My Eyes Are Up Here

by Laura Zimmermann

  “What are you looking at?”

  I scramble so fast to close the browser I end up dropping my phone, and when Jackson bends down to pick it up, I step on his hand trying to get to it first.

  “Sorry! I am so, so sorry!” I say, jamming the phone into my pocket.

  “You got something inappropriate on there?” Jackson says.

  “No! Just kind of, um, private.” As soon as I say it I worry it sounds like I’m either sending or receiving nude pictures. I blurt out, “Not pictures, though!”

  “Oh-kaaaaayyyyy.” Now it definitely sounds like it’s pictures. But I can’t think of anything else to say that won’t make it weirder, so we just stand there outside math in silence.

  “Auf wiedersehen, I guess.” He shrugs.

  There are still six minutes before school starts and I don’t want him to auf wiedersehen. I say the first thing that comes to my mind: “I’m trying out for volleyball.” No, I’m not. Why would I say that?

  Jackson says, “Volleyball?”

  “Some schools in our athletic conference wanted to add field hockey, so all the schools had to bump volleyball to winter.”

  “Nice pun!” he says. I look blank. “Bump?”

  “Right! But I probably won’t make it. I mean I definitely won’t be on varsity. Maybe not JV, either.”

  It is unlike me to be this self-deprecating, but I already decided I’m not going to do it, because I would not be caught dead in a volleyball uniform, and because there is way too much bouncing. So I’m definitely not going to be on the team that I just said I was trying out for.

  “Are a lot of people trying out?”

  “I . . . I have no idea, actually.”

  “So why do you think you won’t make it?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t want to assume.”

  “You should have more confidence in yourself.” He says it in a funny, whiny voice, like the way a beautiful mermaid girl on a Disney show would talk to her friend who looks like a sea lion. The minute bell rings, but he doesn’t go. “Repeat after me: I am.”

  “I am.”

  “The greatest.”

  “The greatest.”

  “Volleyballerina.”

  I snort. “Volleyballerina.”

  “Who ever graced the halls of Kennedy High, so help me Olympic committee.”

  “Who ever graced yeah whatever.”

  “Say you’re going to make it.”

  “You’re going to make it.”

  “Say, ‘I, Greer, am going to make the team.’”

  I roll my eyes at him, but he doesn’t budge. We stand there facing off, and I have a feathery feeling, like a tiny butterfly just poked her antennae out of a cocoon in my stomach. Finally, I say, “I, Greer, am going to make the team. Damn it,” I throw in for good measure.

  “That’s the spirit.” And he bumps my side with his side, and I am pretty sure I let out one of those ridiculous breathy sighs like when the mer-prince gives the mermaid a pearl and she falls in love with him.

  The start bell rings, meaning I am officially late to school despite having stood inside the building for almost fifteen minutes.

  “Scheisse!” says Jackson, and bolts.

  And now I guess I’m trying out for the volleyball team.

  CHAPTER 13

  One weekend last spring, Maggie dragged me to a movie with Natalie, Tahlia, and a couple of other girls. My preference for avoiding clusters of teenagers lost out to her promise that Seth Rogen would be hysterical. Whoever said their mom was going to pick us up didn’t mention that the mom was working until five thirty, so we were stuck at the mall with this pack of girls for two extra hours, which made Maggie and me feel like the living embodiments of a cliché. (I said this to Tahlia’s friend Kiki, who said, “Oh, it’s pronounced click even though it’s spelled with a q.” Then I felt worse because if I was going to be in a clique, I’d at least want to be in one where everyone knew what a cliché was. And now that I think of it, it was Kiki who assumed that we’d all want to wander around the mall all day. Quiqui is not going to be in my quiché.)

  Mags and I trailed behind the other girls for a while, me occasionally looking at a pair of pants, because pants don’t make me feel like a mutant, and Maggie reporting which brands used child laborers (most).

