You Can't Catch Me

  You Can’t Catch Me

  Cassie Mae

  writing as

  BECCA ANN

  Dedication

  To those who consider themselves to be “huggable.”

  *squeeeeeeeze*

  COPYRIGHT

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by

  Cassie Mae

  Copyright March 2016

  Cover art done by Makeready Designs

  Edited and formatted by CookieLynn Publishing Services

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This is not a prologue

  I promise, it’s just like an FYI type of thing.

  This is a story about my relationship with my own boobs. Now that may send you running for the hills, hands over your ears, singing under your breath, “I don’t care about your boob relationship, Ginger.” That’s totally fine and all if the word “boobs” makes you uncomfortable. I mean, the word makes me uncomfortable. So for the sake of saving everyone’s comfort levels, I’ve decided to give the word a new name.

  Not that I don’t know that there are several words already out there to describe the female bosom. (Yep, I looked them up. Be happy I’m not calling them something way crasser right now. I mean seriously, every round fruit in the dictionary was mentioned. Even some non-round fruits.) But none of those really fit my relationship.

  It took me a while to come up with something. “Life-ruiners” was first on the list. Followed by “Jerk Magnets.” But those don’t really describe how I feel about these things—these massive intrusions that have destroyed not only all of my bras, but my ability to run like the born star I am. And they are completely stuck to me. I can’t conveniently remove them and only put them on for a hot date. I have to strap the girls down and wear big hoodies mid-summer.

  They are permanent.

  So keep in mind while reading, that instead of using the word “boobs” every time I need to talk about them (or to them), I’ll be substituting the word with a new name.

  Welcome to the story of me and “The Sharpies.”

  1

  From A to D

  I’m humongous.

  So maybe instead of training for the cross country season, I found my bed much more comfortable at six a.m. So maybe I ate three helpings every meal when I really, really shouldn’t have. So maybe I spent all summer vacation in my pajama shorts and baggy tank tops, swatting at pesky bees that seemed to congregate on Aunt Heidi’s back porch.

  There might be love handles that haven’t existed before. There might be more junk in the trunk. Honestly, I expected those things.

  But these? No, I did not expect these.

  I jump up and down and nearly knock myself out. How in the world did this happen? I swear they weren’t here when I got home yesterday from two months of sunny times, frolicking along the beach in my summer wardrobe. I would’ve noticed the bouncing, the obvious weight slowing me down. Yet here I stand, trying and trying to put on the only regular bra I own, and it won’t stretch across these gargantuan bosoms that seemed to have blossomed overnight.

  “Mom!” I scream out, pulling at the straps, fighting the restricting material, and praying it doesn’t give out.

  “What?” Mom shouts back. I take one heaving breath before I answer her.

  “Can we go to Target? I need a new bra!”

  I hear more than just my mom’s laughter, and my face flushes fifty shades of purple. Fab. Thanks, Mom. Didn’t know we had company. Hopefully it’s just Aunt Heidi. She’d understand this issue. I’m pretty sure she has a set of Gs dangling from her chest, making the appropriate sound of gonggling, gonggling every time she moves.

  Aunt Heidi has been tracking my track (See what I did there?) progress ever since I broke my middle school’s record. Okay, break is being modest. I shattered that sucker. My aunt was a runner up until her senior year of high school when Uncle Neil, as she puts it, “distracted” her from taking State. I wonder if she thinks I’m an idiot, because I can do math. My cousin Alex turns nineteen this year, and Aunt Heidi is thirty-eight.

  “Get ready now!” Mom calls back after the laughter dies. “We’ve only got an hour before people start showing up.”

  “Apparently people have already shown up,” I grumble to myself, chucking my useless bra on the crumpled heap of Divergent bed sheets and grabbing one of my old reliable sports bras. As soon as I snap the sucker on, I feel like I’ve lost a cup size. No wonder I haven’t noticed. I basically live in these things from June to August.

  Last track season I earned the title of second fastest 3000m runner in the good ol’ State of Montana. You’d think a silver medal around my neck would earn me some respect, but not from my track buddies. No, they love to razz on me—but mostly because I made a big show of grabbing the gold before I left. Since most of us are in cross country, too, I’m betting the razing will continue through October.

  Anywho, Mom said I’ve had no opportunity to celebrate. What with school and finals and our normal two months in California. But I think she just wants an excuse to eat carbs. With me on a strict diet and having that lovely gluten intolerant gene, Mom has missed eating like she used to. And bread. She tells me almost every three minutes that she misses bread.

  I tug a loose tee over my head, letting my light brown frizzy hair bounce before I stuff it into a ponytail. It’s the perfect hair for me because I rarely do it in anything other than a ponytail, and with the frizz it at least looks like I curled it. My BFF, Tiff (Tiff my Biff!), convinced me to dye it red once to impress Jeremy Wilkin because he had a redhead fetish—or so she overheard from Jeremy’s chemistry partner’s girlfriend’s cousin. I looked like Ronald McDonald for about a week before I dyed it back.

  I slip into some yoga pants and slide down my banister, knowing Mom’ll probably give me guff about it—the yoga pants and not using the stairs.

