1.
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.

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.

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.1

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 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...