“Jess? You going to get black kneepads to go with that dress?” asks Mena through the door.
“THERE we are!” It’s Tape Measure, clicking toward my chair with an armload of dresses. “I thought we lost each other.”
So did I.
“Here’s just a couple of different styles to start with, and once we have an idea of what we like, we can go from there.” She starts hanging them along the bar in an open fitting room.
“We’re going to look at accessories,” says Kate, who peeks in the back with Khloe. Why can’t I be in their “we” instead of this messed-up “we” with pushy pumps lady?
Jessa is stripping off the black dress in front of the mirrors. “Do you want to try on this one? It’s actually really stretchy, like yoga pants or something. You want to try it? We could both get it.”
See? Uniform.
She holds the tangled dress out to me, but I shake my head.
I try to feel optimistic, though, since Jessa and Mena are trying stuff on and they don’t have ideal proportions, either. I have to find something, and here is where they have absolutely everything. I click the door behind me and slide out of my jeans. In the mirror, my legs look long and strong; not the chiseled legs of a gymnast or a dancer—just the kind of legs that no one could think of anything bad to say about except for all the new and old bruises from crashing into things on the court. My legs don’t need any Special Sizes.
But then I peel off my shirt. Me from the waist up looks like it couldn’t belong to the same person as me from the waist down. If my bottom half was built out of regular Legos, my top would be made of Duplos. These Sizes don’t just need to be Special. They need to be Magic Sizes or I don’t see how a dress is going to work.
I think I’m going to regret this, but I start in with what Tapey brought me.
The first thing is a sheath dress, like the one Mena had on. It gets to my armpits and doesn’t move. I tug at the edge, but it isn’t going anywhere. I pull it off and try the other way: I step into it and pull from the bottom. This time it slides up over my hips, but it gets stuck on the way up. Like if you tried to stuff a sea lion in a boot sock, only worse, because a sock would stretch a little. I take it off and hold it in front of me. It’s the same skinniness from top to bottom. My optimism is starting to fade, but it’s only one dress. I carefully hang it back on the hanger because Kathryn Walsh has trained me well.
I try a pale teal dress with a full skirt next. This time I start from the bottom, pulling it on like a pair of pants. It feels right around the middle, and the fabric is this really nice kind of silk that’s got imperfections in it—dupioni, it’s called. It’s a good length for me, a little above the knee, and I let myself pop up on my tiptoes a few times to imagine how it might look with heels.
But then I slide into the armholes and try to pull up the bodice. It’s not working because my breasts are in the way. I pull the bottom up higher to give me more room and manage to get my arms all the way in. Now the top is up, stretched very tightly across my chest. The skirt is hanging wrong, higher in front than in back, I can’t move my shoulders, and the whole thing looks like I’ve dropped a couple of ten-pound sacks of rice down around my belly. I haven’t even tried to close the zipper on the side, which is gaping open about eight inches. You’d need a whole other Mena-size dress to fill in that gap.
I can’t get that dress off fast enough.
“Are we finding anything?” Tape Measure says from behind the door.
Stop saying we. “Not really,” I say. I slide it onto its hanger a little less carefully than the first one.
“Do we need a different size of anything?”
I mean it, lady. “I’m not sure that would help.”
“What’s not working for us?”
Unless you are prepared to squish inside this too-small triple-D polyester torture chamber, there is no us. I am very alone in here. “Um, they are too tight in the top.”
Long pause.
“Why don’t we take some measurements?” The door handle rattles but I’ve got it locked.
“No, thank you.” I don’t need measurements. Your dresses can’t count that high anyway.
I hear Jessa now. “She has pretty big boobs. That might be it.”
I glare at the door, hoping she can feel the heat of my gaze through it. Jessa has still not learned that We Don’t Talk About Greer’s Breasts. Jessa still believes We Talk About Whatever Comes to Mind. Usually volleyball. Sometimes protein shakes. Occasionally breasts.
