“What’s with the arm?” she pants between sucks on her water bottle.
“My bra strap is bugging me.”
She nods, as though she has any idea what I’m talking about. Jessa’s not little, but it looks like every part of her is solid muscle. I doubt her breasts try to go anywhere the rest of her isn’t going. “I’ll give you some Glide.”
I look at her blankly.
“It’s, like, this gel that you use wherever stuff rubs.” I am still staring at her blankly. “A lot of people use it with new shoes. I use it on my thighs. They rub together when I run.”
“Thanks,” I nod, and Jessa gets up to roast another player about her poor sprints to hell and back.
And right there, Jessa Timms and I have had the most intimate conversation about our bodies that I’ve ever had.
CHAPTER 19
“Melinda Oates sure thinks I’m a lifesaver,” says Mom, swirling the wine around her glass. She never drinks more than a few sips of it. She’s usually too busy talking.
“Who’s Melissa Oates?” asks Dad, at the same time I say, “Why are you a lifesaver?”
“Melinda, not Melissa. Melinda is a client of mine, and the reason that I’m a lifesaver is because she’s moved seven times in fifteen years and she says she’s never had the kind of relocation support she has had here.”
Dad forks a spear of asparagus off Mom’s plate. “That’s great, Kits.” This is his name for her, which no one else is allowed to use. “I hope she finds someone half as good as you next time.” Mom beams.
“Why would there be a next time?” I ask. I’m annoyed at myself for the tiny panic I feel.
“Somebody moves seven times in fifteen years,” says Dad, “I doubt they’ll stick around suburban Illinois forever.” He puts a little extra emphasis around “Illinois,” just enough to make me wonder if he wishes he were somewhere more interesting than the middle of the country.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Kennedy might not be the last school Jackson will be the New Kid at. I figured once they got here, here was home. But maybe some dumb girl in Cleveland thought that, too.
Mom is not fazed by this, because to her, the Oateses are clients. Companies pay Relocation Specialists to help with moving in, not moving out, so if they stay or go is irrelevant. In fact, my mom needs families like theirs to keep uprooting all the time so she can get their three-month settlement-support contracts.
I’m distracted by the thought that Jackson won’t be around long enough to fall in love with me. I have no experience with anybody falling in love with me, but I suspect that it might take a long time. On the other hand, if he is going to move, maybe he’ll move before he falls in love with somebody else, so there’s a silver lining.
“How’s volleyball shaking out, G?”
I shrug. “There are eight or nine girls who are awesome, like Olympic-ly awesome. And there are some freshmen who have never played anything that wasn’t on a PlayStation. And everybody else is in the middle.”
“Which part of the middle are you? The top of the middle?”
“I’m okay,” I say. What I don’t say is that I felt better about the whole thing before Coach Reinhold yelled at me for missing a perfectly easy hit because I was adjusting my bra. Or that my blocks look bad because I’m holding down my giant T-shirt while I jump. I’m not exactly a superstar out there.
But now that I’ve been to all those practices, I want to play. Except that at the end of every practice, my breasts ache like they’ve been squeezed in an elevator door. And my shoulders burn from the weight. And now there are rashy red spots under both arms where the bra has been rubbing.
Plus there’s that uniform.
It will be much better if I don’t make the team. Then I can concentrate on the things I am comfortable with: wrecking the curve in math; keeping Maggie from starting a revolution; and making fun of Tyler. And secretly obsessing over Mom’s client’s son.
“I’m sure you’re better than okay.” He goes to squeeze my shoulder, and I shift sideways out of habit. “Where’s your confidence?”
In math class, I think.
“Can we get me some shoes tonight?” Tyler says it with his mouth full of bread, like “Caweegehmeshmoosdanite?”
“You need shoes again?” Mom puts half her chicken on Tyler’s plate. He doesn’t have giant breasts making him look “heavy,” so Mom thinks he’s too thin.
“Yah,” he says between chews.
“Does it have to be tonight?”
“Yah.” He swallows and says, “My gym teacher says I can’t bring those shoes into her presence again.”
“What does that mean?”
He says, “I dunno,” but without any actual words, just that little melody that always goes along with “I dunno.”
Mom goes out to the front to investigate the shoe situation. A second later we hear a cry like she’s found a dead body. “Oh my . . . Oh my god . . .” Worse. Like a client has found a dead body and she doesn’t have any five-star dumpsters to ditch a corpse listed in her re-lo binder. Dad runs out to help and he says, “Jesus effing . . .”
Ty and I stay at the table. “They that bad?” I ask.
“I guess.”
“Did you get them wet or something?”
“I stepped in the creek a couple days ago, but I put ’em in a plastic bag so they wouldn’t get everything else in my locker wet.” He sounds proud that he took such good care of his shoes.
“Tyler, you’ve got to take wet things out of the plastic bag so they can dry. Otherwise stuff starts to grow in them.”
We hear my mother cry out, “HOW is this even POSSIBLE?” and my dad shout, “Just get them out of here!”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Bacteria? Mold?”
“That’s nasty,” says Tyler, as though I’m the nasty one.
The front door opens and closes, and my parents pass through the dining room on their way to the kitchen to boil their hands.
“I can’t get that smell out of my nostrils,” Dad says, blowing his nose into his napkin again and again.
“Tyler, those shoes were a hundred and twenty dollars.”
“Is that a lot?”
“When they last less than a month it is,” Mom says, exasperated. “Let’s go. Master’s closes in an hour. Oh my god. Now I can smell it in here. Did you wear those socks with those shoes today? Get rid of them too.” She drains her whole wineglass for once. “IN THE GARBAGE, TYLER. NOT ON THE TABLE. Oh, Greer, that package you ordered was on the front step.” She tosses a padded envelope at me.