We’re trying to decide what Jessa should take next year to get her second fine arts credit. It can be performing arts or visual arts or, in a very strange loophole, robotics. I already took ceramics freshman year, and Maggie wants me to do printmaking with her second semester. Maybe I should talk her into sewing with Ms. K-B—except that that class is called Fashion and Design, and Maggie thinks the “fashion industry exists to commodify women’s insecurities about themselves.” She might be right, but what if I could sew a shirt that fit? Maybe I could make Quin a pair of longer pants.
“Do you think you have to be good at drawing to take studio art?”
“Seriously, Jess, you don’t have to do anything in choir. Just show up and sing. It’s the best.” Kate braids her hair as she talks, using an elbow for balance when the bus bangs over a pothole. The bus magnifies every bump and dip, and I feel every one of them in my nipples like a fresh bruise.
According to the tracking app on my phone, it’s T-minus one day till my period and Maude and Mavis are cranky and sore. I had to carry my backpack from the locker loop this morning because they didn’t like the straps rubbing against them. I check the time and it’s been three hours and thirty-nine minutes since my last dose of ibu. Close enough. I want it to kick in before we get to St. Matt’s Prep, because Coach will have us doing pregame drills the second we hit the gym. I dig the little bottle of Advil from my bag and shake two into my palm, think about it a second, and add one more. Long-term liver damage cannot possibly hurt like short-term period boobs.
“What’s wrong?” Jessa asks.
What’s wrong? I’ve hung ten pounds of hot, swollen breast tissue off a skeletal system designed to carry a couple of cotton balls and have been bouncing around on what feels like an unpaved road through a Central American jungle for the last hour, all while processing a surge of undiluted estrogen. I’m a leeeeetle sore.
“Shoulder?” Jess assumes.
“Yeah,” I say, and rub my right shoulder. It’s not a lie. That hurts, too. We worked on hitting and serving the whole practice yesterday, and everybody’s shoulders are sore. I could tell Jess what hurts worse, but Kate’s right there, and nobody would have any advice for me, anyway, so I’d rather let them think I’m just hurting in the way everyone else is.
“Move up by Kate,” Jess says, nudging me out of the seat. I slide in next to Kate. Jess leans forward over the back of my seat, and digs her thumbs into my shoulder, massaging the stiff muscles that run all the way from the side of my neck down to the edge of my armpit. At first it makes me tense up even more. I’m not used to people touching me. Even the little hugs and taps in the games were surprising at first. But Jess finds the tightest knots I wasn’t even aware of, presses and holds hard. It takes my breath away.
“We should tape her,” Kate declares. She’s finished her braids, and they’re totally uneven. I know she’s got multiple rolls of athletic tape in at least three different colors in her bag. Kate and her sister are the Tape Queens. She will mummify your knees or web all your fingers if you let her. I’ve never let her, but maybe today I will. Maybe if it works on my shoulder she can tape up my breasts, too.
“Heya! I’m next over here!” calls Sylvie to Jess. “Captains can’t play favorites.”
“I’ll get to you in a minute, Soop.”
I thank Jess and send her to Sylvie, who takes one arm out of her hoodie to give Jess access to her sore spots. I think Sylvie would whip off her whole shirt if the bus wasn’t so cold.
My shoulder hurts more than it did before Jess started rubbing it, but differently. It’s almost like it pulses. It moves. Like that one part of me has woken up. And at least it’s distracting me from my boobs.
“Did that help at all?”
“Totally,” I say. And I mean it. I don’t know how, but I know it has.
CHAPTER 40
Jackson is ready with a pocketful of quarters when the bus pulls up. There are only a handful of other riders so far, and when I choose a seat facing the middle of the bus, he sits directly across from me. It’s no problem to talk at school, when there are a million people around and there’s only a few minutes to fill, or even at his house when our families could pop in at any minute. Here on a city bus, though, when we are here together by our own volition, it makes it way harder to think of things to say.
The surly silence of the other passengers doesn’t help. If only they were volleyball players filling the seats we could talk about tape or braids or D3 colleges.
“Did you do anything fun last night?” Jackson finally ventures.
“Not really. I watched some stuff and then I fell asleep reading.” This is the edited version of my night, but I don’t want to elaborate. Really I took an extra-long shower after volleyball, shaved my legs, tried on a few tops from the vault in case my boobs shrunk in the shower (they hadn’t), put on PJs, remembered Mom had a cute scarf that might make one of the shirts work (it didn’t), ate dinner, watched Food Network with Dad, went to my room and watched a video of a breast surgery, watched some Amy Schumer clips to get the surgery out of my mind, and fell asleep reading an article about Maryam Mirzakhani. “How about you?”
A woman steers a stroller down the aisle with one hand. There’s a baby in the seat, and a toddler trooping alongside. Jackson gets up so she can position herself and her kids together on that side of the bus. He sits down next to me.
“Thank you,” says the tired mom across the aisle. She smiles at me, like I deserve credit for Jackson being a nice guy.
The bus starts up again. There’s more chatter now, plus the toddler across the way watching a video on his mom’s phone, so I have to lean in to hear him. His hair smells orangey.
