Plastic by Sarah N. Harvey

Chapter One
    Boobs, bazongas, bazookas, big berthas, blouse bunnies, boulders, buds, cannons, chubbies, coconuts, the devil’s dumplings, dirty pillows, flesh melons, fun bags, the girls, hooters, headlights, jubblies, jugs, knobs, knockers, milk wagon, milkshakes, ninnies, norks, pompoms, rack, speed bumps, sweater cows, tatas, tits, torpedoes, twin peaks, chest pumpkins, mosquito bites, raisins on a breadboard, aspirins on an ironing board, bee stings, goose bumps on steroids. I could go on.
    Number of words I know for breasts: one hundred and thirty-eight, and counting.
    Number of times since the age of ten that I have actually seen a naked female breast (not counting TV or movies or online): four. My cousin Amber when I was twelve and she was fifteen. I grabbed her towel when she was changing at the beach. A woman in the mall who was nursing her baby. Janice Hayward when her shirt rode up when she was taking off her sweatshirt in PE . And, sadly, my mom.
    Number of times since the age of ten that I have actually touched a naked female breast: zero. Amber punched me out. The woman in the mall flipped me off and pulled a blanket over her chest. Janice called me a pathetic loser perv. My mom, who is a women’s studies professor, just laughed and tied her robe a bit tighter. When I was younger, I saw her and my dad naked all the time. It was no big deal. Really.
    I’m not alone in my obsession with breasts. I’m just more organized than most guys. I keep track of things. In notebooks. I’ve always kept notes about things I’m interested in. I even have a notebook that keeps track of my notebooks. When I was five, it was caterpillars. When I was ten, it was fossils. When I was twelve, it was crows. Now that I’m fifteen, it’s breasts. I’m not a stalker or anything. I don’t have a secret porn collection under my bed. I’m only interested in boobs in the wild. No airbrushing, no surgery. Just the real deal.
    My observation skills are very highly developed. That’s one of the reasons that I ended up at the Warren Academy. Warren is a high school for gifted kids. Don’t get too excited. There’s no end-of-the-year performance where a talent scout discovers the ballerina turned hip-hop star. Warren is a school for the academically, not artistically, gifted. Our end-of-theyear assembly features awards for the highest marks in things like college-level statistics. There are announcements about who got into what university and how big their scholarships are. Then everyone sings the school song, “The Warren Way.” It was written in 1927 by the wife of the school’s founder. That’s as artsy as we get. The kids who are great at singing, dancing or acting go to the Beacon School for the Performing Arts. They probably don’t worry too much about getting into Ivy League schools. Warren is for kids who get straight A’s in physics. They couldn’t dance if you held a gun to their heads. There are dances at Warren, but mostly the girls dance with each other. The boys lean against the walls and talk about how they got six thousand points on a triple word score in Scrabble. Me—I lean against the wall and watch the girls dance. I suck at Scrabble, and there’s always a chance that there will be a wardrobe malfunction. Especially now that strapless dresses are so popular.
    I’m sitting in my advanced-fiction class, supposedly working on a short story about a hemophiliac hermaphrodite. I don’t really believe in Write What You Know. I’m trying to figure out whether Melissa Reed’s boobs have actually gotten bigger over the weekend or whether she’s wearing one of those weird gel-filled bras.
    â€œJack!” Leah’s voice comes from behind me and is accompanied by a sharp jab between my shoulder blades. Unlike most of the kids at Warren, Leah is athletic. She plays basketball and soccer. She swims. She’s the pitcher on