My first try with the ball, I miss it altogether.
The next, it jams my folded pinky and careens directly to the right.
The third, it rockets from my hand and smacks into the ground with enough force to crater the gym floor. (Okay, no, but hard.) The only way it would have made it over a net would be if the net was a foot high and right in front of me, but the sound of that smack gives me a tingling rush anyway.
Reinhold laughs. “Now you get it? It’s not about your arm. Power comes from your whole body.” I pull both sides of my bra back into place as Reinhold shouts to the class, “That’s it—locker rooms.” The others leave the balls rolling around the court and file down to change.
“That was pretty cool, right?” Jessa offers me a fist bump before she heads toward the locker room.
“Walsh,” Ms. R calls. I turn to her brightly. I assume she is going to ask me to try out for the volleyball team and for a moment I am happy. But already my neck and shoulders are starting to ache from the strain of jumping around, and then I remember what the volleyball uniform looks like.
She doesn’t say anything about the team, though. She doesn’t even say I did a good job. She asks me for an email address. She has her phone out and says, “I’m sending you a link.” She hits a couple things with her thumb and slides it back in her pocket. “It’s not strictly school related, though, so don’t get me in trouble,” she says and winks.
Nella is still standing under the basketball hoop with a few boys around her. Ms. R yells over, “The last one in this gym will take down the nets and put away the balls, and no, I will not write you a late pass.”
The boys scatter, except for Griffin. Nella has him by the arm, preventing him from leaving the gym before me. “Run, Greer! I’ve got him!” she yells and laughs. “Go!”
CHAPTER 10
The summer after second grade, I saw a video of Emma Watson when she had really short hair and I told my mother that I wanted a haircut. Right before school started she took me to get a pixie cut. They clippered up past my hairline in the back, and over my right ear, leaving long bangs on one side, the kind that are always falling into one eye. I remember how light my head felt when I walked out, and how fast it dried after a bath. When I see pictures now, I love it. I look like an adorable little boy.
Nella, who had had superlong hair when we left school in June, also happened to return with a short pixie cut, one side longer than the other. It wasn’t exactly the same, because her hair is darker than mine, hers fell into her right eye and mine into my left, and because she already had her ears pierced so no one ever thought she was a boy.
It was close enough, though, that for most of that school year, parents and substitute teachers mixed us up all the time. They’d call me Nella and her Greer (or they’d call me Ella and her Gwen, because we both have the kind of names people don’t quite believe). Kids in other grades would say “You look exactly like that other kid.” And anybody who didn’t know us would say, “Did you plan it?”
With some kids, that would be enough to start a rivalry. The cooler or cuter or meaner kid would resist the comparison. She’d try to distinguish herself or say the other one copied her. It happens when other people try to lump you in with someone else. The two shortest boys in the grade always hate each other. The three kids at the peanut allergy table can’t stand each other.
But Nella ate it up. Right away on the first day when we saw each other, she came up to me and said, “Greer! We’re haircut twins! WE’RE HAIRCUT TWINS!” and held the sides of my arms and bounced like this was the best news she ever heard, even though we only knew each other from school. “AND WE HAVE THE SAME BACKPACK ALMOST!” Her Fjällräven pack was light green with yellow straps; mine was bright blue with yellow straps.
It didn’t make us friends exactly, but for the next few months at least, we were, in her mind and everybody else’s, the haircut twins.
So that’s why it’s especially weird for her to be the most perfect-looking person in my school, and for me to be me. The idea that anyone would ever mistake me and Nella at this point makes as much sense as mistaking a gazelle and a rhinoceros. (I’m the rhino, obviously. A Sumatran—the kind with two horns.)
We both grew out our cuts, because having that kind of hairstyle when you’re a kid kind of sucks. There’s not enough to make a ponytail, which means there’s always hair hanging in your face, which turns out to be annoying as hell. If I hadn’t discovered headbands I never would have made it through third grade. Nella’s hair grew faster, and she could actually do tiny French braids by the time fourth grade started. Everything else on Nella grew faster, too, but on her, it stopped where it should have.
We’ve never talked about it, but I think she still feels like we have some connection. Or at least history. Not enough that we’d hang out or be friends outside of social media. But something. That’s how it is with Nella and everybody. She has this way of responding to a person that makes them feel like it’s nice to be in her orbit. Not just that they want to date her, but also that they just want to sit by her or joke with her or be her haircut twin. All are welcome in the universe she sits so perfectly comfortably at the center of.
And maybe it’s that, even more than the perfect boobs, that I’m most jealous of.
If I could wake up in Nella’s body one morning, I might still be an awkward mess. But, god, would I love to try.
CHAPTER 11
Since we came together over Tyler’s nut cup last week, Jackson has been stopping to talk before first period every day. German III is three doors down from my math, and we’re both usually early. He updates me on adjusting to the new place, and I try not to stare at the cowlick he has over his ear, which is beckoning me to touch it.
We are talking about Quinlan’s third grade troubles. Everybody was supposed to make a poster about a state with three facts on the page.
“I remember that project.” Quin’s school is where Tyler and I went, but a lot of the teachers are different. “Everybody wanted Illinois, so my teacher said no one could have it. I finished Delaware fast and then I did Illinois too.”
“You didn’t do all fifty?”
“Markers ran out.”
“Quin decided she wanted Maine for some reason, but there were already two girls doing Maine, so the teacher gave her Ohio. I think she thought she was being nice, since we just came from there. But Quin drew poops all over Ohio, cut it into tiny pieces, and put them in the guinea pig’s cage. And then she called the teacher a moron and walked out.”
Judging by the call Jackson’s mom got from school, no one else thought it was as funny as I do. I would never have done anything like that. I wouldn’t have even drawn a poop on an assignment if I could erase it after. “Your little sister has balls.”