“I took Quin ice-skating.”
“At Ice Castle?”
“If that’s the one in the binder.”
“Was it fun?” It seems sweet but weird that Jackson would have agreed to it. He must have been more bored than I was.
“Not really.”
The bus bumps along for a minute before he speaks again.
“Actually, it was kind of a disaster.”
“What happened?” I’m expecting a funny story. Quin assaulted the Zamboni driver. Disney on Ice was rehearsing. He tried a triple lutz and only made a double.
“There was a birthday party there. Some kid from her school. She knew some of them were going skating last night—turns out that’s why she wanted to go—but she didn’t know it was a birthday party. Once she realized they were all there together she bolted.”
Not a funny story. A sad one. I feel awful for the poor kid. It’s terrible to be alone; it’s worse to be reminded that you’re alone.
“I told her to just go up and say hi,” Jackson says. “They were having cake. I’m sure they would have offered her a piece.”
I look at him in disbelief. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Why not? What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“They could reject her? They could laugh at her? They could make her feel worse?”
He’s not buying it. “She says she doesn’t have any friends, and there were a bunch of girls from her school right there.”
“You really have no idea, do you?” I shake my head at him. “She’s not like you. Most of us aren’t. Moving all the time’s not easy for her.”
He blinks and scrunches his forehead, totally surprised. “When did I ever say it was easy?” He searches my face, but only for a second, because the bus heaves to a stop. “Scheisse! This is our stop.”
CHAPTER 41
“Schnucks? What the hell is Schnucks?”
“I think you mean ‘what the schnuck is Schnucks.’ It’s a supermarket.”
Obviously. The bus pulls away in a cloud of hot fumes, and the other passengers descend into an oceanic parking lot. Huge SUVs, medium-size minivans, and tiny electric cars are pulling in and out of
spots with dozens of near misses every second, like fish without a school. People are going in empty handed and coming out laden with bags that say, unbelievably, Schnucks. The logo is red and slanty and looks as much like it would be printed on the side of Tyler’s hockey skates as a big brick grocery store.
“I think this used to be a Family Food Mart.” You can barely make out the outline of the FFM, darker on the brick storefront.
“Maybe, but it’s a Schnucks now.”
“Is that better than Family Food Mart?”
“Probably not. It’s just a supermarket.”
“Wait. There’s no secret exotic spice shop?”
“If it’s not in the binder, I don’t think it exists.”
“Does this one have something the other ones don’t?”
“It has a pretty big Mexican food section.”
“You were getting Indian spices.”
“Yeah, you can’t find that stuff around here. My dad substituted tamarind paste, which is in a lot of Mexican foods.”
I don’t even know what to say. I thought we were going to some cool little import shop, with big jars of good-smelling ingredients and boxes of mysterious dried foods and an ancient man behind the counter offering us Turkish delight. And a travel blogger to post an adorable candid shot of Jackson feeding it to me on Instagram. But for some reason he’s led me to a giant supermarket, which is not adorable at all, and which would make a terrible photo for Instagram.
“It was still good, wasn’t it? Or could you taste the tamarind and you knew that something was off?” Jackson is putting on his best embarrassed face. “Tyler could probably taste the difference.” He hangs his head like a guilty dog who’s been caught chewing up the tamarind. I want to punch him. Lightly. In a lingering way. As in I just really want to touch him.
“You know there are like ten supermarkets that are closer than this one? Plus several Mexican markets? I’m sure they’re in the binder.”
He shrugs. “My mom grew up in St. Louis. They have a million Schnuckses. Mom was excited to find one up here. You know they call their coupons Schnupons?”
“Of course they do.” We stand there admiring the Schnupermarket, and I wonder if this entire outing was a joke. If it was, it’s still nice that he’d spend the morning on a joke for me, I guess. But it’s weird. I sort of expected Jackson to have more of a plan than this. Finally, I say, “Did you want to go in?”
“Into Schnucks?”
“Yeah? We came all this way?”
“Oh. Right. I didn’t bring you here for that. Unless you need to pick up some eggs or something. I brought you here because of this.” He turns me around to look across the street at a small, low building with big windows and a mural of the solar system painted on the side.
Cupernicus Coffee. It’s a coffee shop named (kinda) after an astronomer.
“I thought you’d appreciate it.” He takes my hand (!) and pulls me across the street. “They have unbelievable caramel rolls, too. Come on.”
Oh my schnucking god.
CHAPTER 42
We sit on opposite sides of a long booth and stretch out our legs like we’re on parallel couches with a table between us. We take turns unwinding the spiral of the plate-size caramel roll and tearing off pieces. He’s got a chai; I’ve got hot chocolate. The mugs are the extra-big round kind, almost like soup bowls, and they’ve got the shop’s logo on them: a coffee cup with little icons (car, dog, briefcase) orbiting around it. The girl at the counter has the same picture on her tee, with the words I BELIEVE IN COFFEOCENTRISM.
The warm spiciness coming off Jackson’s tea smells like Christmas. He’s telling me about how baseball has no off-season for Max Cleave, and since he’s captain, there’s no off-season for any of the other guys, either.
