chapter one.
the care and ownership
of boobs
(a subject important to
our study of the male humanoid animal because the boobs, if deployed
properly, are like giant boy magnets attached to your chest.
Or smallish
boy magnets. Or medium.
Depending on your endowment.
But boy magnets. That is the point.
They are magnets, we say. Magnets!)
-
If you
jiggle, wear a bra. This means you. (Yes, you.) It is not antifeminist.
It is more comfy and keeps the boobs from getting floppy.
-
No matter
how puny your frontal equipment, don’t wear the kind with
the giant pads inside. If a guy squeezes them, he will wonder
why they feel like Nerf balls instead of boobs. And if you forget
and wear a normal bra one day, everyone will then speculate
on the strange expanding and contracting nature of your boobage.
(Reference: the mysteriously changing chestal profile of Madame
Long, French teacher and sometime bra padder.)
-
A helpful
hint: For optimal shape, go in the bathroom stall and hike them
up inside the bra.
-
Do not
perform the above maneuver in public, no matter how urgent you
think it is.
-
Do not
go topless in anyone’s hot tub. Remember how Cricket had
to press her chest against the side of the Van Deusens’
tub for forty-five minutes when Gideon and his friends came
home? Let that be a lesson to you. (Yes, you.)
-
Do not
sunbathe topless either, unless you’re completely ready
to have sunburnt boobs whose skin will never be the same again
(Reference: Roo, even though she swears she used sunblock) or
unless you want to be yelled at by your mother for exposing
yourself to the neighbors (Reference: Kim, even though really,
no one saw and the neighbors were away on vacation).
—from
The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques
for Taming Them (A Kanga-Roo Production), written by me,
Ruby Oliver, with number six added in Kim’s handwriting.
Approximate date: summer after freshman year.
The week before junior year began, the Doctors Yamamoto threw
a ginormous going-away party for my ex-friend Kim.
I didn’t
go.
She is my ex-friend. Not my friend.
Kim Yamamoto was leaving
to spend a semester at a school in Tokyo, on an exchange program.
She speaks fluent Japanese.
Her house has a big swimming
pool, an even bigger yard, and a view of the Seattle skyline.
On the eve of her going away, so I hear, her parents hired a sushi
chef to come and chop up dead fish right in front of everyone,
and the kids got hold of a few wine bottles. Supposedly, it was
a great party.
I wouldn’t know.
I do know that the following
acts of ridiculousness were perpetrated that night, after the
adults got tired and went to bed around eleven.
-
Someone
chundered behind the garden shed and never confessed. There
were a number of possible suspects.
-
People
had handstand contests and it turns out Shiv Neel can walk on
his hands.
-
With
the party winding down and all the guys inside the house watching
Letterman, Katarina Dolgen, Heidi Sussman and Ariel Olivieri
wiggled out of their clothes and went skinny-dipping.
-
Nora
Van Deusen decided to go in, too. She must have had some wine
to do something like that. She’s not usually a go-naked
kind of girl.1
-
A group
of guys came out onto the lawn and Nora’s boobs were floating
on top of the water as she sat on the steps of the pool. Everyone
could see them.
-
Shep
Cabot, aka Cabbie, who squeezed my own relatively small boob
last year with great expertise2
but who is otherwise a lame human being as far as I can tell,
snapped a photo—or at least pretended he did. Facts unclear
upon initial reportage.
-
Nora
grabbed her boobs and ran squealing into the house in search
of a towel. Which was a bad idea, because she wasn’t wearing
anything except a pair of soggy blue panties. Cabbie snapped,
or said he snapped, another photo. The rest of the girls stayed
coyly in the pool until Nora, having got her wits together and
wearing a pair of Kim’s sweatpants and a T-shirt, came
out and brought them towels.
I know all this because
no one was talking about anything else on the first day of school.
Nobody spoke to me directly,
of course. Because although I used to be reasonably popular, thanks
to the horrific debacles of sophomore year—in which I lost
not only my then-boyfriend, Jackson, but also my then-friends
Cricket, Kim and Nora—I was a certifiable leper with a slutty
reputation.
Meghan Flack, who carpools
me to school, was my only friend.
Last year, Meghan and
her hot senior boyfriend, Bick, spent every waking minute together,
annoying all the girls who would have liked to date Bick, and
also all the guys who didn’t want to watch the two of them
making out at the lunch table.
People hated Meghan. She
was the girl you love to hate—not because she does anything
mean or spiteful, but because she’s naturally gorgeous,
extremely oblivious, and completely boy-oriented. Because she
licks her lips when she talks to guys, and pouts cutely, and all
the guys stare at her like they can’t pull their eyes away.
But I don’t hate
her now. She doesn’t even bug me anymore. And she was lost
on the first day of school junior year, because Bick had left
for Harvard the week before.
So Meghan and I were standing
in front of the mail cubbies when we heard a crew of newly minted
senior girls discussing Kim’s party and what happened. Then
we heard more from the guys who sat behind us in American Literature,
and then from a girl who is on the swim team with me. By the end
of first period it was clear that Nora’s boobs were going
to be the major focus of nearly every conversation for the rest
of the day.
Because Nora is stacked.
Really stacked.
She is just not a small girl.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Nora
was the only one of my old foursome (her, me, Cricket and Kim)
who had never yet experienced some social or bodily horror related
to taking her top off. See The Boy Book entry, above.
2
Yes, only one boob. Long story.
Excerpted
from The Boy Book by E. Lockhart Copyright © 2006 by E. Lockhart.
Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press, a division of Random
House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
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