I try the other dresses, each one worse than the one before. I’m leaning out the door in a T-shirt telling Kate she looks great when TM appears holding hangers in each hand. “I thought this blue might look lovely with your . . .” And somewhere in the middle of this sentence her gaze drifts from my face, lands at my chest, and stays there. “. . . eyes,” she finishes.
Those aren’t my eyes, I think. My eyes are up here, I think. “Thanks,” I say, and take the dresses into my hellhole.
Why do schools even have formal dances anymore? Don’t adults complain my generation only interacts on screens? Why can’t we have a VR dance? I’d make my avatar a B cup. Maybe I’d give her swords for arms, too.
More consulting through the door. More failed attempts in the fitting room. But Tape Measure won’t give up. She keeps bringing things, a couple at a time, and flopping them over the top of the door. She’s gone from slinky to flowy, but everything, absolutely everything, is made for someone whose upper circumference is smaller than a snow tube. Zippers ain’t gonna zip, lady.
Everybody else has moved on to jewelry. I told Jess to go with them. Eventually, I stop trying on what she brings me. I just take it from her at the door and hang it in the room, because none of it is going to work. None of it even comes close. I try not to think about what this means, because it means I’m going to have to make up an excuse not to go. I should have realized this right away and told Jackson I was going to be in New Mexico at a bar mitzvah or something. Now it’s going to seem like I just don’t want to go with him.
I scrunch on the bench playing games on my phone while the fitting room closes in like an overflowing closet.
“Now, this is a different route we could try. Remember we can alter anything.” The toes of TM’s cream pumps are peeking under the door into my fitting room. A circus-tent worth of fabric comes flopping over the top of the dressing room door. I decide I’ll give her one last shot and then get out of here.
The dress is long, loose, and flowy. Everything else she picked out was colorful, but this is plain white. I slide it on and manage to get the long zipper most of the way up the back. A tiny bit of help and I could make it to the top, breasts and all. It’s too big around the middle though—strangely big—not to mention that it’s long and white. But I did manage to get Maude and Mavis contained, so that’s good. And then I see myself in the mirror.
The tag hanging from the armpit says “Suzanne’s Bridal Maternity Collection.”
I am dressed as a pregnant bride.
This time I don’t bother rehanging the dress. I just leave it in a pool on the floor and stomp on it on my way out. I don’t say a word to Tape Measure, who is waiting outside with the same placid grin she’s been wearing all day, that she probably wears every day, that she has probably trained herself to sleep in.
Jessa and the others are having a ball in the accessories section. They don’t even notice me as I fly through the store and out to the sidewalk. I’ll text Jess an apology later. I just need to be alone.
I mean we just need to be alone. The three of us.
CHAPTER 57
Quinlan opens the door before I knock, like she’s been waiting for me. Maybe she’s been watching out the window. Maybe she saw me pause at the driveway, then walk past the house, then circle back and get halfway up the drive, then leave again, sit on the curb, fidget with my phon
e, then finally come up to the front door.
If she’s seen all that, she doesn’t say anything about it. She just says, “Hi, Greer,” and steps back to let me in. Her pajama bottoms have tiny whales with lacrosse sticks on them.
She notices that I’m looking at them and says, “I wanted volleyballs, but they only had these racket things.” She points to a lacrosse stick. Several inches of bony ankle are visible at the bottom of her pants, the skin so pale it’s almost purple. I wonder if she has any pants that are long enough.
“Those are lacrosse sticks. Tyler plays lacrosse.”
“But you play volleyball.”
“Yeah. I just started. Lacrosse is fun, too, though. Tyler likes it because sometimes people hit each other with sticks.” She giggles.
“Thanks for the books you gave me,” she says.
LOANED you, I think, but I say, “Did you read any of them yet?”
“Almost all. I’m reading Artemis Fowl.” Artemis Fowl! That’s what else is missing. “Do you have all the Artemis Fowls?”
“I do.”
“Did you read them all?”
“Of course.”