I know some of this from Maggie, but it’s funny to hear Jackson describe it. The baseball kids kind of adopted him. He goes to the batting cages and works out with them, but I don’t think they ever do anything together that’s not baseball related. It’s like Jackson is playing the part of a baseball player, because that’s what this school needs him to be. If he was somewhere else, maybe he’d play lacrosse. Or join debate.
But Max Cleave would be who he is even if you dropped him in the middle of the ocean—or some country that doesn’t play baseball. He has built his identity around one thing. (I guess I kind of have, too, but mostly because I don’t want it to be about two things.)
“Does he think he’s going to get drafted by the Yankees or something?”
“You did not just say that.”
“Say what?”
“Yankees.”
“Why not?”
“Because my dad is from Boston.” I look at him blankly. “And the Red Sox and the Yankees hate each other?”
“My dad is from New York. I don’t think he hates the Red Sox.”
“He’s supposed to hate the Red Sox.”
“I’ll let him know. Is there anybody else he should hate?”
“Well, ideally he’d hate the Yankees.”
“I’ll work on getting him to hate more things, but he’s a pretty friendly guy. What team are we supposed to like?”
“Cubs!” The “duh” is implied.
“You moved here like ten seconds ago, and you’re already a Cubs fan?”
Jackson shrugs.
“Does Max want to play for the Cubs? Or some other not-hateful team? Does he think he’s going to be a professional baseball player?”
“Nah. He’s good but that’s a whole other level. He’ll probably want a job where he gets to work out a lot, though.”
“Gym teacher?”
“Personal trainer?”
“Firefighter?”
“Navy Seal?”
“He could be a model.”
Jackson lifts his eyebrows, curious, and I wish I hadn’t said it. I figured Max being attractive was a given. A fact. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the teachers had his senior portrait in their cubbies. Now it looks like I’m into Maggie’s brother. “I mean, everybody likes Max.”
“Ah.” He nods.
“No, I mean, not me. He’s just Maggie’s brother.”
“Right.” He doesn’t buy it.
“I mean, I’ve known him since third grade. When their parents took them out of Catholic school. He’d pitch pine cones to us, and we’d try to hit them with our American Girl dolls. He’s like a brother to me.” This is not entirely true, because if I accidentally fell into Tyler’s lap on the way home from practice, I’d try to fart on him, not have a heart attack.
“He’s the hot older brother. Got it.”
I roll my eyes and pick up some pecans that have fallen off our roll.
“So if you’re not into Max Cleave, is there anybody you are into?” Jackson says.
He’s looking right at me, not blinking. Maybe not breathing. Is this Jackson nervous? Does Jackson even get nervous?
The butterfly is having a conniption. Now! she says. Say something! Carpe the goddamned diem!
What she wants me to say is:
You, obviously. Only you. I can’t wait to get to school in the morning to see if you’re waiting for me outside of math. I look for you in lunch, just to check you’re still there. When you grabbed my hand to cross the street, I felt it in my feet. I know if I kissed you right now you’d taste like chai and caramel rolls.
But I also know that if I did, one day soon you’d hold my hips and you’d touch my hair and then you’d slide your hand up my back and feel the four steel hooks that hold my bra together. And you’d be as polite as you could be and make a joke about a fortress and I’d laugh, but Maude and Mavis—they have names, I named them—would be so sweaty already that I’d want to die instead of let you near. I would be embarrassed, and you don’t think you would be but you would be too. And then we couldn’t j
ust joke around in the hallway or talk about Quinlan or trophies or wistful poetry because that moment would always be there, and I would rather have those minutes with you before math every day than anything or anyone else.
“I’m pretty focused on school right now.”
“Right. Of course,” he says, and looks down into his chai.
I know and I don’t know and I don’t want to know that it wasn’t the thing I was supposed to say. Like there was a turn in the path that maybe we could have taken, but I don’t know where that one goes and I don’t know if there’s a way back if it goes nowhere.
The butterfly can’t even stand to look at me anymore.
Jackson can’t either.
“So do you want to know what I was really doing last night?” I finally say. I let it sit there a minute, a tiny tease, ready to throw myself under the bus. “I watched three straight hours of baking shows with my dad.”
He looks up and smiles. “Seriously?”
“Eric Walsh loves baking shows. He doesn’t love baking, but he absolutely loves baking shows.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“He keeps it on the DL. But this is the best time of year for it—there’s a Christmas cookie competition and a gingerbread house one—”
“Isn’t your dad Jewish?”
“Not when it comes to Christmas bake-offs.”
We find our way back from the precipice to easy conversation, the kind you can have when it’s clear you’re not on a date, which I’ve just made sure we’re not.
We talk about which ages we were when we read each Harry Potter, our parents’ rules for phones, some of the million different places he’s lived and what’s weird about each one (once he lived in Tennessee and his teacher called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression).
He tells me that Quinlan hasn’t been lashing out as much but that she seems almost too quiet. I’m about to ask if he thinks she’s planning a terrorist attack, but I’m glad I don’t because he says, “Do you think somebody can be depressed in third grade?” and I realize he’s actually worried about her. And for the record, yes, I do think somebody can be depressed in third grade.
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