Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

Once upon a friday night

A shy girl with no close friends save her big brother, who was out at a party she couldn't go to because she was just a lowly seventh grader, can do very little on a Friday night except watch movies, read, or take a bubble bath. As usual, Jenny poured almost an entire bottle of Mr. Bubble into the bath and ran the tap until the hot water had run out and huge puddles splashed onto the cracked white tile when she got in. The bubbles were so plentiful she couldn't see herself, which was just how she liked it. She lay back in the warm water, resting her head with its damp mass of dark brown curls on the ridiculous red inflatable lips bath cushion her mother had left behind all those years ago.

"Jennifer? Get out here—I'm trying a new deviled egg recipe and I want you to taste it!" Rufus bellowed from the kitchen. One of the reasons Jenny had chosen to take a nice hot bath was that her father was experimenting with a blowtorch and boiled eggs while he cantered around the kitchen to some boisterous Italian opera. "Hurry!" he shouted, as if it were a true emergency.

"Dad, I'm in the bathtub!" she yelled back.

"Thinking!" she added, hoping that would shut him up.

"Forget it," her father replied from just outside the chipped, white-painted bathroom door. He opened it a crack and shoved his hand in, brandishing something on his palm. "I'm not looking. Just try it and tell me what you think."

Jenny sighed. "Can't it wait?"

Rufus stretched his blind arm out as far as it could go. "Nope. It can't."

She leaned over the side of the tub and reached for the thing in his hand, already sure that it was going to be disgusting. Half a hard-boiled egg, its skin marbled with black veins and filled with something that looked like crunchy peanut butter mixed with yellow dog poop weighed heavily in her palm. Oddly, it smelled like Cracker Jacks.

"I added some almonds, but then I decided the nuts should be caramelized, so I threw in a cup of sugar and some sherry and torched the hell out of it. I thought it'd taste better, you know, flambéed with candied nuts," Rufus's voice echoed outside the door. His approach to food was not unlike his approach to fashion: inventive and utterly appalling.      Jenny stared down at the sad little half of an egg. "But Dad, don't you see? It's not a deviled egg anymore. It's just . . . gross."

"I bet you haven't tasted it yet, though. Come on. Taste it, taste it!"

Jenny sniffed the egg again and then tossed it into the little trash can under the sink. She sank her head back into the red lips pillow and closed her eyes again. "Mmmm. Yum. Wow. Actually, Dad, do you think I could bring some of these to school tomorrow so I can give them out to my teachers? I bet I'd get A's in everything if I told them that's what I got to eat every night for dinner."

"Forget it," Rufus muttered before retreating to the kitchen.

Jenny opened her eyes again to dispense more hot water into the tub and was dismayed to discover that the bubbles had already almost completely evaporated. There it was—her pale, concave chest with those two little pink things that looked more like mouse eyes in a Beatrix Potter illustration than boobs. Even Marx, the Humphreys' overweight black cat, had bigger boobs than she did, and he was a boy. Maybe she should just get used to it. She was doomed. Or maybe not. According to the literature she'd received with the breast enhancement supplements from noknockers.com that had arrived this afternoon care of FedEx, she might feel like nothing was happening for a while. Then one day she might measure herself and find she'd increased by at least a quarter of an inch. Say that happened twice a month. She'd be a B cup by spring! She might even be able to wear a normal bra or even a bikini in a real women's size rather than a child's size ten.

Anxious to measure her progress, Jenny sprang out of the tub and wrapped her unnecessarily thick bubble gum pink fuzzy cotton chenille robe around herself. She padded down the hall to her bedroom, closed the door, and slid her desk chair in front of it. Then she bent down and pulled aside her pale pink dust ruffle to retrieve the white cardboard box beneath her bed. Inside was a giant white plastic canister decorated with an illustration of a redheaded woman with perfect cleavage. Jenny unscrewed the top, tapped two of the organic supplements out onto her palm, and swallowed them dry. Then she unwound the white, neatly coiled paper measuring tape that had come tucked inside the box beside the canister. Pushing down the shoulders of the pink chenille robe so that it hung down from her small hips like a gargantuan fuzzy pink tutu, she wound the tape around her back and over those two pink mouse eyes. She was careful not to pull too tightly and reduce the chance of a tiny incremental increase since the last time she'd measured herself, which happened to be this morning.

"Thirty-one and an eighth," she said aloud. She checked the tape again. Was it twisted? Nope. Thirty-one and an eighth. This morning she'd measured at exactly thirty-one. She'd only taken one dose. Was it possible that the supplements had already started to work? She hurried over to her dresser and pulled out the thing that made her blush with embarrassment and guilt every time she touched it. The powder blue cotton Hanro jog bra had been sort of hanging out of the only accessible crack in Serena's locker when Jenny had needed to shove in Dan's poem yesterday. She'd tugged on the bra, and it had fallen out. The locker had been locked, so instead of just leaving the bra on the floor in the hall, Jenny had replaced it with the poem and stuffed it into her bag. What else was she supposed to do, drag Serena out of French class and tell her she had her bra? She'd return it eventually.

Maybe.

The tag inside it read 34B. Not too big, not too small, just perfect. Jenny pulled it on over her head and pushed her arms through the holes. The soft light blue cups sagged so badly she looked like a little girl playing dress-up with Mommy's things. Still, there was something reassuring about wearing the bra. Maybe, just maybe, if she kept on taking the supplements, she'd fit into it. Maybe one day she wouldn't be a tiny mouse of a girl stuck at home on a Friday night with her crazy dad eating flambéed eggs with candied almonds. Maybe one day she'd be the girl wearing the bra, the girl every boy wanted and every girl wanted to be. Just like Serena.

Wouldn't that be something?"