The Boy Book
Authors: E. Lockhart
contents
1.
The Care and Ownership of Boobs
2.
Rules for Dating in a Small School
3.
Your Business is Our Business: A Pledge
4.
What to Wear When You Might Be Fooling Around
5.
Scamming: Our Brief and Irregular History
7.
Neanderthals on the Telephone: Or, How to Converse
8.
Boy-Speak: Introduction to a Foreign Language
9.
Clever Comebacks to Catcalls
10.
Why You Want the Guy You Can’t Have: Inadequate Analysis of a Disturbing Psychological Trend
12.
Why Girls Are Better than Boys
For Zoe Jenkin
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!)
1. 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.
2. 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.)
3. A helpful hint: For optimal shape, go in the bathroom stall and hike them up inside the bra.
4. Do not perform the above maneuver in public, no matter how urgent you think it is.
5. 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.)
6. 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.
t
he 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.
1. Someone chundered behind the garden shed and never confessed. There were a number of possible suspects.
2. People had handstand contests and it turns out Shiv Neel can walk on his hands.
3. 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.
4. 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.
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5. 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.
6. Shep Cabot, aka Cabbie, who squeezed my own relatively small boob last year with great expertise
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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.
7. 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.
She’s on the basketball team, and she keeps those things in line by wearing a sports bra every day instead of a regular, so maybe you wouldn’t notice unless you slept over at her house and saw them in the flesh. But once they pop out, they’ve popped. I don’t like to use this language to describe the female body, but the right word for what Nora’s got on her chest is
hooters.
Nora Van Deusen is actually not the kind of girl guys tend to pay attention to. She’s never had a boyfriend. She takes photographs and watches sports on TV. She laughs a lot and drinks her espresso black with no sugar. Her family goes to church.
And now, she was walking down the hall with her books clutched to her chest, looking down at the floor while guys called, “Don’t hide that light under a bushel!” or, “Set ’em free, Van Deusen! Twins like that need a regular airing.”
God, it was like they had never been forced to take American History & Politics, where we spent nearly half a semester on the history of feminism. Everyone should have known, after that, that it’s completely retro and lame to make comments about other people’s bodies in the hallway.
“Hey, Nora, can you fly me somewhere with those hot-air balloons?”
It was like they’d never seen a boob before.
And maybe they hadn’t.
Besides the info Meghan and I got eavesdropping, the main person who filled me in was Noel DuBoise. He turned up in my Art History class and then again in Chemistry, where we decided to be lab partners as a way of lightening up what promised to be a painful semester of scientific suffering.
Here’s Noel: blond, spiky hair that probably requires quantities of gel; nondrinker, clean liver, vegetarian but heavy smoker; pierced eyebrow; underweight; funny in a mutter-under-your-breath way. I’d known him forever, because everyone at Tate Prep has known each other since kindergarten,
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but I really only made friends with him in Painting Elective last year, and then he stood by me during all the debacles of sophomore spring, when everyone acted like I was covered with the strange blue spots of leprosy.
Noel is one of those people who doesn’t have a clique—but he isn’t a leper, either. I used to wonder if he was gay, but he’s completely not, though he definitely holds himself aloof from the rabidly hetero merry-go-round of our high school.
Noel looks at the Tate Universe as if he finds it all mildly amusing and sometimes a bit sickening, but he’s willing to participate for purposes of research so that he can bring back interesting tidbits of information to the ironic, punk rock planet where he really lives.
People like him for this quality. They invite him to parties. He can sit at anyone’s table. But he never really seems committed, if you know what I mean.
Noel and I hadn’t seen each other all summer. I had been traveling with my mom during the first half.
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Then, in August, he went to New York City to visit his older brother, Claude, who goes to Cooper Union.
Even when we were both in Seattle, Noel and I had never been the make-plans level of friends. More like Painting Elective friends who sometimes put notes in each other’s mail cubbies.
We didn’t call each other or anything.
At the end of the summer, though, Noel had sent me an e-mail. A New York City travel report.
Number of stairs to Claude’s walk-up apartment: seventy.
Number of lights in Times Square: a gazillion.
Number of dumplings consumed in a single sitting: eleven.
Number of times yours truly did not go to bed until four a.m.: eleven.
Number of times Claude called me a little punk: countless.
Number of gay dance clubs he dragged me to: three.
Name of person who busted out dancing and then fell on his little punk butt with all his brother’s friends looking: Noel.