But it looks . . . small. Smaller than the tops that are already packed into the “outgrown” bins in the basement. Smaller than anything I’ve put on in a long time. Smaller than I’d be if I only had one giant boob. Much smaller than the space I need for two of them.
But I really want to wear this uniform, more than I’ve ever wanted to wear anything else. I hold my breath and slide my head through the neck hole and my arms into the sleeves.
And that is as far as it goes. The shirt bunches at the level of my armpits. I tug and unroll it to pull it over my chest, but it is not going anywhere easily. This fabric must be for some industrial use. It is not as stretchy as you’d think.
I press one breast in and tug that side of the shirt down, then work on the other. I get it over the cups, but it is pulled so tight the Kennedy is warped; the lowercase n’s are as big as the capital K. I can’t get the bottom of the shirt low enough to meet the top of the shorts. If I lift my arms, the thing rides up another inch and stays there. Plus I look like I’m about to explode. This is how comic makers would draw a girl Hulk; it wouldn’t be her muscles, it’d be her boobs that would burst the seams.
I stand in front of the mirror.
Shit.
I can’t wear this thing.
Even if I didn’t care how it looked, I can’t move in it. If I bend forward at all, it inches up my belly. If the coach thought I was “unfocused” when my bra was riding around, she’s not going to want to send me out there tugging and twisting and pulling just to keep my ta-tas covered the whole game. It’d be handing the other team a win: Never mind looking for an opening, just hit everything to the one who can’t keep her shirt on.
I cannot wear this thing.
Here’s how tight it is. Imagine a full-grown man trying to fit into a baby onesie. Imagine a hippopotamus wearing a dog sweater. Imagine an article of clothing so tight it can squeeze tears out of your eyes. Because it does.
I can’t wear this thing.
And if I can’t wear the uniform, I can’t play.
I rip off the shirt. Or really, I peel myself out of the shirt, because getting it off turns out to be almost as hard as putting it on. I shove it back in the plastic pouch and sit down hard on the wooden bench.
I want to sneak out now and never come back, but the only way out is through the gym. And this is the only high school in Mom’s binder.
I put my dad’s T-shirt back on. I made the team, at least. That’ll have to be enough. I’ll go up to practice for the last time, and tonight I’ll email Coach Reinhold that I’m sorry but I need to concentrate on my schoolwork and she should put somebody else on the team in my place. They can keep my $130 activity fee. The other players will think I’m a flake, and if I am ever starving, they’ll throw an empty Lärabar wrapper at me and say, “I remember you. You quit the team before the first game.” But at least I will die with dignity inside an extra-large sweatshirt that’s never been sweated in.
And Jessa. What is Jessa going to think?
Back up in the gym, I look for a partner for the next drill.
“Walsh!” Jessa yells. She is standing with Coach R. I jog over to them, wiping my eyes with the side of my hand.
“We’re going to start you tomorrow as outside hitter and Nasrah as right side,” says Coach.
“Um . . . well . . . ah . . .” They both stare at me, because the right response is “Great!” and a bounce back to the drills. My face turns maroon, and not the good kind of uniform maroon.
“Outside means you’re on the left,” offers Jessa.
“Yeah, I know that. I just, I’m not sure if I’m going to make it.”
“WHAT?” snaps Jessa.
“I don’t have tomorrow as a schedule conflict for you,” says Coach, checking against her clipboard.
“I know. Sorry. I’m not sure I’m going to have time to play—”
“AT ALL? Are you QUITTING? NOW?” Jessa steams.
“No! I mean . . .” What I mean is yes, but I can’t say it. I love this team. I don’t want to quit.
“Jeez, Greer. Were you just at practice for fun? Did you ever even want to be part of this team?” Jessa is angry. Not just angry. I think she’s hurt. She has pushed for me from the start, went out of her way to help, and defended me when everyone else, including the coach, thought I was “unfocused.” She thought I was part of the team, and the team, to Jessa, is everything. And now I’m bailing. “You didn’t even put on the uniform.”
