The teachers are handing out pink rubber-band bracelets that read I HEART BOOBIES in stout white letters. Mr. Patterson wears one around each wrist and woots as he passes around the box of them—this month’s assembly is about breast cancer. A blurry projector image of our late principal lights up the gym. Somehow, I don’t think she’d like being reduced to her tits.
The vice-principal reads out the mission statement of I HEART BOOBIES. To heart your boobies is to take care of them, he says, and a low snicker rolls through the bleachers. Beside me, Kayla mutters that she’d take care of her boobs if she had any. This is nothing new: Kayla’s been lamenting her mosquito bites since eighth grade. She wrinkles her nose when the box of bracelets passes by and doesn’t take one. In truth, I want to take one, just to see the look on my mom’s face. I’d pin it to my bulletin board next to my print-out copy of Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong, and manifest the same for my tits. Someday I’ll Love My Boobies, I’d think, and someday, I would.
Instead, I follow Kayla’s lead and turn the box away. After the assembly, we funnel out of the gym in swarms. A boy with a butt chin jostles into me and grins, brutish.
“Hey.” He flashes his I HEART BOOBIES bracelet and gestures at my chest. “Want me to check you for lumps?” His friends flock behind him and jeer.
“He’s a real doctor,” one of them shouts, “You’ll be in good hands, don’t worry.” The others tug him back into their cluster, jerk him around and cackle. “It’s true!” he continues, “Got his degree in Boobology and everything.”
I squeeze away wordlessly. I find Kayla in the math hallway, sorting through her locker.
“There you are,” she says, “Does Patterson check homework?”
I shrug. “Don’t know.” We walk to Calc together, shoving through the crowd. I tell her about the boy with the butt chin, about his breast cancer joke.
“Damn,” she says, “Wish I had enough tit to get comments like that.” I contemplate telling her to stop thinking about her itty bitty titties for just one second and consider that I don’t want a schoolboy checking my breasts for lumps.
“You can take mine,” I say instead.
“God,” she laughs, “I wish.”
Ten minutes into Calc, the loudspeaker screeches the lockdown alarm. Patterson turns off the lights and locks the door and we all huddle against the wall. Kayla leans against the leg of a chair to take a nap; I tilt my head back and close my eyes. A hand brushes my waist, spiders up my chest. I seize up, primed to scream. It squeezes, and I think of Kayla wishing this were her, wishing a boy with broad hands would grope her in the dark.
I don’t scream. Instead, I do what Kayla would do: stay silent and still, and let him.