“Jackson only read the first three.” I’m not surprised by this.
“I think the first few are the best anyway,” I tell her.
“That’s what usually happens. But then I feel like I have to read them all anyway and then I get mad at the author because it’s like they’re not letting me read someone else’s book that I would like better.” I laugh, because it’s exactly how I feel, too.
“Oh, it’s Greer.” Melinda comes to the entry. “Is your mom with you?” She looks around me, like maybe my mother is hidden behind my boobs.
“No, I just needed to talk to Jackson for a minute.”
“Sure. I think he’s getting out of the shower. Hang on.” She bounds up the stairs, leaving me with Quinlan and a mental picture of Jackson in the shower, lathery and drippy, his abs lined like a crustacean. The butterfly mimes a striptease, but I poke my finger hard in my side to stop her. Knock it off. You need to let this go.
“Is that real?” Quin is squinting at my necklace, the diamond pendant Mom saved for me when Grandma died. (Technically, she bought it from Tiffany with money from selling Grandma’s jewelry to an antique shop. She figured it was still like the necklace came from my dead grandmother, but this way it was a little classier than the chunky rhinestone stuff her mother liked.)
“No,” I lie, tucking the chain under my shirt. “Fake.” I don’t know why I say this. By now I’ve figured out that Quin doesn’t steal things because they are worth money; she steals things because they are worth something to somebody else.
Melinda pops back downstairs. “Go ahead and run up there, Greer.” She blocks Quin from following me.
I was already nervous, and now my brain is split in half trying to figure out if I want him to be wearing just a towel when I get up the stairs or not. Really, though, what would I do with towelly Jackson? Shake his hand? Tell him that my mom’s binder has a Men’s Apparel section? Drool?
Jeans and a washed-out T-shirt. Wet hair, bare feet, and he smells like the shower. “Hey,” he says and smiles. He hasn’t shaved. The sun pouring through his bedroom window lights up the tiniest bit of stubble and seems completely wrong for this moment. It is aggressively bright when it should be wallowing behind a stratus cloud. “What’s up?”
“Yeah, I’m, ah, just here checking on your water pressure.”
He laughs, then cocks his head toward the bathroom. “You want to check it out? Let’s go.”
I blush hard. Damn, he’s good.
“Sir, I’m from the Greater Chicago Water Conservation Bureau. We never shower.” Point Greer for deflecting the flirt. “Do you know that the water from one shower could be used to brew hundreds of lattes?”
He laughs again, and he is too bright for this moment, too. Sooner or later I’m going to have to tell him why I’m here, but I don’t want to. I’ve practiced: I’m going to look him straight in the eye and tell him that I changed my mind about the formal, that I hope we can still be friends, but that I think it would be better if he asked someone else. That’s my plan. I will be frank and matter-of-fact, and he won’t ask any questions—he’ll probably be relieved—and we will go our separate ways, and I won’t make up fantasies about his towel falling off anymore and he can get on with his life as a normal person and go to the fancy things with Angela Merkel from German class.
“Aha! I thought I recognized you. You’re from Starbucks.”
My face is hot again, thinking about the day I met him, thinking about how I’ve been thinking about him every day since then. Thinking how it was so good, when it was just that, but I wanted more than that, and now I am stuck here. “Ja, und du are ein German business fellow.” It comes out too quiet and sad.
He can hear it, too. He tips his head and says nothing.
“Willst du Kartoffelsalat?” I try. He texted that one day when I was at practice and had said I was starving. It means “Do you want potato salad?” and was one of the first phrases he learned. I liked it so we sent back and forth pictures and recipes of potato salad until the assistant coach told me to go put my phone in the locker room. Why does Kartoffelsalat make me want to cry now?
“What’s up, Greer?” That obnoxious, glaring sun lights up the pink shiny line on his forehead where his stitches were, caught in a wrinkle while he waits for me to answer.
