Chapter 1: AC/DC to 11
Puberty. That wonderfully chaotic and confusing time in a girl’s life that introduced her to the social custom of self-loathing. While most girls ended up bemoaning being top-heavy, bottom-heavy, or some variation of both, Denny Roberts had miraculously managed to avoid both camps and instead won the genetic lottery with lopsided.
The homeroom bell hadn’t rung yet, but the class was already full of that low, tectonic hum that came with Monday mornings. Denny shouldered through the door, her battered canvas backpack hanging from one strap.
She felt the eyes before she fully crossed the threshold.
Not the usual passing scan, either. This was different. A physical stillness. A collective intake of breath that had nothing to do with her face. Her blue eyes stayed fixed on the back wall, on a faded poster about integrity curling at the corners. She gave nothing away.
She wore low-rise black jeans, frayed at the hems from catching under her heels too often, and a white T-shirt. It was clean, new, and fitted.
Across her chest, the fiery letters of AC/DC—split by a jagged lightning bolt—stretched unevenly. The AC lay nearly flat over her small A-cup, while the DC climbed sharply over the fuller curve of her D-cup. The fabric clung differently on each side, mapping a reality she usually buried under hoodies and careful layering.
Today was different.
The silence in the room wasn’t respectful. It was the stunned quiet after a car crash—of something so visibly off-script that brains stuttered.
She walked the aisle between scarred desks, her sneakers squeaking softly on the linoleum. She could feel the stares like heat—on her neck, her chest, her back.
Liam Chen, two desks up, was openly gawking, his mouth slightly ajar. He’d never once looked her in the eye before. She gave him half a second—just enough.
He flinched. Turned red. Fumbled with his phone.
Her desk sat near the back, by the window. She dropped her backpack; it hit with a dull thump. The strap slipped loose. She didn’t fix it.
“Holy shit, Roberts.” Jess Kramer leaned over from the next desk, glossy lips, sharpened curiosity. “What’s the, uh… occasion?”
Denny unzipped her bag, pulling out a sketchbook warped from use. “Monday,” she said.
“Yeah, but…” Jess’s eyes flicked downward, then back up. “You’re just… out there today.”
“The shirt was clean.”
Denny flipped to a half-finished charcoal drawing of a tree, its roots knotted and exposed, and picked up her pencil.
“It’s just—people are talking,” Jess pressed, faux concern barely covering the excitement.
“Are they?” Denny glanced up. “Debating AC versus DC?”
Jess blinked. “I—maybe?”
“Good.” Denny returned to the page, darkening a shadow where root met earth. “Saves me the trouble.”
Mr. Greeley shuffled in then, coffee stain on his tie, a stack of announcements under his arm. His gaze swept the room, snagged on Denny for a fraction too long, then moved on. He cleared his throat.
The room didn’t recover.
Denny focused on the paper. The grain beneath her fingers. The smell of dust and old wood. The faint buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. Her heart hammered—a frantic bird in her chest—but her hand stayed steady.
This was the trade.
The slow suffocation of hiding… or the sharp, immediate violence of being seen.
Today, the hoodie had felt like a shroud.
The stares, at least, were honest.
The T-shirt hadn’t been an accident.
She’d picked it. Bought it. Worn it today for a reason.
AC/DC.
Thanks to the inordinate cruelty of children, it had been her nickname since freshman year—courtesy of Michael O’Reilly, who had coined it sometime during the long, awkward stretch of that first year. Loud enough to be heard. Clever enough to spread.
A-cup. D-cup.
AC/DC.
The exact moment of her renaming had blurred with time, as those moments tended to do. But the effect hadn’t. He’d said it with enough volume, enough pride, that it stuck—caught and carried by just enough people to make it permanent.
Not because it was particularly vicious. Not even because it was especially brilliant.
But because it was clever enough, memorable enough, and true enough.
And because once people had a name for something they liked—something easy—they rarely felt the need to look any further.