My face must give something away, because Reinhold, who has been letting Captain Jessa tear me a new one, puts her hand in front of Jessa before she can say anything else.
“Did you try on the jersey, Walsh?” She says it in a casual way, like she’s asking if I’ve seen a new Mission Impossible movie. Like, “Just out of curiosity, did you wedge your monumental breasts into that sausage casing?”
Mmm-hmm, I hum. I can’t open my mouth to talk. Air will enter my throat and it will stop there.
“Did it fit okay?”
I blink really hard and really fast. I shake my head even faster.
Jessa frowns. Reinhold yells over her head, “Assistant Coach Vallejo is in charge,” and then to me, “Let’s see.” She doesn’t wait for a response, just heads into the locker room. I scramble after her, and Jessa does, too.
It’s almost as embarrassing to take my plastic bag into the toilet stall as it would be to try to change in front of them, because it means I’m some kind of super prude, which most of the girls aren’t. But I do it anyway, because I can’t bear to have anyone see me grunt and struggle to pull that thing on.
When I come out of the stall, the two of them stare at me. Coach furrows her eyebrows and squeezes the sides of her mouth with one hand. This is how she looks when she’s thinking about strategy.
The fact that neither of them says, “What’s the problem? It looks great!” confirms that it is as bad as I thought. I squeak out, “It’s really tight,” and wipe the embarrassment sweat off my lip with those silky oil-slick arms.
“Don’t they have a bigger size?” says Jessa, which would be the obvious thing to think if you had not been down this path with a million shirts. In order to be big enough at my biggest point, the whole thing essentially has to be a four-person tent. The sleeves would be down to my knees, and the V-neck would plunge to my belly.
“Timms, run up and get people going on threes and twos.” This is a passing drill I love. A passing drill I won’t ever get to do again. “Walsh, come with me.”
I don’t know where we’re going, maybe outside to push me in front of a speeding Highlander, but that is the power of a good coach: She says, “Come with me,” and you follow. I maneuver out of the uniform top and back into my tee while walking.
She walks faster than most people run.
We end up in the Family and Consumer Sciences wing.
Coach Reinhold knocks on a door with an embroidered sign that says THERESA KERSHAW-BEND. When it opens, Coach says, “Hey, Tess. You got your sewing machine down here?”
CHAPTER 30
Family and Consumer Sciences includes classes like Culinary Explorations, Personal Finance, Independent Living, Child Development, Fashion and Design, Fashion Management, and new this year, Food and Fashion Blogging. Theresa Kershaw-Bend teaches all the clothing-related classes, plus the financial stuff. Another teacher handles food and children, and our IT specialist teaches the bloggers because she has a hundred and ten thousand Pinterest followers.
Coach R tells Ms. K-B that we need a uniform that fits and we need it quickly. It’s interesting, this “we,” especially since ten minutes ago I was ready to sneak out of the locker room and never return. She says we might be able to special order something bigger, but it would probably be all wrong, it would take too long, and the school activities budget doesn’t accommodate special-order items anyway.
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��I’m sure we can figure something out,” Ms. K-B says, holding up the jersey. As though it’s as easy as that. “Anything else I need to know?”
“Try and make it match?” Reinhold says.
“It won’t be exact, but I’m sure I’ve got some maroon and gold back here.” She swings her head toward the shelves full of clear storage bins, remnants of cloth folded and stacked inside.
Coach heads back up to the gym while I stand there in my Zoo tee feeling conspicuous. My cheeks are still hot and I’m sure my eyes are pink. Ms. K-B buzzes around the room, grabs a notebook and pencil from her desk, and drapes a measuring tape over her neck. I know what that measuring tape is for and I know what it’s going to say. I steel myself. She stands in front of me and smiles. “First year on the team, or have things changed since last year?”
“First year.”