  It was boring, but fine, until Tahlia led everybody into a store called Perk Up!, which is pretty much a lingerie store for people under twenty-five. Everything is bright, patterned, lacy, and tiny. If you had cataracts and glanced at a table of bras, you’d think you were walking by a tray of cupcakes. The vibe is “Sexy Schoolgirl Pajama Party,” and it’s the kind of place where if your dad went in to buy a gift card, he’d be followed by mall security for the rest of the day. It’s also the kind of place that makes me hyperventilate, especially since I resigned myself to ordering and reordering the same full-coverage, no-nonsense workhorse undergarments online so I don’t have to think about it. Not the store for me. The girls all cooed, and even Maggie started leafing through a pile of undies. My breasts grew a half pound each just being in there.

  “I’m going to go to the bookstore,” I said.

  “I’ll come,” chimed Maggie, scowling at a pair of panties with MEOW printed on the butt.

  But as we were turning to leave, I noticed a poster of a girl in a cute plaid bra and matching bottoms, and instead of the kind of skinny where you could identify her bones and major organs, this model had curves. Like big curves. Like she was made of flesh instead of just skin, and kind of a lot of it. PERK’S EXTENDED SIZE COLLECTION JUST GOT BIGGER!

  It was a cheap slogan, but in smaller print it said, “Select styles in 26AA to 40G.” If that cute bra was in the Extended Size Collection, and the extended size collection extended to my size, by extension, I could have a cute plaid bra, instead of the institutional beige one I was wearing.

  I wasn’t about to look for it with the other girls there, but the next day Mom dropped me at the mall as soon as it opened, when senior citizens were doing their morning laps and Perk Up!’s customers were asleep in their matching camis and sleep shorts. (Mom thought I was going back for a birthday gift for Maggie.)

  “Lemme know if you need help finding anything,” the Perk Up! assistant manager mumbled without looking up from the thongs for tweens she was arranging.

  At first I couldn’t figure out where the “extended sizes” were, but hanging under the display bras in the back there were drawers of extra undergarments, bras nested inside each other like silky matryoshkas. A cups and Bs and Cs and Ds and DDs, all the way up to Gs! And then there it was, the bra de résistance: pink-and-orange-and-cream plaid with a pair of matching boy shorts, in (close to, maybe?) my size. I also picked up a lacy, stretchy overhead bralette in a pale purple, because I was feeling so optimistic about the big girl in the poster and the plaid bra that I momentarily lost my mind.

  I took them into a fitting room, where there was a sign that said, LET US FIND YOUR PERK-FECT FIT! and a cartoon of a happy salesperson in smart librarian glasses wrapping a tape measure around a giddy-looking customer with the exact dimensions of a toothbrush. No, thank you.

  I tried the purple overhead one first, because it looked so comfortable.

  It was comfortable like wearing a scratchy vest made of old dryer sheets and thorns that stopped halfway down your boobs would be comfortable. Okay, that one was a long shot anyway. Doesn’t matter.

  I picked up the plaid bra. There were only two hooks in the back (mine had four), and the straps resembled thin pink ribbons you’d tie on a baby’s head to signal she was a girl, but the cups were like mixing bowls. It was sort of like if you took the sails off a pirate ship and made them into a bikini.

  I hooked the band and slid my arms through the straps. It’s a good thing I liked that plaid print, because now I was looking at a lot of it—enough so that
the bra actually covered most of Maude and Mavis, without rolls of boobage coming out the sides. It fit! Sort of.

  That is, it did until I bent down to pick up the purple bra that I’d dropped on the floor, and both breasts slid completely out of their cups. I stood up and tucked them back in. So it wasn’t something I could do a handstand in, but I wasn’t much for handstands anyway. It wasn’t comfortable. Or supportive. Or cheap. But it was enough to feel like I was wearing something a fifteen-year-old would wear, instead of a grandmother.

  I leaned forward just a bit. They stayed in.

  A bit more. Still in!

  I leaned forward as far as you’d need to to hand someone your money if you were buying this bra. Ploop! There went Mavis. “What’s going on out here?” she asked.

