Another girl walked past with her mom, both of them with matching Gucci bags. It was like I shouldn’t even try. What was the point in getting some new sneakers or jeans? They weren’t going to help me fit in here.
It was a losing battle. And one that I didn’t want my grandmother to dedicate herself to.
“Grandma, you really don’t have to buy me stuff,” I said.
“There are rips in your jeans.”
“That’s the style,” I promised.
“Not in Bayport,” she retorted, marching into J.Crew.
I hung back, slightly terrified, as she prowled the racks, picking out “sensible basics” that I never would have chosen.
But then, I never shopped here. It was way too expensive. My mom and I shopped at the outlet mall, or at thrift stores, where you could buy like an entire wardrobe for the cost of one J.Crew sweater.
Although I doubted asking my grandmother to drop me off at the nearest Goodwill would go over well.
“These aren’t really my style,” I said meekly, after checking a price tag.
Not that I had a style. At my old school, I’d copied the status quo, wearing whatever my classmates wore to blend in. Secretly, though, I loved fashion. I followed influencers on YouTube and Instagram, studying their haul videos and their outfit posts, and wondering what would happen if anyone showed up at Randall High wearing over-the-knee boots with a beret and a plaid blazer.
“You’re sixteen, your style will change,” she said confidently. “Now what size do you wear in jeans?”
“Um, twenty-eight,” I said.
“You should try the twenty-sevens, just in case,” she said, leaving the twenty-eights on the table and hurrying me into the dressing room.
I barely had time to put on the first sweater before she’d peeled aside the curtain to get a look.
“Perfect,” she said. “We’ll get three.”
I almost choked. They were sixty dollars each.
“I don’t need three,” I said. I didn’t even need one. I had never in my life worn a merino wool cardigan.
“It’s my treat,” my grandmother insisted eagerly. “Now try the jeans.”
They were too small. Of course they were. I couldn’t even get them over my hips.
“I told you, I’m not a twenty-seven,” I said, embarrassed.
“Well, that’s a shame.” Eleanor frowned. “Are you trying to lose weight?”
“No,” I said, puzzled.
“Why not?” she asked, like it was a perfectly reasonable question.
“Um, well . . .” I blinked at her, unsure how to answer. I didn’t have a problem with my weight. But apparently my grandmother did. This whole time I’d been panicking over price tags, but it turned out she’d been obsessing over the sizes.
Thankfully, the sales associate interrupted, asking if she could bring some new sizes, and as she made sympathetic eye contact, I realized that she’d overheard everything.
Even with bags of new clothing, courtesy of my grandmother’s credit card and her philosophy on sensible basics, I still wasn’t ready for school to start. But for some reason, my worry wasn’t audible. If anything, my grandparents read my nervousness as excitement. Or maybe they just saw what they wanted to see, which would explain a lot.
“Big day tomorrow,” my grandfather said at dinner that night. “You must be excited.”
“Yep,” I lied, smiling weakly.
“This is the year that colleges look at the most,” my grandmother added, passing around a Pyrex dish of green beans.
“I know,” I said.
They kept reminding me. Lately, my acceptance into a good college was one of their favorite conversation topics. They fixated on it with a laser focus, and I got that it was something exciting for them, so at first I’d encouraged it.
Maybe it was pathetic of me, but hearing my grandparents give advice about majors and SATs made me feel closer to my mom. I imagined her sitting in the same seat when she was my age, having the same conversation.
My mom was smarter than anyone I knew. Always reading—she was the one who had gotten me into the Lost Generation—and watching old movies, forever talking about long-dead artists and writers as though they were great friends of hers, as though Freddie Mercury or Dorothy Parker or Salvador Dali had sat in her salon chair just that afternoon, getting a trim. She’d gone to Claremont, a fancy private college halfway between Los Angeles and the San Bernardino Valley. She didn’t finish, though. Thanks to my dad, and a course of antibiotics that made her birth control pills totally ineffective.
And now my grandparents had descended on me as though I were her do-over, their second chance to do everything right. As though, this time, they might actually get an invitation to a college graduation, instead of an insurance bill for an ultrasound scan.
So I smiled and listened as they talked about advanced placement classes and the best times to go on college tours, nodding along and saying yes, sure, that sounded great.
“And of course you already know Cole Edwards,” my grandmother added. “Such a nice boy.”
“A very good family, the Edwardses,” my grandfather added.
“It’s not like I’m marrying him,” I said, resisting the urge to sigh.
“You never know,” my grandfather said cheerfully.
Believe me, I did. I was already preparing to watch him from across the cafeteria, where he probably sat at a table full of intimidating jocks and their equally intimidating girlfriends. I pictured them easily: the type of girls who never got period pimples, and who wore lacy thongs during the mile run in gym, and who were always slathering their legs in seasonally scented lotion.
I zoned out, thinking about those girls, because there were always those girls. And they always seemed to know that I wasn’t like them. I ate some green beans, relieved we weren’t discussing my future anymore. Instead, my grandfather was talking about the new dental hygienist he’d been to see that morning.
“I asked what her husband did for a living,” he said, swallowing a mouthful of veal, “and she said she had a wife.”
My grandmother smiled tensely, sipping at her sugar-free organic iced tea.
“A wife,” my grandfather repeated.
“We heard you, Joel,” my grandmother said.
I slid down in my seat, inwardly cringing.
“I didn’t know what to say, so I just said ‘oh,’” he continued.
“Well, you could have asked what her wife did,” I said.
He stared at me. Blinked. Like the thought hadn’t even occurred to him.
“It’s just a suggestion,” I mumbled.
“I didn’t know she was a lesbian,” my grandfather said, shaking his head.
“So what?” my grandmother said, her expression scathing.
Go Eleanor, I thought. I assumed she was about to tell him not to be so closed-minded, but what she said instead was, “The woman’s a dental hygienist, not our next-door neighbor.”
I pushed some food around on my plate, my appetite gone. Like a lot of older people, my grandparents sometimes said things that were kind of racist. But I’d never heard them say anything outright homophobic before. And while discussing a total stranger, whose life didn’t matter to them. It made me so uncomfortable.