Tats by Layce Gardner Read Free Book Online Page B

hold it up and examine it from every angle. What is she, nuts? Has she not been paying any attention at all?
    “I can’t wear this,” I say. “It’s not even a whole shirt. Just pieces of a shirt. Not even the best pieces.”
    “It’ll look great on you,” she replies. “Less bloody, anyway.”
    “This won’t even cover up my sportsbra.”
    “God, you’re so helpless. You don’t wear a bra with that. The support is built in.”
    I turn it over in my hands. “Where?”
    “Put it on,” she orders.
    I hold this thing she calls a shirt up in front of me and look in the mirror.
    “That’s the back. Turn it around,” she sighs.
    Now she’s tapping her foot at me and I’m getting nervous because I remember how lethal she can be with footwear so I disappear back into the bathroom. I strip off my T-shirt, wife-beater and sportsbra and look at myself in the mirror. My boobs are actually okay, just smallish. I press them together with my palms and hold them up as high as I can. That kinda hurts, but it’s the only way I can create cleavage.
    I throw her shirt over my head and pull it down. It’s tight. Way too tight. I look in the mirror again. Yep. The shirt’s so tight, what boobs I did have are now mushed down to oblivion. I roll my eyes at my reflection and head back to Vivian.
    When I walk in the room, Vivian looks right at my chest and knits her eyebrows. I turn beet red from head to toe.
    “I really really really feel uncomfortable in this.”
    “You don’t look half bad,” she says.
    “Which means I don’t look half good either. I couldn’t find the support.”
    “You just need to poosh them up some,” she says.
    “Poosh?” I ask. “Did you just say ‘poosh’?”
    “Poosh ’em up some,” she explains, cupping her own tits up high as an example.
    “My boobies don’t poosh.”
    “Boobies?” she laughs. “Did you just say boobies? Four-year-olds have boobies. Grown women have tits.”
    “Some grown women do,” I retort. “Some don’t.”
    “Oh, for chrissakes, you have tits. You’ve just been binding them down for too long.” Then she actually sticks her hand down the front of my shirt, cups my boobie in her hand and pooshes it up. “See?” she says, already pooshing up the other one too. “ Voila ! Tits!”
    I look at myself in the mirror. She’s right. I have cleavage. The shirt is squeezing them high and hard and I actually kind of have tits.
    Here comes her hand again. “Now if you can just make your nipples hard—”
    “Stop it!” I yell, slapping her hand away. “Don’t do that unless you mean it.”
    She laughs and flops down on the bed.  “You amuse me,” she says, “you truly amuse me.”
    “Well, I’m happy you find me so amusing,” I say. “What’re we getting ready to go do?”
    “Go eat,” she says and rolls off the bed with a peppy bounce. She walks to the window and peeks her nose through the curtain, looks around, closes it and heads to the door. She flings it open and steps outside, blinking in the hot sun.
    She stops and scans the parking lot. “Which El Camino is yours?”

    “IHOP is my favorite sit-down restaurant in the whole entire world. Endless coffee, six different types of syrup, you can even get pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head if you want,” I ramble while Vivian fixes her lipstick in my rearview mirror.
    I score a parking spot near the front of the restaurant and get out of the car. I’m at the front door before I realize Vivian is still in the car. Now she’s using the rearview mirror to put on mascara. I cross my arms. I tap my foot. I count to twenty and back again. If I had a watch I’d look at it. I finally get tired of waiting and go on in.
    Inside smells like pancakes and bacon and syrup and coffee and old women’s perfume. I love it. I could just wallow in the smell and rub it all over me. If somebody would bottle this smell, I’d buy a whole case of it. Eau de IHOP. It reminds me of my grandma, my