Among Others

Deirdre and I each got an order mark this morning.
    We were in the shower, which is a long trench of tile with a dozen showerheads, with fairly feeble pressure and variably warm water. Give me a bath any day. There’s hot water, meaning water that isn’t icy cold, between seven and eight in the morning, and between seven and eight at night. There are also showers in the gym, which are obligatory after games, but they’re cold and mostly the girls just run through them and splash off any mud. Any serious washing gets done first thing in the morning or last thing at night. It must be lesbian paradise then, because there are always acres of female flesh jiggling about.
    There were probably fifteen girls in there this morning, competing for the limited water. Deirdre and I had a showerhead and were relying on my leper status to keep it to ourselves. I saw Shagger casting a few glances towards us, as if she might be repenting her shunning. As I stepped out of the water flow to shampoo my hair, Deirdre said, laughingly, “You’re getting breasts.”
    “Am not!” I said, automatically, even before looking down. Then I looked down, and saw that I sort of am. I’ve had sort of breast buds for ages, behind my nipples. Now that’s all my mother has, so I thought that would be all I had, but now they were swelling out and kind of pouching. Lots of the other girls in VC have quite jiggly breasts already. It doesn’t make as much of a distinction as whether you have pubic hair, which I have, much darker than the hair on my head, and periods, which almost everyone does by now. I’ve had periods for two years. I was afraid they’d stop me being able to see fairies, but they made no difference at all, whatever C. S. Lewis thought about puberty.
    “You need a bra,” Deirdre said.
    “Do not,” I riposted feebly. I pushed her out of the spray and rinsed my hair. As the shampoo was running down, I looked down at my incipient breasts. “Hey Dee, do you think they’re an awfully funny shape?”
    She was laughing so much she could hardly catch her breath. People were starting to look to see what was so funny.
    “No, really,” I said, quietly but vehemently. “They’re sort of pear shaped. Other people’s aren’t like that.” I looked around the girls in the showers, and none of them had breasts shaped the way mine were.
    “They’re fine,” Deirdre said.
    “Hey Dreary, what’s so funny?” Lorraine asked.
    “Commie just made a great joke,” Deirdre said.
    Some of the girls finishing in the shower and wrapping themselves in towels started to sing “Jake the Peg.” I glared at them, but it didn’t work because of the water.
    Deirdre and I stood together under the falling water. “They’re fine,” she whispered. “They just look funny because you’re seeing them from on top. If you could see them straight on the way you see other people’s you’d see they’re the same.”
    “In a mirror,” I said.
    “You should say ‘looking glass,’ Karen says,” Deirdre said.
    “Crap,” I said, using another word that school didn’t approve.
    The only mirror is above the row of sinks in the toilets where we brush our teeth, and our hair. It’s a long strip of mirror fixed on the wall, with the light strip above it.
    “Come on,” I said.
    Deirdre giggled and grabbed her towel, and I grabbed mine and wrapped it around me like a cloak. I put my soap and my shampoo back into my sponge bag, because otherwise someone would steal it, or open the shampoo and pour it down the drain, that happened to me with my shower gel my first week, when I left it in the shower.
    We went into the toilets, which were right next to the shower room. There was nobody there, which was easy to see because none of the toilet cubicles has doors. I put the sponge bag down and wrapped my towel around my head like a turban. That’s a useful skill which Sharon had taught me. If you give it a tuck, it just stays there. Sharon has long unruly hair and it keeps even that in place. So my towel was here and Deirdre’s was around her shoulders, and we were otherwise naked.
    We saw at once that the strip of mirror was useless. It reflected our faces and necks, but nothing as low as our breasts.
    “Maybe if we stood on something,” Deirdre said, looking around.
    “There’s nothing,” I said. “Unless we stood on the toilet seats, and then we’d be too high.”
    “Let’s try it,” she said.
    So we shut two of the toilet seats and