So AC/DC it was.
And AC/DC it had been for more than four years now.
A crumpled wad of notebook paper landed softly on Denny’s desk, coming to rest against the edge of her sketchbook.
She didn’t reach for it right away.
One breath. Two. Three.
Then she picked it up and smoothed it flat.
Block letters, pressed hard enough to tear the paper in places.
Nice boob there, AC/DC!
Beneath it, a crude sketch—a unicorn, or something meant to be one, with a single exaggerated breast jutting from its forehead where the horn should have been.
Denny stared at it for a moment.
Then she snorted.
Not loud. Not performative. Just… once.
She folded the paper neatly along its creases, set it aside, and gave the grinning sender a thumbs-up before going back to her shading.
Kevin's grin faltered into a confused frown at her positive feedback and the student next to him punched his shoulder teasingly. "Looks like she told you," Stuart whispered, just loud enough for Denny to hear.
Kevin grinned again, sheepishly this time, and shrugged. He gave Denny a small capitulating salute before returning his attention to Mr. Greeley.
Internally, Denny clocked it as a win.
An hour later, the bell rang, a harsh electronic bleat that shattered the quiet. The scrape of thirty chairs against linoleum was a wave of sound. Denny took her time, carefully sliding her sketchbook into her bag, letting the current of bodies flow around her.
The hallway was its own ecosystem—a warm, noisy river of shampoo, sweat, and shouted plans. She kept her head up--leading with her D-cup breast--as she moved through the current, a stone creating a minor, temporary eddy.
She felt the looks. The quick, darting glances from the sides of eyes. The not-so-subtle nudges and nods that went around. The heat of a stare lingering on her asymmetrical chest before snapping away when she turned her head.
It was familiar territory. She was simply navigating it more overtly today. A guy she didn’t know, leaning against a locker, let out a low, appreciative whistle as she passed. It wasn’t for her face.
Her stomach tightened, but her expression didn’t change. Just weather, she told herself. Atmospheric pressure.
By the time lunch period rolled around Denny, with her mismatched breasts on clear display today under the fixed AC/DC t-shirt, had disrupted four classes together.
The cafeteria was a cathedral of noise and smell—industrial cleaner trying and failing to mask the essence of overcooked green beans and teenage anxiety. Denny got her usual: a carton of milk, an apple. She paid in exact change, her fingers brushing the cashier’s palm without looking.
Her usual table was in the far corner, near the emergency exit. It was usually empty. Today, it was occupied.
Michael O’Reilly held court. He was mid-story, hands carving the air, and the group around him—a mix of football-season-hopefuls and their attentive admirers—laughed on cue. His eyes met Denny’s as she paused, tray in hand. His story died. His smile didn’t; it just changed, sharpening at the edges.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, not loud, but with a projected warmth that carried. “The main attraction.”
A few heads turned. Most of his table had the decency to look uncomfortable, studying their sandwiches with sudden intensity.
Denny’s grip tightened on the tray. The plastic felt brittle. She could walk away. Find another table. Let the victory of the morning curdle into a retreat.
She didn’t.
She walked straight toward them. The laughter had completely faded now, replaced by a wary, watchful silence. She stopped at the empty chair directly across from Michael.
“This seat taken?”
One of his friends, a guy named Greg with a perpetual sheen of sweat on his upper lip, mumbled, “No, man, it’s—”
“It’s free,” Michael said, cutting him off. He leaned back, spreading his arms along the back of the bench. A king on his throne. His gaze was methodical, a slow drag from her face, down to the lightning bolt on her chest, and back up. “You’re broadcasting strong today, Roberts. Clear signal.”
“You always were a fan of the classics,” she said, setting her tray down. The clatter was terribly loud. She sat. She took a deliberate bite of her apple. The crunch echoed.
He watched her chew. The challenge in his eyes had ignited into something brighter, more focused. He’d coined the term. Her wearing it like this was a direct repatriation of his power.