  When I held perfectly still and stood straight, Perk Up! was right—the bra was the extended size that fit over my extended body. But already the skinny ribbon straps were digging a thin wedge in my shoulders, and even the tiniest bounce on my heels had M&M flopping like a mattress on the roof of a Volkswagen.

  Essentially, they had made a bigger version of the same bra but had not modified it to account for the different physics of a shape like mine. It would be like if you stacked thirty snowballs on top of each other to make a super tall snowman and expected him to be as stable as the standard three piece. Or if you tied that mattress onto your Volkswagen with a friendship bracelet.

  I stared at my plaid-patterned self in the mirror.

  This bra didn’t do any of the hoisting, holding, or hauling I needed it to do, and Maude and Mavis were hanging troublingly close to my belly button. This was not my Perk-fect fit.

  But for the first time since my C-cup days, they were wearing something cute.

  “You all set?” asked the clerk, who had given up pricing underwear and was playing on her phone.

  I bought the useless plaid bra and the matching boy shorts. I have no idea why. They are in the bottom of my pajama drawer with the tags on and will stay there forever.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Tyler needs a haircut.”

  “I need one, too. I can take him to my place.”

  “He doesn’t need a fifty-dollar haircut.” Mom means Dad doesn’t need a fifty-dollar haircut, either. He has nice hair, wavy and dark and thicker than most of the other dads, but it’s not a complicated style or anything.

  “Would you like me to just trim him up in the bathroom?” Dad smirks. He tried the trim-him-up-in-the-bathroom route when Ty was little and ended up having to shave his whole head. Everyone assumed that he was the one that brought lice to preschool and that’s why we shaved him. Mom was humiliated. Ty said his ears were cold.

  They go back and forth for a while about whether it makes sense to spend fifty dollars on hair that mostly lives under a hat anyway. Mom caves when Dad reminds her that for fifty bucks, they will also give Ty a good, scalp-scrubbing wash, which they wouldn’t do at the ten-dollar place and which the boy clearly needs.

  I’m anxious for Dad to take Tyler and go already, because I need to talk Mom into ordering a bra from a website that looks like a Ukrainian internet scam, and I really, really don’t want Dad to be part of the conversation. One time I had to get pads when he was pushing the grocery cart and I spent the rest of the time wondering when Mom had told him I’d gotten my period, because I sure hadn’t.

  When the boys are gone, I sit down next to Mom, who is in front of her laptop studying online reviews of feng shui providers to add to her binder of recommendations.

  She looks up from her computer. “I’m supposed to find a good feng shui practitioner, but they all look like middle-aged white women.” She says it like she’s not a middle-aged white woman herself.

  I look over her shoulder at the thumbnails, where all the businesses are called things like Four Winds Resources and Pathways to Peace and The CHI-cago Center. “I feel like I should try to make the recommendations in the binder more diverse, you know?”

  “What review site is this?”

  “Neighbor-to-Neighbor.”

  “Aren’t the only people on Neighbor-to-Neighbor middle-aged white women?” My mom usually complains about the neighborhood app because she sees it as competition, but maybe she still poaches the crowd-sourced intel.

  She sighs. “That’s why I don’t like to use it,” she says, still using it. She clicks on a picture of a woman with a long gray braid and a bird on her shoulder: Pamela Holly Desrosiers.

  “I’m thinking of going out for volleyball,” I begin.

  She doesn’t look up from the screen. “Volleyball? Do you know how to play volleyball?”

  “We did a unit in gym, and I was pretty good at it.”

  She nods and makes a note in her notebook. “I think that would be good for you. You should have more activities.” I know Mom is disappointed that I don’t have more “activities.” She’s an “activities” kind of person.

  “Practice would be after school every day.”

  “Maybe we should try one of them,” she says, looking around the house. She must be excited about all the five-tiny-house-icon ratings Pamela Holly Desrosiers has gotten. I wonder what Pam would say about the pile of Tyler’s gear you have to climb over to get in the front door. That can’t be good for the flow of our energy.