“Let’s see what needs doing,” she says, sliding her glasses on a beaded chain from around her neck to the tip of her nose. “Arms straight, please.” I am a stranger in Ms. K-B’s domain but she’s looking at me like this is the most perfectly natural thing in the world to her. As though imperfectly shaped people stand in front of her tape measure every day. As though I am a problem to be solved—only somehow not a problem where something’s wrong. More like a math problem. A puzzle. A collection of unique properties with a unique solution. And I relax a little.
“And things have changed a lot in the last couple of years,” I add. She laughs, and I do, too.
She starts by pressing one end of the tape at the tip of my shoulder with her thumb. She lays it along my shoulder to the base of my neck, holds that spot with her pinky, and smooths the tape down my other shoulder with her opposite hand. Even through my T-shirt, her fingers are cool, and I get a sprinkle of goose bumps when she touches my neck. She holds the tape against both my shoulder blades next and scratches the numbers into her notebook. She moves around me gently, but without any hesitation or apology, measuring, marking, murmuring to herself. “Thirty and a half . . . Nine and seven-eighths . . . And let’s make sure the left arm is the same . . .” she says, filling the page as she goes.
It should be awkward, having this stranger touch and wrap and measure me, but she doesn’t act like it’s awkward, and somehow that makes me trust her. We haven’t gotten to the worst part yet, though, the part where she measures my chest and her eyebrows shoot up on their own. The part where she feels sorry for me and I feel ashamed.
Now she’s in front of me, reaching her long arms around to lasso me in her tape measure. “We should be okay over the shirt,” she says, as much to herself as to me. “It’s pretty thin.” She maneuvers the tape around my rib cage, just under my breasts, and tugs it tight. Then she gives it some slack, lifts up just to the biggest part of my boobs—the biggest part of me.
“Don’t hold your breath. It messes up the measurement,” she says. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I exhale and feel everything relax a little. She tugs the tape so the end lines up with the numbers, and suddenly we are done. Minutes. Seconds. If she cringed at the measurements, I missed it. If she doubted those numbers could possibly be right, that she was accidentally reading centimeters instead of inches, I missed it. If she is anything but confident that she can fix my jersey, I am missing that, too. She’s already pulling out bins, leafing through for leftovers of material that will work. “Alrighty then. Game is tomorrow?”
“Right after school. But if you can’t—”
“Can you stop by during lunch, in case we need to make any more adjustments?”
“Sure, but you really think you can make it work?”
She looks down at the numbers in her notebook. “I’ve got everything I need.” She taps the page with her pencil.
“Thank you so much. If you can’t—”
But she’s already back to work fishing fabric out of her neatly organized bins. “Greer. I got this.”
CHAPTER 31
There’s a lot of braiding, straightening socks, and checking tiny shorts for underwear lines. A couple of girls brought rolls of gold wrap to use for headbands, and people are taking turns being crowned. Nasrah’s mom has embroidered her number—25—on one edge of her hijab in gold thread. Jessa’s marching around in her First Order kneepads, psyching up everybody.
People are too focused on getting ready to notice my jersey, but I love it. I love it. Ms. Kershaw-Bend should be in my mom’s re-lo binder as a master seamstress/uniform superhero. She split the side seams and took out the whole back section. She used that fabric to create “darts” or folds where breasts go. Like the pointy part (two pointy parts!) a dress has, instead of being like a T- shirt that assumes you are shaped the same in the back and the front. She found some maroon mesh from an old football uniform to fill in the parts she cut out from the sides and back and lined it with a piece of gold (Glinda the Good Witch’s dress from the 2004 production of The Wizard of Oz) so my bra wouldn’t show through the mesh.
So now the Frankenjersey fits properly everywhere, and it still looks all right. It makes its way over my chest, but it narrows again below, so it’s not billowing out like a table skirt. It rounds the curve of my butt like it’s supposed to instead of stopping at my belly button. And I can twist, turn, and spike without my uniform riding up to my neck. Or if I can’t, it’s not because of the shirt.
