I’m caught completely off guard. They don’t even know how perfect their timing is because they didn’t see the way my mom looked at me before the game. I walk as fast as I can to the locker room, my shoulders rounding forward as I go. I must be down to three feet tall at this point.
People aren’t chatty like they were after our last match, when we won. It’s mostly quiet as players change out of their uniforms. I blow by them, slam open my locker, and jerk my bag out. I rip through it to find my sweatshirt, even though I’m sweating like crazy. I pull it over my head and I am safe inside fleece again.
I’m so mad I could chew through my kneepads. I’m mad at those stupid kids, but I’m more mad at myself for letting them get to me—and for the fact that they’re long gone on their way to Dairy Queen and they are still getting to me. Not this. Don’t take this from me. I just need to get up to Mom and Ty and we can go home.
“Walsh? You okay?” Jessa stops me before I get to the door.
“What? Yeah, I’m fine. My mom’s waiting.”
“It’s just a game. Win some, lose some or whatever, right?”
“I know. I’m fine.” I am obviously not fine, or Jessa wouldn’t be standing in front of me trying to reassure me. There is a poster about bullying behind her head, and I can see a sliver of my reflection in the silver frame around it. My cheeks are the same color as my jersey. I am so fucking hot and tired.
“Coach is just trying to get everybody court time early in the season.”
“I know, Jessa. It wasn’t a great game, but it’s not that big a deal.”
“Okay, good then, ’cuz you’re really looking good out there.”
“Thanks.” She’s trying hard, and even though I definitely do not want to talk, I love her for it. “It’s not the game. Some kid just said something to me and it kind of rattled me. But it’s fine. I’m fine.”
“What’d they say?”
“Something about my uniform.” She looks at me blankly, like she is trying to imagine what someone might say about a person’s uniform that would be upsetting. “He said he liked my uniform.”
“They are really cool this year.” She slides her hands over her silky sleeves with approval.
“That’s not what he meant.”
Jessa cracks a smile. “You think he likes you?”
“No.” Do I really have to explain this? “No. I think he was making a comment about the way my uniform fit. Like about my chest.”
Jessa’s smile fades. “Like a mean comment?”
“Well, I don’t think he was trying to flatter me. I think he just wanted to embarrass me.” Jessa frowns. “It worked.”
Jessa’s eyebrows come together, and her shoulders rise a bit. It’s the same thing that happens if we’re down when she’s serving, or she hears someone on Varsity badmouthing a JV player. “Do you think they’re still up there? I could go up and say something to him. Or I could go with you if you want?”
“I’m sure they’re gone. It’s fine.” It would not feel any better to slouch behind Jessa while she tells the other team’s boyfriends to leave the girl with the boobs alone, but it’s just like her to offer. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, but you don’t worry about it, either, okay? Those guys are assholes.”
I think maybe it really is that easy for Jessa. Like if she was me, she’d decide not to worry about the assholes, and then go play a killer game of volleyball. She wouldn’t shrink into herself. She wouldn’t crawl inside a giant sweatshirt. She would feel the way I would feel if a teacher handed out a pop quiz, or asked us to write five pages over the weekend about how the Bill of Rights both mirrored British law and expanded protections, or accidentally included problems in the homework that shouldn’t be covered till Calc II. “What an asshole.” Then I’d nail it anyway.
The confidence I have in my brain is the confidence Jessa has in her body, and in what her body can do.
I don’t understand her at all.
CHAPTER 36
I found Kelsey Tambor and Peevish Pru after I was walking from the ice cream place to Tahlia’s and someone yelled “I like your tits” out his car window. Maggie went on a diatribe about the way young males act out against women when the patriarchy is threatened. Tahlia yelled, “I bet you do, dickface.” I went home and searched for “clothes that conceal breasts” and “tops for big boobs” and “make boobs look smaller.”
My search yielded a lot of useless things, a few semi-useful things (turtlenecks are bad; dark colors are good), and two YouTubers who seemed like they knew what I was talking about.
Peevish Pru is a Brit, and probably smart not to use her real name because she pisses a lot of people off. She posts a rant once a week about things that bother her, and she’ll probably go on forever because that includes a lot of things: German tourists, climate change, Americans trying to do British accents, fake hellos, long goodbyes, Crocs, men who expect her to shave, women who expect her to shave, genetic engineering, reading glasses as a fashion accessory, grammar mistakes (especially apostrophes), and her own bulbous baps.
She reminds me a little of Maggie, because she gets annoyed about so many things; and a little of me, because two of those things are her breasts.
But she’s different from Maggie because she’s rather a snob, which I don’t think Maggie is. And she’s different from me because she doesn’t sound angry at her body—she sounds angry on behalf of her body. She’s not mad that her boobs are so big. She’s mad at the store that sells slinky camisoles for not making one that would fit her. And the constant questions on Twitter about whether they are “real.” And the massage therapist who didn’t have any way of positioning her when she said she couldn’t lie on her stomach. (“I’ve got this gift card from me mum because she knows how stressed I’ve been, but I cahnt even use it because I cahnt lie down on that on that stupid table. And then the massage therapist suggests we try the special cushion she has for ladies who are pregnant, where there’s a hole for their bump? No, thank you. I’m not preggers, thank you very much. I left that massage more stressed than before.”)
The unfairness of the world toward her breasts is one of her favorite topics to rant about. She has definitely never helped anyone find a shirt that camouflages curves or suggested hacks to make boobs look smaller, and I bet if someone asked about it, she’d rant about the question itself. In the comments on a post about being squashed by a safety bar at Disney Paris, someone asked whether she’d ever have breast reduction surgery, and she replied, “Why should I want my boobs to be smaller? Why shouldn’t I want the world to be bigger?”