At around nine, I developed a nubby bump poking out from beneath my right kneecap. The universe was being particularly cruel because it looked exactly like that hard nubby Barbie boob I always resented as a child. After all, they do say you become what you hate. Worse than having my nemesis’s chest on my leg was the fact that this bump was filled with nerves, so every time I hit it on something, which was often, I could only find solace by screaming for hours in a fetal position in the school nurse’s office. To boot, it would cause a giant black-and-green bruise, which made it look like I had a moldy knee. I was never able to wear a skirt or, even more heartbreakingly, a skort. For a couple years I went to a school requiring a uniform that involved a plaid dress, so I had to wear opaque tights underneath. I looked like a gimpy Wednesday Addams. A slut for symmetry, I developed the personality to match.
When I was eleven, the shit hit the fan in my nuclear family and my mom sent me to Roanoke, Virginia, to live with two of my aunts. They had all my favorite things: horses, dogs, and boobs. According to some online test where I spat in a tube, I am of Irish-Welsh mutt descent, but strangely my aunts are olive-skinned with perfect teeth, big lips, and even bigger boobs. The more time I spent with them, the more entitled I felt to a body like theirs. I counted the days when my DNA would take the stage and turn me into the kind of girl that cartoon men would get hit by cars just to get a glimpse of.
Unlike everyone in my family, I went through puberty oddly late. When I was twelve, I remember walking into my bedroom in Roanoke and finding a giant plastic box-shaped bag filled with maxi-pads. These were more like diapers than maxi-pads, the ones that look like an inflated safety vest, only made of layers upon layers of perfumed, bleached cotton with tiny roses emblazoned on them. The maxi-pads had a giant sticker on the bottom so they could attach to your underwear, and when you wore them with tight pants, they augmented your pelvis with a very conspicuous gender-neutral hump, like that weird thong situation sumo wrestlers wear on their undercarriage. I wanted to look like a Barbie, but these made me have the pelvis of a Ken doll.
I stacked all the pads in my bathroom, placing them one on top of another like I was playing a game of Tetris. The saddest part of the giant Jenga game of maxi-pads I made is that I didn’t even need them yet. The stack sat there for what seemed like forever. I was so ashamed of not having my period yet that I did what any insecure tween who didn’t get enough eye contact as a baby would do: I pretended I did. I peeled off the sticker coating of the pads, attached them to my giant Jockey underwear, and wore the colossal pads every day to the chagrin of my inner thighs, which retaliated with many an angry rash.
More devastating, my breasts were also still not cooperating. My legs were growing, my feet were growing, my Osgood-Schlatter bump was growing, my anxiety was growing, but my boobs were not. Turns out they were more scared to go out into the world than I was. To make matters weirder, I think my nipples were growing. But not my actual breasts. Well, that’s not true. One of them was growing. But not the other. I looked like Barbie if someone had second thoughts and bailed halfway through microwaving her.
I compensated for the sternum disparity by becoming a master illusionist, by crafting a bra layering system that made it seem as if I had a modicum of a figure. I saved money for months to order one of the bras from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. It was forest-green satin with giant wide straps and a tiny bow between the cups. I am not sure why of all the colors I could choose, I picked the one chosen by the Girl Scouts of America and Shrek’s wife.
The first layer was a bra that clasped in the back, a wireless sort of training bra, which served as my base. Then I cut a padded bra in half and put just the one cup on the flatter side of my sternum to even out the situation. Then I had another bra over that, with a clasp in the front, pulling it all together. I topped off this morass of fabric and wires with a sports bra that I pulled over my head to mush all the layers into what could from forty feet away look like an actual chest of a human girl, although up close, it looked like an octopus was trying to get out of a trash bag, so I tried not to get too close to anyone.
I actually wore this bra combo for a couple years, very satisfied by the attention my handiwork got me from teenage boys, even given the incredibly low bar they set once their bodies had been kidnapped by testosterone. I had zero guilt about my ruse because, after all, it was a secret between me and Victoria.
That summer I went to Florida with my sister and father. The weeks leading up to the trip, I was terrified about what I was going to wear to the beach. I was able to make my fabricated chest symmetrical under a shirt, but that was on dry land. I’d have had to be David Blaine to make my boobs look somewhat realistic in a bathing suit with water involved. Fortunately I didn’t end up having to go into the water to watch my Franken-chest float away into the sea, but I did have something equally as traumatizing happen: I hooked up with a lacrosse player.
My sister and I were always up to no good, and one night we snuck into the lobby of a neighboring hotel, where some lacrosse teams were staying for a tournament or whatever lacrosse players play in. I don’t know how it happened exactly, since I drank four Amaretto sours, but I ended up making out with one of the lacrosse bros on the beach. By this point I had already lost my virginity, but not in a way that prepared me for making out with anyone.
I know you’re going to think I’m making this up, and sometimes I even think I am, but I lost my virginity in the Virgin Islands. I know, too on the nose. I was on a cruise with my dad and Jessica. They were by the pool most of the time, and this activity was out of the question for me given my jerry-rigged sternum padding situation, so I wandered off and ended up losing my virginity to some guy from Schenectady, New York. The main headline is that while it happened I was so focused on keeping my triple bra contraption on that I didn’t pay attention to anything else that was happening. Now that I actually know what sex entails, I am shocked that this boy was able to keep an erection despite the lumpy bandage-like contraption around my chest. All I did was lie there and intensely pray it didn’t fall off. I was so still and quiet that I would not be surprised if this guy was a necrophiliac.
When I made out with the lacrosse player on the beach, I also worked very hard to keep my array of bras on and in place, much to this poor boy’s confusion. Every time he would put his hands near my chest, I would move them away, borderline swatting at him with a Kung Fu chopping motion. His deep need to see under my bras was yet another reminder that boobs are very, very important. By this point, I wasn’t even sure I would have been able to take them off if I had tried, given how intertwined they had all become, but I also couldn’t take the chance that he’d see my stunted log jam of a sternum.