Near the end of summer, Buster wanted me to come back to New Jersey to record. The choir thing did not go over very well with the crowds, and I was really interested in doing solo stuff anyway. My mother wanted me to take a break and just focus on school for a bit.
“Just be an eighth grader,” she said. “Try being a cheerleader.”
Be a cheerleader, they said. It will be fun, they said.
4
Cheerleader Blues
Fall 1993
“Hey, Jessica,” said a bright voice behind me.
I was between classes at North Richardson Middle School, walking from eighth-grade English, which I loved, to Pre-Algebra, which I hated. It was a guillotine walk every day, so I turned quickly in hope of rescue or at least distraction. It was a blond boy, smiling with four other boys. They were ninth graders, and they were all cute.
“Hi,” I said.
“You know,” the blond boy said, “you’ll make more friends if you jump up and down.”
“Really?”
“It’s a trick, but it totally works,” he said.
I jumped up and down, once. A short hop.
“No, no,” he said. “Keep going.”
I did it some more, higher, and the boys seemed mesmerized.
“There you go,” he said, smirking.
A girl walked by, hissing at me, not them. “Ugh,” she said. “They just want to see your boobs bounce.”
“No, they—” They laughed, and I knew it was true. But I laughed along with them.
“You know that,” she said, sneering at me as the boys ran to class. I tried to talk to her, but she kept moving. Honestly, I’d come to trust the intentions of boys over girls after the way some girls had treated me. I had a core group of girlfriends who I loved, but they were all from youth group at church. They went to other schools, and it was like when I saw them, I was Dorothy when life turned technicolor. If boys were nicer to me because of my breasts, well, at least they were nice to me.
Ugh, my breasts were so annoying to me. In the eighth grade, they were already a D-cup. I hated them when I started developing in the fifth grade. As they were growing, I started wearing baggier and baggier T-shirts, thinking I could hide them because no one else had them. By the end of fifth grade I was a B-cup, but I thought I had mastered magician-level skills of sleight of hand, crossing my arms over my chest and constantly pulling at my shirt. I didn’t like how they made older kids and men look at me differently, but they also just made me feel like I was getting fat. I couldn’t wear what other kids wore. My daughter wears a blazer uniform for school and I just thank God that I didn’t have to. I could not have pulled off that look.
Finally, my mother confronted me, and bought me a sports bra. She tried so hard to make me feel okay about it. “It’s how God made you and God loves you,” she told me again and again.
Not everyone was so nice. In seventh grade the pastor at our church nearly grabbed my mother after I performed at the service.
“Jessica can’t sing in front of the church because—” he paused. “You could see her breasts.”
“Her breasts?”
“Her nipples!” he said, trying not to yell for all to hear.
“Well, why the hell are you looking?” my mother asked. She was always that tiger mom. She had her own resentment about putting so much into the church and not getting credit. Any slight to her family gave her the release valve of anger.
“She will make men lust!”
“She’s thirteen!”
Mom had to explain the nipple controversy and I thought I’d done something wrong. “I’m just catching the spirit of the Lord,” I said. The compromise was big vests for summer and roomy blazers for winter. Anytime I sang, I had to cover myself. I got my revenge in little ways. I would intentionally laugh loud during church. Any odd thing that happened, I would let it rip, and the pastor would shush me in front of five hundred people. My dad hated it, but my mom would laugh, too.
It wasn’t just my pastor. When I performed at abstinence rallies, people were especially hard on me. I would be wearing the exact same shorts and T-shirts other girls my age wore and get yelled at for dressing sexy. When I did a big Southern Baptist youth conference, singing in front of nearly 20,000 people at Reunion Arena, I wore flowery Doc Martens, black leggings, a T-shirt, and a white button-up vest. To be safe, my mom even put a second denim vest over me. I wanted to look exactly like Rebecca St. James, who was also on the bill. She was a huge Christian singer at the time, beloved in that same outfit.
Right before I went on, the guy who was leading the music for the conference approached me and my mom. He looked at me a long time, and then turned to my mother. “You know that she is an abomination to the Lord,” he said quietly, deliberately emphasizing each word to maximize my shame and my mother’s complicity.
“Excuse me?”
“Yes,” he said, pointing a meaty finger at me. “Dressed like that. People are going to look at her. And they are only going to see what she is wearing.”
“What is she wearing that’s wrong?” my mother asked. She was genuinely confused, and so was I. He walked away as they announced my name from the stage.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “You are beautiful.”
I went out there, smiled, and sang my heart out for my allotted two songs. My heart was pounding, but it was the start of that feeling I get when I’m performing: Once I get going, I don’t want to leave the stage. But sure enough, I got slammed for my outfit. Even though I dressed exactly like Rebecca, I was dancing around up there so I guess things were bouncing.
Being a preacher’s daughter, I was used to being looked at and held to a higher standard. But having people focus on something completely different than what I was trying to do was strange. “Wait,” I wanted to say. “I’m singing to God right now. God’s using me right now. Let Him sing through me and stop looking at the vessel.” All that judgment, and it was constant, toughened me up for what would come when the crowds got bigger, I know. But then, I was just thirteen, singing to the Lord and trying to do what He called me to do.
My mom recently joked that middle school was when her life became all about covering my breasts. “Those boobs definitely ruled our planet,” she said. “What were we gonna do, tape them down?”
“Which we did,” I said.
“Well, that was to play Tiny Tim in the seventh-grade pageant.”
“Tim wasn’t so tiny, Mom.”
“Heck no,” she said proudly. “That took a lotta Ace bandages.”
AT LEAST I HAD MY NEW CHEERLEADER FRIENDS. EIGHTH GRADE WAS MY first year putting on the sleeveless green-and-gold-striped uniform to cheer for the Vikings, and I was excited at the idea of being part of a squad. I liked wearing the uniform on game days and I felt like I belonged, which I’d only truly felt at youth group. There were about twenty girls, and they were all popular. I admit that I thought they would be good to recruit to youth group. I was always helping bring people in, not just to “sell it” but because I was rigid in the thought that accepting Christ would save their souls.
There was a girl on the squad who I’ll call Beetlejuice. I call her that because I don’t want to call her by the name of someone you might know or meet in real life. What she did to me was so awful that you might tell that person off out of reflex and I honestly don’t want anybody to get hurt. Beetlejuice and I had sleepovers, and we would camp out in her backyard until the fall Texas air chilled to the point that we would run inside laughing, dragging our sleeping bags into her living room. I still had trouble sleeping, but I would bring a Tylenol PM just in case.