“So, what’s the play?” he asked, his voice dropping into a false, intimate concern. “Awareness campaign? Donation drive for the… less fortunate side?” A snicker rippled through his crew, quickly stifled.
Denny looked up at him and sat back, arching her back slightly to push her asymmetrical bosom into the limelight. "No play," she told him directly. "Just figured it was finally time for you to get a good look at what you guys have been teasing me about for the past four years."
The silence at the table was absolute. One of Michael’s friends, a linebacker type, actually stopped chewing. Michael’s smile didn’t drop, but it froze into something hard and plastic. His eyes, a flat, muddy brown, flickered with the first signs of real confusion. This wasn’t in the script. The script was: she flinches, she cries, she runs. Not this. Not a cool assessment over a fucking apple.
“A look?” Michael finally echoed, his voice trying to reclaim its usual lazy arrogance. It came out a half-octave too high. “Trust me, we’ve seen.”
“Have you?” Denny took another bite, chewed slowly, swallowed. She let her gaze sweep the guys at the table. Greg looked like he wanted to melt into the floor. “You’ve seen a punchline. A walking joke. You haven’t seen this.” She waved the core of her apple casually between AC and DC. “You might have given them nicknames, but you don’t own that. Not really.”
A slow, deep red was creeping up Michael’s neck from under his polo shirt collar. He leaned forward, elbows on the table. The king’s throne suddenly felt like a plastic cafeteria bench. “You think this is empowering? Strutting around like a flawed fucking product? It’s a cry for help, Roberts. It’s sad.”
The word sad hung in the greasy air. It was his last, best weapon.
Denny felt it land, a dull blade in her ribs. She placed the apple core neatly on her tray. Every eye at the table was nailed to her.
“You're right, Michael,” her voice wasn’t loud. It was just clear, cutting through the background rumble. “It's sad that you peaked at fourteen. Sad that your greatest claim to fame is coming up with a nickname for a girl’s tits. Sad that your legacy--AC/DC--is all you’ve really got here.”
Michael's face turned and ugly red and twisted with rage.
“Well. That was seismic," someone interjected before the other's rage could boil over. Well, played AC... I mean Denny. Well played."
The table softened into smirks and agreeable nods around her. Denny’s eyes scanned their faces cautiously, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the inevitable followup barb to come.
When it failed to materialize, Denny let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. In that moment, the tectonic plates of high school social hierarchy seemed to shift in her favour.
She shrugged, rolling with the moment. "AC/DC is okay, Ben," she said finally. "I can own that."
The laughter that followed was different. It wasn’t at her. It was a release of tension, a collective exhale. Ben, who’d spoken, gave her a nod that felt like a handshake. Michael scraped his chair back, the legs screaming against the floor. He didn’t say another word. He just left, his friends shuffling to their feet and following like a flock of confused geese.
Denny picked up her milk carton. Her hand trembled, just a little. She took a sip. The milk was lukewarm.
The rest of lunch passed in a blur of laughs and conversation that--for once--actually included her. Sure there were still quick glances, curious eyes panning her lopsided bosom. The weight of the morning began to settle, not quite a triumph, but as a quiet feeling of acceptance.
As the lunch bell rang, signalling a return to classes, Ben addressed her again. "Say, Den... I mean AC/DC, we were all going to hit the creek tonight. You know, beers and bathing suits. You wanna come?"
The word “bathing suits” landed in her gut like a cold stone. It wasn’t the beer. It was the implication, the visual. A bathing suit didn’t care about asymmetrical fabric tension. It was unforgiving. A public declaration in Lycra.
All the hard-won confidence of the day—the shirt, the lunch table—threatened to leak out of her. The creek was different. It was dark, unsupervised, and the rules were nebulous.
Ben was watching her, his expression open, expectant. It wasn’t a pity invite. She could see that. He was genuinely amused by what had happened, and she was now, temporarily, interesting.