It’s now or never, and since never isn’t an option, it’s now. “I wanted to talk—” I can’t look at him, because he is bright and kind and curious and then I will not be able to pretend this isn’t killing me. So, I look above his head and that’s when I notice that there is something new in the line of things on top of the bookshelf. There’s Batman in Lego boat, Beanie iguana, Aquarium cup, tennis trophy, all the usuals, and right on the end, a mug with a picture of a dog, a car, and a briefcase orbiting around a coffee. The one from Cupernicus. What is that doing here?
“About anything in particular?” he prompts.
I’m tempted to ask about the mug but I’ve started down this path that I don’t want to be on, plus I’m not sure I want to know anyway. “Yeah. Sorry. I wanted to talk about the formal.”
“Okay.” He waits, and when I don’t say anything he adds, “I was thinking we could Uber from your house.”
“Yeah,” I say, still distracted by that mug. Why does he have that? He has like four things. “That’s not what I mean. I, um, I’m not going to go.”
“You’re not going to go?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I thought I could, but I can’t.” Why isn’t it in the kitchen? Why is it with an iguana and a Batman?
“You have other plans or something?”
“No. I mean, not exactly.” What makes those things a set?
“Oh. All right.” I couldn’t have imagined it was possible, but Jackson looks self-conscious. Maybe even embarrassed. He looks like I probably look every time I see one of my parents’ friends who hasn’t seen me in a while. (“Wow, you’ve really gotten . . . taller.”)
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I rush. My practice run was for nothing. That stupid mug keeps making me think about Schnucks and Cupernicus and how I felt that day—goofy and happy and hopeful—and how I thought maybe the formal could be like that, too. But you can’t wear a sweatshirt to a formal, and I can’t be goofy and happy and hopeful wearing a wedding dress made for someone eight months pregnant. I can’t figure out what to say here.
“It’s all right, Greer. I get it.”
“No, you don’t,” I say. He doesn’t get it at all. He thinks I don’t want to go with him, but he is wrong. I would go anywhere with him—Starbucks or Cupernicus or the grocery store or Cleveland—if only I didn’t have to bring the rest of myself along. I look at the tiny dog circling the tiny coffee on the mug. Coper
nicus was an idiot. He thought the universe revolved around the sun. Not to me. To me it revolves around my boobs. “I just,” I stutter, “I just don’t know what I would wear.”
He looks up suddenly. “What?”
I shift between my feet. “I can’t really . . . there’s not really a dress . . .”
“You’re saying you don’t want to go because you can’t find a dress?”
It’s obvious that he thinks it’s stupid, and I feel myself getting defensive. Like now, after all this time, he’s going to think I’m some flaky, ridiculous girl who is being snobby about clothes. Give me some credit.
“You want to wear a suit and I’ll wear a dress?” I can’t tell if he’s kidding. I don’t think he is.
“You don’t understand.” You couldn’t understand. You can just slide into anything—into anywhere—and feel like yourself.
This is going very, very wrong, and I don’t know how to stop it. I should have stuck with the bar mitzvah excuse, but eventually it was going to come to this anyway. I feel like I’m going to cry way too much lately. I didn’t used to. I never cried when life was just school and Maggie and baking shows.
“Or maybe you could just wear your favorite sweatshirt.” It’s a dig. Not a volleyball dig. A mean, sarcastic dig and it takes my breath away.
My favorite?
I look down at my sweatshirt, pilling under the sleeves, starting to fray at the cuffs. He’s right. It is my favorite. It’s my favorite because it’s the most boxy one, way too big, but the sleeves still aren’t too long. It’s my favorite because it’s so heavy, the fleece doesn’t cling or lie close to my body at all. It’s my favorite because the elastic at the bottom isn’t too tight, which makes a top balloon. It’s my favorite because it’s the most plain, nondescript gray, so I can pull it on day after day and people hardly notice. It’s my favorite because I can dig my hands deep in the pocket if I need to feel smaller inside it. He’s right: It’s my favorite.
My Eyes Are Up Here Page 19