I had planned for the next day after school. I’d made a long list of all the things I’d need to buy — fifteen different kinds of fabric with matching thread, plus hat-elastic, suspenders, bias binding, and all kinds of fastenings and decorative details. It was going to cost a small fortune.
As soon as the last bell rang, I hurried out of math class and headed for the steps outside the entrance. Chloe joined me a couple of minutes later, and together we scanned the throng leaving the building, looking for Robert Scott.
“That’s him!” I knew what he looked like because he played varsity football. No doubt he’d be another boring sports jock, but beggars, I reminded myself, couldn’t be choosers.
“Hey, Robert? Robert, over here.” I beckoned him over to a quieter spot.
“He’s kinda cute,” said Chloe.
His face wasn’t a patch on the sharp-lined and hard-angled attractiveness of Jay’s, but yeah, he was cute. And young
— he was a junior, and looked even younger than that. I felt a bit cougarish.
“I’d make a play for him myself only, you know, I’d have a permanent crick in my neck,” said Chloe, tilting her head at an increasingly acute angle as he approached us, a frown of puzzlement between his baby blues.
“Um, hi.” A split second later, recognition hit. “Hey, I know you. You’re the girl who —”
“Yeah, I’m her. Look, I wanted to ask you — do you want to go out sometime?”
“You and me?” He seemed surprised, but then they all did when I asked them out. It was like they’d never thought of me as being a girl. “Like on a date?”
“Exactly that.”
“Um, okaayyy. Like, when?”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Tonight?” he squeaked. Oh dear, his voice hadn’t finished breaking yet. I was definitely feeling my age.
“Yeah, are you doing anything tonight?”
“Chemistry homework?”
“Fine,” I said. “Do you know Jumping Jim’s Diner? I’ll meet you there at six o’clock.”
“Okay, yeah, sure.”
“Is this your new dating approach — ambush and manhandle?” Chloe asked when we left Robert and headed for the bus.
“I’ve got eight hundred bucks riding on him,” I said firmly. “I can’t afford to accept no for an answer.”
That night, I arrived at the diner ten minutes early and immediately regretted it. Steve and Tori, both of whom were on duty, scurried over to where I was hanging up my coat and immediately began hassling me.
“You,” I interrupted Tori, “are mean. And you’re a poor sport, and a cheat! But you won’t win this bet.”
“We’ll see,” Tori said, smugly. “So, are you going to quit your job here and apply at Hooters?”
Steve snickered. “Nah, she wouldn’t qualify. I hear they have a maximum height restriction to keep out the giants.”
I stepped right up close so that I towered over him, gave him a cold-eyed smile and retorted, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Dwarvish. What are you trying to say, little person?”
Even Tori laughed at that.
“I want a quiet table,” I said, heading over to one of the booths.
The Law of Tall Girls Page 25