“What’d Greer get?” Tyler whines as he follows Mom out.
The Stabilizer has arrived.
CHAPTER 20
This is how I usually put on a bra: Pull it around my waist like a belt. Hook each of the four hooks. Twist it around. Poke my arms through the straps. Lift the front up and over. Tuck everything in. I can’t reach around back to hook it while it’s already covering me like you’re supposed to, because the whole thing is too tight. I don’t have the lats to pull it together.
There is always a half-inch gap between the bottom of the bra and my body, because the cups aren’t actually big enough. My boobs squeeze out and over the sides like an overfilled muffin tin. Instead of a sexy little dip of cleavage like you’d see in a Victoria’s Secret ad, mine looks like a butt crack going straight up to my neck.
Right away the Stabilizer looks different from my old sports bra. There are several sets of hooks, and the straps are threaded in and out like one of those pot holders you make on a toy loom. If you pull on one part, it shifts and tightens all the other parts. Imagine levers and pulleys and stretchy belts. Imagine if M. C. Escher and Rube Goldberg designed a bra.
Fortunately, it comes with directions. Yes. Directions. For a bra. Unfortunately, they are a little hard to follow. There’s a page of illustrations of a woman adjusting all the dimensions, and the address for a YouTube video “for more ways to wear the Stabilizer.” But first I have to actually get inside the thing and how to do that isn’t as obvious as you’d think. I wrap it around my waist and put my arm through a hole, but there’s not another hole that looks the same for my other arm, so that can’t be right. I flip it over, thinking maybe it’s upside down, but now all the hooks are facing in. I stare at the illustration, trying to match up the crisscross of the various straps with the tangle of spandex in front of me.
I try every combination of looping, tying, and strapping, until I more or less get it on. The hooks come around the sides instead of the back, and when you cinch the straps that go over your shoulders, they also adjust through the cups. It’s generally bra shaped, but a very complicated bra. Like if the engineers at SpaceX invented a bra. It would be ten times easier to get it all perfect if I had another person here, but the only other one home is Dad and neither of us wants to make my new sports bra a family project.
Once I’m in and adjusted, it feels pretty good. It’s tight, for sure, but not so tight I can’t breathe. When I wear my too-small sports bra over my too-small regular bra, it feels like a boa constrictor. This is more like a bear hug.
I do a little jump. It feels okay. I do a bigger one. I can’t quite tell, so I jump up and down a bunch of times in a row. They aren’t flopping! It’s not like they’re not moving, because I’m not made of stone, but they are moving with me, like my arms do, like my nose does. Like they are part of my body and not just a purse or a couple of sacks of potatoes I threw over my shoulder.
I lift my arms above my head. The fabric stretches, but it doesn’t ride up. I wave my arms over my head like I’m trying to get the attention of a rescue plane, but everything stays where it’s supposed to. When I put my arms down, everything is still where it’s supposed to be. Nothing rubs wrong, either. The fabric is soft.
And the people on the site were right: There are distinctly two breasts, not one monster one. This is a relief, because I’ve been having to use Jessa’s Glide between Maude and Mavis, and even still, they are red and raw.
“Greer?” my dad yells from downstairs. “Want to watch the British Baking Show with me?”
“I’ll be down in a minute!” Part of me wishes I could show him the thing because he loves gadgets, but the other 99 percent of me plans to keep this feat of engineering to myself.
I try something I haven’t done in years: I turn a cartwheel in the space between my bed and my closet. I whack my leg on my nightstand on the way down. It hurts like I’ve cracked my shin bone in half, but my breasts feel great. I don’t even have to tug the bra back down.
In the bathroom mirror, it looks like I’ve fallen through the webbing of a lawn chair and gotten tangled up, or like I’m a sporty mummy. But I feel more like I’ve put on a safety net. And if you attached a cable to it, maybe I could even fly.
CHAPTER 21
Kate Wood and Jessa find me before math. It’s the last day of tryouts. Coach R will post the rosters on Monday. Kate’s heard a bunch of rumors from her sister, who is one of the varsity captains.
“Emma says seniors are automatically on varsity, so Eva Frank and Arianna whatsherbutt will be on varsity even though they suck. I mean, not to be mean or whatever.”
“That’s fine.” I shrug. “I didn’t have a shot at varsity anyway.”
“But that means that somebody who would have been on varsity will take a spot on JV!”
“Right, but those seniors who would have been on JV move up to varsity, so the numbers are the same.”
Kate ignores my logic. She thinks we should be worried about this news. Maybe they use a different kind of math in sports where twelve girls on one squad does not equal twelve girls on another. She starts in on a bunch of hypothetical volleyball rosters. It’s more complicated than the electoral college.
Someone bumps the back of my knee, the kind of thing that makes your legs fold but doesn’t knock you over. Jackson doesn’t say anything, just waves as he keeps going, not wanting to interrupt the volleyball summit. The redheaded girl who always tries to drag him to class early to conjugate verbs will be whatever the German word for happy is. I watch him like he’s a birthday balloon disappearing into the clouds. Kate doesn’t pause for a second.
“And Nasrah Abdullahi will for sure make it ’cuz she’s so tall.”
Nasrah is a ninth grader who has never played either, but she’s almost six feet and a pretty amazing athlete. Jessa says Reinhold practically drooled when Nasrah walked in to tryouts.
Jessa and Kate are going through the list of girls at tryouts, trying to determine where our real competition is. Or really, where my competition is, because Jessa is awesome, the best of the underclassmen, and Kate’s been playing in a competitive league since she was ten.
Way down the hall, Jackson is stopped outside of class with Red Hair. She’s leaning on him and laughing, like he’s telling some hilarious story. I wonder if he’s telling it in real German or the kind of funny broken German he uses on me.
“There’s one other thing that Emma said. About you.” Jessa brings me back to real life.
“What?”
Kate says, “She said they were talking about all the new girls and the thing that everyone said about you was that you might be good, but it’s like you just aren’t comfortable or something. Like you’re distracted.”