  The smell of freshly baked bread instantly makes my mouth pool. As much as bread doesn’t like me, I sure do love it.

  “Oh food of the gods,” Mom says to the loaf as she pulls it from the oven. She turns around to ask whoever is sitting at the bar (I can’t see them yet) to scoot the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter over.

  “Did you make anything for me?” I ask, entering the kitchen on one foot as I hop into my pink sneaker.

  “I miss bread,” Mom says in answer, and the guest at the counter laughs and spins on the barstool. Aunt Heidi’s bright teeth smile at me before they take a giant bite down on a wad of gum. She’s an Orbit addict. Said once that it was just as effective as brushing her teeth. I’m not sure how I should feel about that, but I keep a safe distance from her breath as often as I can.

  “I’ll take you shopping, Gee.” She calls me that. I like it. I wish more people would call me by Gee instead of Ginger, since my name sounds like my parents wanted me to go into the pole dancing biz.

  I sidle up to the counter, reaching for the bread just to get a better whiff of it. After the best inhale of my life, the warmth weaving its way through my entire body, I slump my shoulders, and my lip juts out in a tiny pout. I miss bread, too.

  “That’d be great,” Mom says in answer to Aunt Heidi. “I can stay here and finish getting everything ready.” She pulls the bread out of my reach. “And yes, I made lots of gluten-free food.”

  “T
hanks, Momma,” I say, sliding my hands along the counter and pushing myself upright. Aunt Heidi jumps off the stool, and whatever bra she’s wearing does its job because she doesn’t knock herself out.

  “To the braziers!” she says with an incredibly lame wave of her hand in the air. I laugh and stuff my phone and wallet into the seam of my pants. I don’t own a purse. So I improvise.

  “Just don’t make me try them on over my clothes out in the wide open like she does.” I jab a thumb at Mom, who wrinkles her flour-covered nose at me. I give her a quick hug, which feels so weird now that I can tell my chest is three times its normal size, and then sneak a small piece—I mean minuscule—of gluten-filled bread. It’ll be worth it.

  ***

  Someone put me out of my misery. Baby swordfish keep poking at my stomach. Then Aunt Heidi takes a speed bump at forty miles an hour, and the swordfish move from my stomach to my intestines.

  “Kill me,” I say, folding myself in half and taking deep breaths. Curse you, bread. Looking and smelling just right, tasting good on the way down… You have to transform into a rabid beast who likes to tear apart the stomach lining of innocent girls.

  “Cramps?” Heidi asks, nodding without even hearing my answer. “Midol in my purse, right pocket.”

  I reach down and dry swallow one, just to pacify her, and amazingly, Midol quiets those swordfish before they escape in the most brutal way possible. I almost feel like myself again when we get to the lingerie section in the Super Target. I’m playing with the cap on the water bottle Aunt Heidi grabbed from one of those impulse fridges and said to remind her to pay for it when we check out.

  “What size are you?” she asks, flipping through the laciest and skankiest bras you can find at Target. I move automatically to the practical choices.

  “I don’t know. My last one was a 32A.” I think. It’s been a really long time since I’ve had to buy a bra. In fact, I used to go without because what difference did it make?

  Her wide green eyes that are painted with bright purple eye shadow take one look at my chest, and then she bursts out a jolting laugh.

  “Oh Gee, you’re at least a C. At least.”

  I look down and bounce a bit. I’m in Old Reliable, so I don’t move much, but… did they always jiggle like that?

  “I’m not trying a C cup. No way.”

  “I wish I was in a C!” she says, pulling bra after bra off the rack in front of her. I shake my head vigorously, because no no no. C cup runner? Not possible.

  Before I totally break down in the middle of Target, Heidi shoves a few choices in my arms, and I give her a “heck no” look at the ruby red and black lacey number, but she just says, “Try them on for size.” Then she shoves me into a dressing room.

  “I’m going to look for some sports bras, too,” she tells me. “Those poor things are suffocating in the ones you own.”

  Pouting at that very lovely sentiment, I strip off my loose tee and add it to the pile of bras. The mirror in here is cracked across the top, making it look like I have three eyes. I make faces at myself for a minute before grabbing the bra that least looks like porn wardrobe and shoving the straps up my shoulders.

  The hanger says 32C, but it has to be lying, because it takes several pig-like grunts to get the clasps closed. And when I do, my jiggly Sharpies strain against the seams like they are gasping for air.

  “Where did you come from?!” I whisper-shout at my foreign chesticles. Is someone pranking me? Do I have a scar from a collagen injection that some plastic surgeon did in my sleep? Maybe it was Violet Drebel, who took third in State behind me, and she’s coming back for the gold in the most vicious way possible.

  “How are those working out?” Aunt Heidi’s voice rings through the thick wood of the dressing room door. I rip the bra off and check the rest of the tags. There’s one D cup in the pile, and of course it’s the red lace.

  “Um, I’m okay.”

  “What size works best? I’ll find some more.”

  “Give me a second!”

  I take a deep breath, letting the air soak up my nostrils, fill my lungs, and hold it till I think I’m gonna pass out. Then I tug on the straps at the speed of light, hoping it’ll be less painful like when you rip off a Band-Aid.

