“Do we need a different size of anything?”
I mean it, lady. “I’m not sure that would help.”
“What’s not working for us?”
Unless you are prepared to squish inside this too-small triple-D polyester torture chamber, there is no us. I am very alone in here. “Um, they are too tight in the top.”
Long pause.
“Why don’t we take some measurements?” The door handle rattles but I’ve got it locked.
“No, thank you.” I don’t need measurements. Your dresses can’t count that high anyway.
I hear Jessa now. “She has pretty big boobs. That might be it.”
I glare at the door, hoping she can feel the heat of my gaze through it. Jessa has still not learned that We Don’t Talk About Greer’s Breasts. Jessa still believes We Talk About Whatever Comes to Mind. Usually volleyball. Sometimes protein shakes. Occasionally breasts.
I try the other dresses, each one worse than the one before. I’m leaning out the door in a T-shirt telling Kate she looks great when TM appears holding hangers in each hand. “I thought this blue might look lovely with your . . .” And somewhere in the middle of this sentence her gaze drifts from my face, lands at my chest, and stays there. “. . . eyes,” she finishes.
Those aren’t my eyes, I think. My eyes are up here, I think. “Thanks,” I say, and take the dresses into my hellhole.
Why do schools even have formal dances anymore? Don’t adults complain my generation only interacts on screens? Why can’t we have a VR dance? I’d make my avatar a B cup. Maybe I’d give her swords for arms, too.
More consulting through the door. More failed attempts in the fitting room. But Tape Measure won’t give up. She keeps bringing things, a couple at a time, and flopping them over the top of the door. She’s gone from slinky to flowy, but everything, absolutely everything, is made for someone whose upper circumference is smaller than a snow tube. Zippers ain’t gonna zip, lady.
Everybody else has moved on to jewelry. I told Jess to go with them. Eventually, I stop trying on what she brings me. I just take it from her at the door and hang it in the room, because none of it is going to work. None of it even comes close. I try not to think about what this means, because it means I’m going to have to make up an excuse not to go. I should have realized this right away and told Jackson I was going to be in New Mexico at a bar mitzvah or something. Now it’s going to seem like I just don’t want to go with him.
I scrunch on the bench playing games on my phone while the fitting room closes in like an overflowing closet.
“Now, this is a different route we could try. Remember we can alter anything.” The toes of TM’s cream pumps are peeking under the door into my fitting room. A circus-tent worth of fabric comes flopping over the top of the dressing room door. I decide I’ll give her one last shot and then get out of here.
The dress is long, loose, and flowy. Everything else she picked out was colorful, but this is plain white. I slide it on and manage to get the long zipper most of the way up the back. A tiny bit of help and I could make it to the top, breasts and all. It’s too big around the middle though—strangely big—not to mention that it’s long and white. But I did manage to get Maude and Mavis contained, so that’s good. And then I see myself in the mirror.
The tag hanging from the armpit says “Suzanne’s Bridal Maternity Collection.”
I am dressed as a pregnant bride.
This time I don’t bother rehanging the dress. I just leave it in a pool on the floor and stomp on it on my way out. I don’t say a word to Tape Measure, who is waiting outside with the same placid grin she’s been wearing all day, that she probably wears every day, that she has probably trained herself to sleep in.
Jessa and the others are having a ball in the accessories section. They don’t even notice me as I fly through the store and out to the sidewalk. I’ll text Jess an apology later. I just need to be alone.
I mean we just need to be alone. The three of us.
CHAPTER 57
Quinlan opens the door before I knock, like she’s been waiting for me. Maybe she’s been watching out the window. Maybe she saw me pause at the driveway, then walk past the house, then circle back and get halfway up the drive, then leave again, sit on the curb, fidget with my phone, then finally come up to the front door.
If she’s seen all that, she doesn’t say anything about it. She just says, “Hi, Greer,” and steps back to let me in. Her pajama bottoms have tiny whales with lacrosse sticks on them.
She notices that I’m looking at them and says, “I wanted volleyballs, but they only had these racket things.” She points to a lacrosse stick. Several inches of bony ankle are visible at the bottom of her pants, the skin so pale it’s almost purple. I wonder if she has any pants that are long enough.
“Those are lacrosse sticks. Tyler plays lacrosse.”
“But you play volleyball.”
“Yeah. I just started. Lacrosse is fun, too, though. Tyler likes it because sometimes people hit each other with sticks.” She giggles.
“Thanks for the books you gave me,” she says.
LOANED you, I think, but I say, “Did you read any of them yet?”
“Almost all. I’m reading Artemis Fowl.” Artemis Fowl! That’s what else is missing. “Do you have all the Artemis Fowls?”
“I do.”
“Did you read them all?”
“Of course.”
“Jackson only read the first three.” I’m not surprised by this.
“I think the first few are the best anyway,” I tell her.
“That’s what usually happens. But then I feel like I have to read them all anyway and then I get mad at the author because it’s like they’re not letting me read someone else’s book that I would like better.” I laugh, because it’s exactly how I feel, too.
“Oh, it’s Greer.” Melinda comes to the entry. “Is your mom with you?” She looks around me, like maybe my mother is hidden behind my boobs.
“No, I just needed to talk to Jackson for a minute.”
“Sure. I think he’s getting out of the shower. Hang on.” She bounds up the stairs, leaving me with Quinlan and a mental picture of Jackson in the shower, lathery and drippy, his abs lined like a crustacean. The butterfly mimes a striptease, but I poke my finger hard in my side to stop her. Knock it off. You need to let this go.
“Is that real?” Quin is squinting at my necklace, the diamond pendant Mom saved for me when Grandma died. (Technically, she bought it from Tiffany with money from selling Grandma’s jewelry to an antique shop. She figured it was still like the necklace came from my dead grandmother, but this way it was a little classier than the chunky rhinestone stuff her mother liked.)