“Yeah,” she heard herself say. The word came out before the fear could fully coagulate. “Sure. Where?”
“Miller’s Bend. You know the old oak that leans over the water? Downstream from the bridge. Around eight.”
She nodded, committing the details to memory like a soldier memorizing coordinates for a drop zone. “I’ll find it.”
The afternoon classes passed in a surreal blur. Trigonometry formulas swam on the board, meaningless symbols. All she could think about was water, and darkness, and the terrifying calculus of what to wear.
The walk home was quiet. Her house, a split-level shrouded by overgrown azaleas, felt like a museum of her other life. Her mom was at work. The stillness was absolute. She dropped her bag in the hallway and went straight to her room.
Her closet was a monument to camouflage. Dark colors. Patterns. Draping fabrics. She pushed past the hoodies and the loose button-downs, her fingers finally brushing the few items stuffed in the back, reserved for the rare, dreaded family beach trip.
There were two. A black one-piece, purchased two years ago in a fit of despair, its skirted bottom meant to disguise hips it didn’t need to disguise. And a monokini she'd purchased but never had the nerve to wear.
She pulled the monokini out of its unopened package. A slender black one-piece with less coverage than a bikini that she had purchased on a particularly optimistic day two years earlier. She held it up. A laugh, dry and hollow, escaped her. It was a joke. She tried it on anyway.
The mirror showed a different truth, however. The bottom fit fine. the thing-back disappearing invisibly between her buttocks to give her the illusion of being bare-assed. The top skewed left toward her D-cup breast, pulling the keyhole cutout asymmetrically with it. Still, the spandex did its job, clinging tightly to AC and stretching to embrace DC.
She had expected to look like a botched mannequin. A DIY project gone wrong. but the results swung more the other way. With her mismatched boobs, she was far from normal looking, but she didn't look bad at all, just... different.
She stood there for a long time, just looking. The critical voice in her head, the one that sounded suspiciously like Michael O’Reilly’s drawl, was silent. It had been shouted down by the sheer, stubborn fact of her own reflection. She wasn’t symmetrical. She would never be. But the girl in the mirror wasn’t a broken thing. She was just… drawn differently.
The relief was so physical it felt like setting down a backpack full of bricks. She let out a breath she felt she’d been holding for years.
Then she thought of the creek. Of dark water and laughter and Ben’s casual invitation. The fear came slithering back, colder now. The shirt had been a statement in a controlled environment. This was uncharted territory. Literally.
She kept the monokini on.
She pulled on a pair of old, soft jean shorts and a thin, oversized flannel shirt over it, leaving it unbuttoned. The uniform of maybe. She could still back out. She could say she got lost, that her mom said no. The flannel was a security blanket she could ditch at the water’s edge, or keep wrapped around her like a shield all night.
At 7:45, she grabbed a towel from the linen closet, the thickest, biggest one she could find. She told the empty house she was going to Sarah’s to study. The lie tasted like pennies on her tongue.
The drive to Miller’s Bend was twenty minutes of escalating doubt. The evening air was cool, smelling of cut grass and distant barbecue. Fireflies punctuated the deepening blue of the twilight. It was stupidly picturesque, which made her own nervous turmoil feel melodramatic. It’s just a swim, she told herself. People do it all the time.
She could hear them before she saw them. The thump of bass from a Bluetooth speaker, competing with the rush of the creek over rocks. Laughter, sharper and more frequent than the daytime version. The sharp, distinctive pfft of a can being opened.
She followed a worn dirt path down the bank, her sneakers slipping on the pine needles. The old oak was a giant silhouette against the bruised purple sky, its branches clawing over the water. A collection of shapes silhouetted by a tidy fire, lounged on its massive roots and on towels spread across the gravel bar.
“Hey! You made it!”
