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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