Coach Reinhold steps onto the court, looking ninety shades of furious, and I assume that she’s coming to tell Nasrah that she has to lose the neon-pink shoelaces, because that happened once before. But Coach passes Nasrah and grabs me by the elbow. She pulls me off the court, and now the entire gym is interested.
She’s holding a binder that Ironman brought with him—about nine thousand pages of rules and regulations from the State High School Athletic Commission.
“Walsh, I’m sorry, but he’s challenging the legality of your jersey.” She says it softly, so no one else can hear, but even at a near whisper, I can hear how upset she is.
She shows me the page in the book that lists all the rules—how many inches the letters can be, how many contrasting colors can be where, how long the shirts have to be. There are dozens of very specific things to complain about, probably put together by a team of people with personalities as lovable as that Ironwood coach’s. Most people hardly notice the changes we made to make my uniform fit, but the other coach is very concerned about my top.
The problem is the gold part in the back of my uniform—where Glinda the Good Witch’s dress shows through the maroon mesh. Our libero (and if you don’t know volleyball, just know that there’s one player who has a different color shirt, like the goalkeeper in soccer) wears gold, and the rules say, basically, that everybody else’s jersey can only have a weensy bit of gold on it or the ref might get confused about who is who.
If this ref can’t tell the difference between Kate Wood, whose libero jersey is so perfectly golden it looks like she stole it from a pirate chest, and my hodgepodge of leftover fabric scraps, we’ve got bigger problems than uniforms. But Coach You’re-Thirsty-When-I-Say-You’re-Thirsty is going to have a tantrum if I try to play in this shirt.
I glance up from the rule book and see that my teammates are all trying to figure out what’s wrong. On the bleachers, my dad is half standing. He doesn’t know what’s going on either, but you can see him debating whether he should come to help, because he’s my dad, or leave me alone, because I’m not a child. I turn away, because if he thinks I can’t handle it, he will come, and that will make it worse. I don’t need anybody else looking at me.
“I need you to go put Timms’s jersey on.”
I shake my head.
“She won’t mind. You’ll trade back when varsity starts.”
“I can’t,” I manage. “It won’t fit.”
“Timms is a pretty big girl. I think it will work.”
I squeeze my eyes and shake my head. I already know it won’t. My jersey was the same size as Jessa’s before Ms. K-B altered it. Even if I could get it over my chest, I wouldn’t be able to move. I wish I’d taken sign language instead of Spanish because if I try to talk, no sound is going to come out anyway.
“Kid, I know this guy is just busting balls because he can, but he’s not going to back down. He’s a grade A whatnot. Please, Greer. We need you.” It is probably the first time she’s ever called me Greer instead of Walsh, and I can see that she knows she’s asking a lot, so I head toward the locker room to try. She sends Jessa down after me. I don’t look at the bleachers, where there are hundreds of eyes watching me go. Why did you all have to come to this game?
If I can’t play, Coach will start Kaia Beaumont, which is pretty much the same as sending a tiny, blindfolded kitten wearing roller skates into the game. Not only will we lose, Kaia will probably die.
Jessa releases a long string of swears about the guy, but understands that sports come with meaningless technicalities and has whipped off her shirt before we’re down the stairs. She stands there in her sports bra, sides bulging over her shorts, holding out a shirt that’s already got pit stains despite the fact that varsity hasn’t even warmed up.
I swallow my usual self-consciousness and peel off my jersey. She’s the only person on the planet who has seen me in this bra. Maybe her jersey will have stretched out from all her dives, digs, jumps, and stretches. Maybe it will show me some mercy, because nobody else up there is going to.
I get my head through the hole and my arms in the sleeves, but the jersey basically stalls in the middle of my breasts. The fabric rolls and bunches at the limit of its stretchiness. It’s pulled so tight the maroon dye fades to pink. I empty all the air from my lungs. Maybe I can play taking only tiny breaths. I inch it down. Jessa works on the back, yanking so hard she almost pulls me over. We get the shirt over the main hump(s), but it will not come down far enough to meet the waist of my shorts.
I stand in front of the mirror, looking like I’ve borrowed a top from one of Quin’s American Girl dolls. I am humiliated and the only other person who’s even seen me yet is Jessa. Virtually everyone else I know and a whole lot of people I don’t are waiting for me to walk back through that door. I blink hard. I. Can. Not. Go. Out. There.
Jessa bites her lip. “Um, can you move?”
I raise one arm, slowly. I raise the other one, and all our progress pulling the shirt down is undone. It pulls right back up. Even from here, I can hear the crowd in the gym.
“What are you doing down here?” Maggie is suddenly behind me in the mirror. I’ve got Jessa’s jersey squeezing down the top halves of my breasts, while the bottoms squeeze out over my bare belly like an upside-down push-up bra. Maggie’s eyes bug out like a cartoon.
Here’s the weird thing: Instead of being horrified that Maggie is seeing me like this, I laugh. What else can I do? And when I laugh, Mags and Jess know that it’s okay if they do, too. And they do. We all do. Hard. So much that I have to sit down on the bench and Maggie has tears running down her face. So much that Jessa can barely catch her breath between hyena gasps.
“Oh god, Greer, get out of that thing before it strangles you.” Maggie is giggling. She and Jessa each take an edge and roll the jersey off me. I’m back to square half-naked. Two of us are sitting there without shirts on, and for once I’m not trying to cover up everything I can.
“That’s a sports bra?” Somehow Max must have scraped up every last bit of sports-related DNA before Maggie was even conceived.
“The finest money can buy.”
“Jeez. Now what do we do?” says Jessa.
“I can’t wear yours. I don’t think they’re going to let me play.”
“What are you talking about? They can’t do that. You’ve been rehearsing for months.”
Jess is about to correct her, but I interrupt, “She knows. She does that on purpose.” I explain about the uniform and the nasty coach from the other team.
“Jessa, run up and get that binder,” Maggie says. Jessa is half out the door when Mags stops her. “You want to put on a shirt first?”