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neglected to wear a “T-shirt bra”—the slightly padded lie that female breasts are Barbie-smooth. I crossed my arms in front of my chest but soon realized that would be an impossible pose to keep throughout the day in class and in the hallways. So I pulled the straps of my JanSport backpack a few inches off my shoulders and in, so that their shadow would cover the points. It started to rain.
    I have normally had very good luck with my breasts. They grew at a reasonable pace, at a normal age, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen years old I wore a respectable B cup. The real fortune, though, was that before then—when I needed my first bra—I didn’t have to go far to get it. Myparents’ lingerie and clothing store, though hopelessly uncool, was an easy place to get a training (AAA-cup) bra without the embarrassment of department store shopping. For some girls this was a rite of passage with their mothers; for me it was just another day at my mom’s store—with my aunt, who was the manager—watching on.
    A salesgirl (she was in her sixties, but this is what they were called) named Mickey helped to measure me, taking me into the small dark dressing room with an accordion-style door and pressing limp white tape up against my skin. Looking back, I realize this must have been just for show because I had no real breasts to speak of yet, but I appreciated the formality with which she measured me. I got three bras: one in white, one in beige, and one in black. They were ribbed cotton and had a bow in the middle where my cleavage should have been.
    Within two years, I was wearing a full C cup. So at fourteen years old, I had the body that I would always have. Outside of the leers from strange men on the subway, though, I didn’t give a lot of thought to my breasts. I was glad to have them, glad that I was “normal.” Glad that I had something, finally, that made me forget about my face. And so when I left junior high with what I thought seemed like a reasonably womanish body and improving makeup skills, I was optimistic that I could leave behind my reputation as the nerdy one of my friends.
    Stuyvesant High School was supposed to be the best public high school in the city. Or at least the hardest to get into. We were a school of consummate test-takers, students who werepraised simply for our presence at a freshman orientation in a packed Tribeca auditorium where we were told by the principal that “cream rises to the top.” To get into the school students had to take an SAT-like test that would qualify them for admission, hopefully, to one of three specialized schools in New York. Those with the highest grades went to Stuy.
    My parents started talking to me about this test when I was still in elementary school. You’re going to Stuyvesant, right, Jessica? my dad would ask in front of my aunts, uncles, and sometimes strangers in bookstores or parks. My father—so smart as a boy that he skipped seventh grade—had wanted to go to the school. But at thirteen years old he got caught stealing a car and a guidance counselor told him he was no longer eligible to take the entry test. This was a lie that shaped the rest of his young adulthood, a missed opportunity that I was expected to make up for.
    I was to take the test for the same reason my parents spent months working the education system to move us to the elementary school on Roosevelt Island, sent me to a ballet class that I hated and was too clumsy for, and later would make me visit colleges that I had no chance of getting into. It was a move that a friend from the Bronx would later call the “outer-borough shuffle”—the hustle of middle-class parents who had the time and knowledge to fuck with the system. A lot of times it worked, a lot of times it didn’t. But either way it left me with the feeling that I should always try for more than I had been given, even if I felt unsure what to do once