Ben’s voice cut through the mix of sounds. He was sitting on a log, a red cup in his hand. He waved her over. A few other faces turned. Kevin was there, looking more relaxed in a swimsuit and a damp t-shirt. Jess Kramer was there too, in a tiny, perfect bikini, talking animatedly to a guy from the baseball team. She glanced at Denny, her eyes doing a quick, automatic scan from head to toe, pausing at the flannel. She offered a slight, non-committal smile before turning back.
“Glad you found the place,” Ben said, scooting over on the log. “Beer’s in the cooler. Or there’s gross lime soda if you’re driving.”
“Thanks,” Denny said, her voice feeling too small. She set her towel down carefully on a clear patch of gravel, sitting on it with her knees drawn up.
“So,” Kevin said, leaning forward. “You survived O’Reilly’s meltdown. Legendary stuff, Roberts. Dude looked like he was gonna have an aneurysm.” He took a swig from his can. “You really just… decided to own it, huh?”
“Something like that,” Denny said, accepting a lukewarm beer from Ben. The can was slick with condensation.
“It’s cool,” the baseball guy, Mark, said. “Weird, but cool. Gutsy.”
Weird. The word hung there, neither cruel nor kind. Just an assessment. She took a sip of beer. It was bitter.
For a while, she just listened. The conversation swirled around parties, college applications, a fight someone had seen at the gas station. Normal stuff. She was an observer, a satellite held in a tenuous orbit by Ben’s occasional nod in her direction. No one mentioned her shirt. No one looked directly at her chest. The flannel was doing its job.
Then Jerry stood up, stretching his arms over her head. “It’s humid and I’m sweating. Who’s actually getting in the water?”
A chorus of agreements and half-hearted protests followed. Ben kicked off his shoes. Mark peeled his shirt over his head. There was a casual, unthinking ease to it all.
Denny’s heart began a slow, heavy drum against her ribs. This was the moment. The flannel suddenly felt as conspicuous as a neon sign.
Kevin, already in his trunks, jogged past her and launched himself off a rock with a yell. He hit the water with a massive splash, followed by whoops from the others. Jess waded in delicately, complaining about the cold.
Ben looked over at her. “You coming in?”
“Yeah,” she said, the word automatic. “In a sec.”
He shrugged, friendly, and ran to join the others.
She was alone on the bank. The water looked black and endless. Laughter echoed off the stone face of the opposite bank. She unbuttoned the flannel, one stiff button at a time. The night air kissed her skin, raising goosebumps. She folded the shirt neatly, placing it on top of her towel. A ritual. A point of no return.
She stood up.
The monokini felt thinner now, more exposed under the vast sky than it had under bedroom lights. She forced her feet to move, the gravel shifting under her soles. She walked to the water’s edge, where a flat rock sloped into the current.
Someone splashed someone else. A shriek. More laughter.
No one was looking at her.
She took a last, deep breath, filled with the scent of wet stone and distant charcoal. Then she stepped off the rock.
The water was shockingly cold, a gasp that stole the air from her lungs. It climbed her thighs, her waist, swallowing the strange, singular shape of her. She pushed forward until it lapped at her shoulders, then dove under.
The world went silent and dark and weightless. For a few perfect seconds, there was no AC, no DC. No eyes. No history. Just the creek’s ancient chill and the push of the current against her closed eyelids. She was a body in water, nothing more.
She surfaced, slicking her hair back from her face. The sounds rushed back in.
“Told you it was freezing!” Jerry yelled, treading water near her.
Denny just smiled, a real one, feeling the cold burn in her lungs. She turned onto her back, floating, staring up at the first stubborn stars piercing the twilight. The water held her, its embrace impartial and complete.
A voice cut through the quiet moment from the bank. Kevin had gotten out and was rummaging in a bag. “Hey, AC/DC,” he called out, not with malice, but with the unthinking volume of a slightly drunk teenager. “Love the bathing suit. I had no idea you had such a fine-looking ass.”
Thigh-deep in the creek, Denny froze at the offhanded compliment.