  I try to bring the conversation back to the bra. “So with volleyball and everything, I’m going to need a new sports bra.”

  “Okay. We can go to Master’s this weekend.” Master’s is the big sporting-goods store on the highway. You can buy everything from golf tees and no-show socks to yurts and hunting rifles. It’s Tyler’s happy place.

  “Actually—” I start.

  “Oh! This guy looks Chinese!” It’s the same excitement she shows when she finds a size 8 Tory Burch ballet flat at a shoe sale. Good deal on designer shoes = appearance of cultural competence. She jots his name down in her notebook. I am glad Richard Lin is not here to hear this conversation.

  “Actually,” I start again, “I already found one online that looks good. It’s got really good reviews.”

  “Don’t you think you should try it on?”

  “I’ve tried the ones at Master’s. None of them fit right. But this one online says it’s specifically for women with, um, who need more support.” This is a subject that Mom and I don’t talk about directly, either.

  “All right, you want to show me?” she says, turning the computer my way.

  I pull up the Sports Supports site and find the page with the Stabilizer. I am very aware of how awful the site looks and for a minute I think I should just go to Master’s and get something off the rack and hope for the best. But then I remember the reviews, and they sound real to me, like real girls and women wrote them. No pain, no bouncing, no monoboob . . . I turn the computer back to Mom and watch her face.

  She curls her lip like she’s looking at a Facebook post of someone’s bike accident, the kind with pus and skin flaps. She clicks through a couple of views and says, “Well, it certainly looks different.” She pages down to read some of the reviews and her expression looks more interested. And then her eyebrows pop up into her hair.

  “I know it’s kind of a lot.”

  “Kind of? I got mine at Target for twenty bucks.” Mom’s sports bra looks like a pink-and-green headband, more fitness accessory than anatomical support.

  “The reviews say it’s worth it.”

  “Jeez. How much better can it be than a normal one?” She catches herself, too late. “I mean, ah, like, ah, the regular kind.”

  I don’t feel it coming, but suddenly my eyes fill, and my face is prickly. It’s not just that she said “normal one,” aka a bra that fits “normal” breasts, the kind “normal” bodies have. It’s also that I feel like an idiot for putting so much hope into a stupid sports bra. Like some bizarro contraption is suddenly going to make my body feel an
d look like other girls’ bodies. Like I’m going to start playing volleyball and be really good. And I’ll stand up straight, and no one will think twice about my chest and I won’t think about it either. And if I have to jog down a hallway because I’m late to class from talking to Jackson for too long, it won’t feel like I’ve bruised my nipples and the skin over my ribs is ripping in two. And I won’t be afraid that if somebody ever liked me, my boobs would become some big joke about him, too, until we were both embarrassed about them. But it’s stupid to think I can get all that—that I can buy my way to normal—from a website that puts an apostrophe in ASK OUR CUSTOMER’S.

  I can’t say anything to my mom because I will cry for real. I can’t look at my mom because I will cry for real. I can’t close the laptop because I will cry. For real. I look over to the shelf where Grumpy isn’t and wipe the corners of my eyes with the edge of my hand.

  But whatever else she is, Kathryn Walsh isn’t stupid, and now she’s actually looking at me and not at the feng shui list.

  “You really want to try this one?” she says.

  I still can’t talk, but I nod.

  And Mom says, “Go grab my purse from the kitchen.”

  And the Stabilizer is on its way, with free shipping.

  CHAPTER 15

  Seventh grade was the year my grandparents moved from Long Island to Florida, and the last time they visited in the winter. Dad and Ty were playing Mario Kart. I was lying on the couch with my feet in Dad’s lap, rereading The Hunger Games, and half paying attention to the race. My grandparents’ flight would be landing in a few minutes, which meant that with the rental car pickup, the hotel check-in, and the drive to our place, we had two hours to make the house and ourselves presentable.

  “Fold!”

  Mom dropped the basket at her feet, making eye contact with each of us so we couldn’t say we didn’t hear her before she stepped out of the way of the TV and on to some task she didn’t trust us with.