“This has been going on for some time.”

Another Country -7-
by Erin Halfelven

I hadn’t known how Mom would react to my showing her my chest, purple nurples and all. “Hm,” she said flatly. “I bet that did hurt.”

I glanced down. The left one still ached and might be turning red, if not exactly purple. I nodded and pulled my shirt back down. What did she think she had seen?

“This has been going on for some time.” A patented Mom non-question that demands an answer.

I made an effort to steer things. “Huh? No, Chud isn’t really a bully.” I frowned. “He just thought it was funny.” I didn’t want to tell her what we’d been talking about.

“He thought it was funny,” she said, repeating what I had said. I hate it when she does that. Dad says she took lessons from Joe, Friday, but she does it every day.

“Um.” I tried to stall, but she just looked at me. I had to say something. “He called them, ‘turkey timers.’”

Her eyebrows went up. “Turkey timers,” she repeated.

“My —uh— my nipples.” I could feel my face turning red again.

“They must have been standing up, showing through your shirt.”

I nodded.

“It wasn’t that cold, but you know why they were doing that.”

I nodded again. It was because of what I’d seen in Josh’s bedroom, but I sure as shooting couldn’t tell her that.

“Speaking of cold,” she said. “Go get a bag of frozen peas from the freezer. You seem to have some swelling you need to take down.”

I shivered just thinking about it, but it looked like a chance to escape, so I hurried off to find a bag of peas. We had a big chest freezer full of meat, but things like veggies were usually in the upper compartment of the refrigerator. Mom wandered off while I was digging a bag out, but when I turned around, she had a narrow roll of yellow cloth in her hand. I recognized it from her sewing supplies, a tape measure.

“That can wait a moment,” she said, gesturing at the bag of peas. “I want to take some measurements.”

I blinked but stood there, juggling frozen produce from one hand to the other, while she wrapped the tape around various parts of my body. My fingers were beginning to get too cold to grip well when she left off. “Measurements?” I repeated stupidly.

She waved the tape at me. “C’mere and stand with your elbows away from your sides.”

I did so but remarked, “My fingers are cold.” I waved the bag of peas around a bit.

“I don’t need to measure your fingers,” she pointed out. “Just stand still, and I’ll be done in a couple of minutes.”

“Okay,” I agreed. I didn’t ask why she wanted to measure me. It was something she did. Not just to me but to other people, too. Once, after measuring me when I was about ten, she had sewn a couple of new shirts, one decorated with license plates. It had been my favorite shirt for a year or so. She had made Josh a shirt from the same material, and the memory of us in our matching clothes made me smile.

She measured twice around my chest, then my waist and hips, writing the numbers down on the pad from the little shelf under the kitchen phone.

“Go ahead and use the peas on your bruises,” she said when she finished.

“Bruises?” I repeated. I wondered if I got that habit from her.

Putting the icy bag of peas on my chest without taking off my shirt, I shivered. Little critters with frosty feet seemed to run up and down my spine, sending cold shocks along my arms and legs and even up to my ears and scalp. It sounds unpleasant, but I had to stifle little yelps and giggles.

I hate it when I do that. I used to giggle a lot when I was small, but since getting to high school, I’ve tried to go cold turkey.

Mom glanced at me, apparently amused. Then she took the bag of peas from my frozen fingers and handed me a piece of paper with numbers on it. Like this:

• C B
• C 31 28.5
• B 32.5 29.5
• b 30 A/B 28 A/AA
• W 27 25.5
• H 34 32.5
• H 64 63
• W ~110 ~98

I took the paper and looked at it. “Um?” I couldn’t make any sense of it. There were two columns labeled C and B and two rows also labeled C and B with another lower case b row—also, two rows of Hs and Ws.

“I don’t get it,” I told her. “What’s this mean?”

“The first column is Cindy’s numbers, and the second is yours.” Mom put the bag of peas on the kitchen table where it could be forgotten.

I frowned. If the second column was for me, it should have had an R at the top. No use mentioning that. I decided I didn’t like these numbers. “What do the letters beside the numbers mean?” I asked.

She looked at me blankly for a moment, exactly as if she had forgotten what we were talking about. Then she said slowly, “They mean you could wear Cindy’s clothes, and they would fit pretty well.”

The hair on my head was too long to stand on end, but it tried. “Why would I do that!?” I yelped, putting the paper back in her hand and stepping away.

She cocked her head sideways, half an inch, looking at me. “Bobby, those numbers mean you’re shaped more like a girl than a boy. The numbers with letters after them are bra sizes.”

A bolt of lightning might have hit me because I’m sure that my hair did stand on end. Part of it was a strange thought that maybe, just maybe, Josh liked girls shaped like me. I don’t know what my face looked like, but Mom took a step toward me and pulled me into a hug.

“We’ll take you to see the doctor on Monday, honey,” she said, but that wasn’t comforting at all.