  Curse my unlucky stars… it fits perfectly. Not only that, but it’s comfortable. My back hasn’t felt this awesome all summer. My chest doesn’t feel like it’s being crushed by an anvil, and when I peek an eye open at my reflection, I even look decent in red lace.

  D cup isn’t a big deal, is it?

  Then I turn to the side.

  No… it’s a huge deal.

  2

  Not a Make-Out Party

  I have a million cousins.

  Like some people exaggerate things to make a point, and yeah, I’m totally doing that now, but… I have a million cousins.

  My mom has one sister—Aunt Heidi—and no, she’s not popping them out like a bundle of puppies. She has two kids, Alex and Abraham. But my dad… see, Grandma and Grandpa Silverman decided they were going to have eighty thousand children. But Grandma hit the old menopause after the twelfth. Dad’s in the younger half of the bunch, which means I’ve got about 300,000 cousins younger than me, 600,000 cousins way older than me (who have kids of their own too), and two cousins my age.

  I may be off on my math.

  So, whenever we have a party, we have to bring it outside to fit everyone and their kids. And even though this party is for me, I doubt anyone even knows what we’re celebrating. All they heard was “food” and “beer,” and they came flocking from every part of the city. Yeah, we Silvermans make up half of our state’s population.

  Mom invited a few of my friends too, but I told most of them it was not a requirement to show up. Jamal is not into crowds, and the last time he came to one of my family gatherings, he was hoodwinked into diaper duty. It was his fault; he was the one who mentioned his mom was pregnant, but he hadn’t even been in the same room as a baby. Well, he certainly had some training that day.

  Needless to say, he passed on the evite.

  Tiff, of course, is here, because she’s absolutely in love with my cousin Fartbucket. Okay, the name on his birth certificate is Marcus. But he’s a total fartbucket, and Tiff refuses to believe me. Always froofing her hair and making sure she wears a blue t-shirt around him—his favorite color. Gag.

  “Is Marcus here yet?” she asks me, trying to be subtle about it, but she is so transparent that I could probably stick my hand through her.

  “Yeah, he’s here,” I say, moving around the table full of every kind of Jell-O salad known to mankind. “Probably out back.”

  She bites her smile, and I roll my eyes. I know the second Fartbucket spots my BFF, he’s going to steal her away from me.

  We dodge through the crowd, and I say “Thanks” to every person who actually knows what the party is for and congratulates me. The patio door is already wide open, and we sneak outside where the sun is causing half of my family and friends to have lovely armpit sweat tacos.

  Thankfully, Fartbucket hasn’t spotted us yet, so I head over to the swing set because that’s usually where Tiff and I have our very deep discussions on hair color and how much we love The Vampire Diaries.

  “Aren’t you hot in that thing?” Tiff asks me as she pops a squat on a swing. She nods at the very large hoodie I borrowed from my dad’s closet. It’s so big it looks like I’m not wearing any shorts at all. But I totally am. I did a cartwheel earlier to prove it.

  “I’m always hot, baby,” I respond, licking my finger and making a sizzling noise when I put it to my hip, effectively getting an eye roll and no further questions. I so don’t want to get into the Sharpie conversation around so many familial ears.

  She starts to pump her legs, and I sink into the swing next to her. We don’t swing very high since two-year-olds are running around. I’d hate to send a toddler through one of my back windows.

  “So how was State?” she asks, her dirty blon
de hair blowing forward when she swings back.

  “Sha-mazing,” I sing. “The track was huge! I bet I could run forever.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  We laugh, and her eyes once again scour the backyard for my cousin.

  “Have you gotten your schedule yet?” she asks. We go to a year-round school, so we should be getting them any time now.

  I shake my head. “Nope. Did you?”

  “Came in the mail this afternoon.”

  “What?” I stop my swing, dragging my heels along the worn out grass underneath my feet. “Did you bring it with you?”

  She snakes her hand into her pocket and pulls out a folded sheet of paper. I snap my fingers around her wrist and drag her through the Silverman crowd to get to my kitchen.

  “Mom!” I shout, and every female who’s ever given birth turns her head. I find the mom I’m looking for sandwiched between my cousin Frankie and one of her kids—after a million cousins, you just forget the names of your second cousins.

  Mom squeezes her way through the room and greets me with a large smile.

  “You having fun?” she shouts.

  I nod. “Did you get the mail today?”

  “You can eat the cupcakes. They’re gluten free!”

  “No. Mail.”

  “What about them being stale? I baked them this morning.”

  I roll my eyes and mutter an “ugh” under my breath as I pull her from the room with the most noise and into the much quieter food pantry. Tiff stays behind, hanging out by the kitchen island, eyes back to her desperate search for my fartbucket of a cousin.

  “The mail, Mom,” I say again, and Mom’s eyebrows twitch inward.

  “I put it in the office.”

  “Did you see anything for me? Tiff got her class schedule.”

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t give it a good look, hun.” She waves me toward the stairs to the basement where Dad’s office is. “It’s on top of the filing cabinet.”