“Seriously, Jess, you don’t have to do anything in choir. Just show up and sing. It’s the best.” Kate braids her hair as she talks, using an elbow for balance when the bus bangs over a pothole. The bus magnifies every bump and dip, and I feel every one of them in my nipples like a fresh bruise.
According to the tracking app on my phone, it’s T-minus one day till my period and Maude and Mavis are cranky and sore. I had to carry my backpack from the locker loop this morning because they didn’t like the straps rubbing against them. I check the time and it’s been three hours and thirty-nine minutes since my last dose of ibu. Close enough. I want it to kick in before we get to St. Matt’s Prep, because Coach will have us doing pregame drills the second we hit the gym. I dig the little bottle of Advil from my bag and shake two into my palm, think about it a second, and add one more. Long-term liver damage cannot possibly hurt like short-term period boobs.
“What’s wrong?” Jessa asks.
What’s wrong? I’ve hung ten pounds of hot, swollen breast tissue off a skeletal system designed to carry a couple of cotton balls and have been bouncing around on what feels like an unpaved road through a Central American jungle for the last hour, all while processing a surge of undiluted estrogen. I’m a leeeeetle sore.
“Shoulder?” Jess assumes.
“Yeah,” I say, and rub my right shoulder. It’s not a lie. That hurts, too. We worked on hitting and serving the whole practice yesterday, and everybody’s shoulders are sore. I could tell Jess what hurts worse, but Kate’s right there, and nobody would have any advice for me, anyway, so I’d rather let them think I’m just hurting in the way everyone else is.
“Move up by Kate,” Jess says, nudging me out of the seat. I slide in next to Kate. Jess leans forward over the back of my seat, and digs her thumbs into my shoulder, massaging the stiff muscles that run all the way from the side of my neck down to the edge of my armpit. At first it makes me tense up even more. I’m not used to people touching me. Even the little hugs and taps in the games were surprising at first. But Jess finds the tightest knots I wasn’t even aware of, presses and holds hard. It takes my breath away.
“We should tape her,” Kate declares. She’s finished her braids, and they’re totally uneven. I know she’s got multiple rolls of athletic tape in at least three different colors in her bag. Kate and her sister are the Tape Queens. She will mummify your knees or web all your fingers if you let her. I’ve never let her, but maybe today I will. Maybe if it works on my shoulder she can tape up my breasts, too.
“Heya! I’m next over here!” calls Sylvie to Jess. “Captains can’t play favorites.”
“I’ll get to you in a minute, Soop.”
I thank Jess and send her to Sylvie, who takes one arm out of her hoodie to give Jess access to her sore spots. I think Sylvie would whip off her whole shirt if the bus wasn’t so cold.
My shoulder hurts more than it did before Jess started rubbing it, but differently. It’s almost like it pulses. It moves. Like that one part of me has woken up. And at least it’s distracting me from my boobs.
“Did that help at all?”
“Totally,” I say. And I mean it. I don’t know how, but I know it has.
CHAPTER 40
Jackson is ready with a pocketful of quarters when the bus pulls up. There are only a handful of other riders so far, and when I choose a seat facing the middle of the bus, he sits directly across from me. It’s no problem to talk at school, when there are a million people around and there’s only a few minutes to fill, or even at his house when our families could pop in at any minute. Here on a city bus, though, when we are here together by our own volition, it makes it way harder to think of things to say.
The surly silence of the other passengers doesn’t help. If only they were volleyball players filling the seats we could talk about tape or braids or D3 colleges.
“Did you do anything fun last night?” Jackson finally ventures.
“Not really. I watched some stuff and then I fell asleep reading.” This is the edited version of my night, but I don’t want to elaborate. Really I took an extra-long shower after volleyball, shaved my legs, tried on a few tops from the vault in case my boobs shrunk in the shower (they hadn’t), put on PJs, remembered Mom had a cute scarf that might make one of the shirts work (it didn’t), ate dinner, watched Food Network with Dad, went to my room and watched a video of a breast surgery, watched some Amy Schumer clips to get the surgery out of my mind, and fell asleep reading an article about Maryam Mirzakhani. “How about you?”
A woman steers a stroller down the aisle with one hand. There’s a baby in the seat, and a toddler trooping alongside. Jackson gets up so she can position herself and her kids together on that side of the bus. He sits down next to me.
“Thank you,” says the tired mom across the aisle. She smiles at me, like I deserve credit for Jackson being a nice guy.
The bus starts up again. There’s more chatter now, plus the toddler across the way watching a video on his mom’s phone, so I have to lean in to hear him. His hair smells orangey.
“I took Quin ice-skating.”
“At Ice Castle?”
“If that’s the one in the binder.”
“Was it fun?” It seems sweet but weird that Jackson would have agreed to it. He must have been more bored than I was.
“Not really.”
The bus bumps along for a minute before he speaks again.
“Actually, it was kind of a disaster.”
“What happened?” I’m expecting a funny story. Quin assaulted the Zamboni driver. Disney on Ice was rehearsing. He tried a triple lutz and only made a double.
“There was a birthday party there. Some kid from her school. She knew some of them were going skating last night—turns out that’s why she wanted to go—but she didn’t know it was a birthday party. Once she realized they were all there together she bolted.”
Not a funny story. A sad one. I feel awful for the poor kid. It’s terrible to be alone; it’s worse to be reminded that you’re alone.
“I told her to just go up and say hi,” Jackson says. “They were having cake. I’m sure they would have offered her a piece.”
I look at him in disbelief. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Why not? What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“They could reject her? They could laugh at her? They could make her feel worse?”
He’s not buying it. “She says she doesn’t have any friends, and there were a bunch of girls from her school right there.”