Do I still look like I’ve got oversize knockers? Of course I do. Would I be willing to wear something this shape-revealing to school or in a face-to-face (or chest-to-chest) conversation with Jackson, Max, or any other boy I know? No, I would not. But standing in front of the mirror pretending to wash my hands instead of checking myself out, I think maybe it’s going to be all right. I asked Ms. K-B to leave it looser than the others, but it’s not huge. Just big enough. I think maybe my chest won’t be the most notable thing about me. I think maybe I won’t think about it so much.
When we come out of the locker room to warm up, the people in the bleachers stomp their feet and cheer. A few years ago the school got a new band director who was livid when she found out that the pep band only ever played for football and boys’ basketball. She started sending small groups of band kids to all home sports as well as debate and robotics competitions. Somehow, it actually made people start to notice all the other things that happen around here. It’s not a full house, but it feels like a lot, especially since I’ve never played in front of anybody but the team.
People are looking for their parents or their friends in the crowd and you can see that it makes them a little springier once they find them. Maggie is at play practice, Dad’s at work, and Mom has Ty at his violin lesson, so I know none of these people are here for me personally. On the one hand, I’m glad because I’m nervous; on the other hand, it would be nice to have my own fan. I want both of those things: to be invisible and visible.
The mini–pep band is playing a Beyoncé medley, and Jessa grabs me and Sylvie and starts dancing like a Single Lady. We laugh till we cry. And then through the chorus of voices I hear him. “Walsh! Eighteen!” I peek into the bleachers and wave. Jackson is sitting with Max Cleave and a couple of other guys—Max just started dating Emma Wood, so I know that’s why they’re here. Still, though . . . I take a deep breath and resist the temptation to pull my sweaty Zoo shirt over my jersey, and do my best to strut with Jessa to our side of the net.
“Let’s go Kennedy! Let’s go Volleyballerina!”
Well, now you know what’s under the sweatshirt. Jackson, meet Maude and Mavis.
CHAPTER 32
The best thing about my first volleyball game wasn’t scoring a point on the very first ball that came to me. It felt good, but it wasn’t remarkable. More of a relief. Chatham had left a giant hole right down the middle. It was me doing my job. No one went crazy because it was how it should have gone down.
The best thing wasn’t finding out that the girls on the court pull together between every point, even when the
point isn’t ours, for a back-patting huddle or a fist bump. Or discovering that by the time we were seventeen cumulative points in, it had already started to feel normal. That instead of wincing when I felt someone’s hand on my back, I could reach out and touch hers, too, and it made us both a little better.
The best thing wasn’t that Jackson was there, yelling dumb silly things in German and English, or that there was a text waiting for me afterward telling me that I should give up academics and plan on getting a volleyball scholarship to Volleyball University. And I didn’t mind that he had to leave before Varsity was done so I didn’t get a chance to talk to him afterward, because there was nowhere I would rather have been than in the locker room with the JV girls.
The best thing wasn’t that we won. (But we did.)
The best thing was this one moment, a few seconds, really, that looked like a disaster to everybody else. Kate got under a ball, but just barely, and sent it wide on our side of the net. Sometimes they go sideways, and there’s nothing you can really do about it.
But when I saw it sailing out of bounds on my side, something clicked. Not like it clicked into place—more like it clicked out of the way. There was the ball, and there was me. I didn’t stop and assess the variables or think about positions or trajectories or my jersey or Jackson or getting hurt or how it would look or if I might fail. I didn’t think about anything. I just went for it. I saw the ball, the impossible ball, and dove. And then I was sailing sideways, too. I didn’t save it; the thing caromed off my forearm into the stands, knocking Jessa’s dad’s popcorn out of his hands. And then when I finally hit the ground, face-first, I slid and slammed my shin into the ref’s stand, shaking it hard enough that she had to grab the rails to keep from falling off.
It felt amazing.
Not that part with the ref’s stand. That hurt like hell and has turned into a throbbing blue egg. I’m not some weirdo who likes pain.
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