Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

Our bodies, ourselves

"Jennifer!" Rufus Humphrey bellowed from his office that morning, waking Dan. "What in hell is noknockers.com?"

Dan's sleepy brown eyes slid open. His lips were stuck to his old Calvin & Hobbes pillowcase with a dried mix of vomit-scented drool and Aquafresh. He vaguely remembered being put in a taxi by that shaven-headed girl, Vanessa, with a twenty-dollar bill and a nearly empty pack of unfiltered Camels. She was nice. And cool. He was pretty sure he'd had kind of a good time, except for the vomiting-Irish-coffee-into-the-gutter part right before he got into the cab.

Ouch.

"Jennifer? Will you please explain how you possibly could have donated nearly three hundred dollars of my money to a charity in Tennessee by the name of noknockers? What is it? Some crackpot organization that helps underdeveloped young women find Jesus? Jennifer—are you listening to me?"

Dan drew up the covers and pulled a pillow over his face, gagging on the cigarette stench of his hands. If only he'd had a chance to speak to Serena last night. Just a hello would have been amazing. Instead he'd become a smoker. He pressed the pillow against his closed eyes. And Serena would forever remember him as the geek who showed up at the party and got thrown out the fire door by Chuck Bass, never to be seen or heard from again.

Jenny lay on her back beneath her light pink chenille Pottery Barn Kids bedspread, feeling her chest. "It's just a place I got some underwear from, okay, Dad?" she shouted, hoping to shut him up. They were a family of shouters, so it wasn't the shouting that bothered her. It was the idea of talking about boobs with her dad, which obviously was not going to happen, ever. Her chest had definitely changed overnight though. There were lumps—-actual palpable apricot-size lumps! She threw back the covers and leapt out of bed, scattering sheets of paper covered with art for Constance Billard's hymnal contest that she'd labored over until late last night. She grabbed the noknockers measuring tape and wound it around herself once more, careful not to twist it. The tape read exactly 32 inches. Jenny yanked her thin cotton Hello Kitty nightgown down so there were absolutely no wrinkles and measured herself again. Definitely 32. It was a miracle. Still, the instructions from noknockers said that it was very difficult to measure oneself and suggested that a friend or family member could give a more accurate reading.

"Dan!" Jenny shrieked. "Quick, get in here!"

Dan threw the pillow off his face and yawned noisily. Jesus, was it against the law to sleep in on a Saturday anymore? He should have slept over at that girl Vanessa's house. She said she lived with her big sister who stayed up really late at night playing in her band. They probably slept until sunset in complete peace. Not that sleeping over at Vanessa's house had been an option. And not that he'd actually considered it in his drunken stupor or anything.

But is he considering it now?

"Dan?" Jenny shouted again. "Are you alive?"

Dan staggered to his feet and shuffled miserably out of his room and down the hall with its creaking, scuffed parquet floor and chipped white paint. Jenny's door was open just a crack. "Okay, so I'm here," he announced, pushing it open.

Jenny was standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, wearing her favorite old pink Hello Kitty nightgown. She cocked her head. "Notice anything different?"

Dan squinted. "You got a haircut?"

"She rolled her eyes. "No, stupid, I grew!" She cupped her chest and gave it a good squeeze. Then she grabbed the measuring tape and handed it to him. "Will you just measure me to make sure? It's supposed to be more accurate if someone else does it." She held her arms out like airplane wings.

Dan glanced down at the white laminated paper measuring tape embellished with tiny illustrations of bras with smiley faces on the cups. "You want me to measure you?"

"Don't be embarrassed. I mean, I'm the one who should be embarrassed," she explained, flustered by his hesitation. "Please just do it and get it over with already?"

Dan averted his eyes as best he could as he wound the tape around his sister's upper torso. He reminded himself that Jenny didn't have a mom to help her with such things, otherwise she'd have asked her. I'm all she has, he told himself importantly. The tape stuck to his clammy, hungover, cigarette-stained fingers.
"Not too tight," she reminded him, holding the tape securely over her front as he wound it around her back. "But don't do it too loose either." She stood up straight.

"Um, it looks like thirty-two inches. Maybe like a hair more."

A hair more? Jenny yanked the tape away and jumped up and down, skipping rope with it. "I'm a thirty-two!" she cried exuberantly. "A thirty-two!" That didn't mean she could quite fill an A cup yet, but almost. Soon.

The scattered sheets of paper on the floor caught Dan's eye and he bent down to take a closer look. Serena's navy blue eyes stared knowingly up at him, her luxurious blond hair spilling over the folds of a filmy white gown. The words Hark! The Herald Angels Sing were printed in bold calligraphy beneath her bare, pink, perfect feet, and her downy white wings were spread wide, as if she were about to take flight.

Wings?

He picked up one of the sketches and held it to his chest. "Can I keep this?" he asked without thinking about how perverted, messed up, or deranged he might sound.

"No, it's mine, you freak," Jenny snapped, slipping her arms into her enormous, hairy pink bathrobe. What Dan might do with that drawing in the privacy of his room was too gross to consider. "Drop it."

Reluctantly, he let the page flutter to the floor. He folded his arms and stared down at it. Serena. Serena, Serena, Serena. "Well, when the hymnals get printed I'm going to make you steal one for me."

Jenny came over and gazed down at the drawings with him. "You think I could win? I mean, I'm only a seventh grader and there are, like, seniors who are way better artists than I am."

Dan rolled his eyes. Jenny had never grasped how truly gifted an artist she was. Ever since she could hold a pencil, she'd drawn the most incredibly accurate portraits of everyone in the family. Once, she'd gotten in trouble for sketching her school headmistress, Mrs. McLean, during assembly. But when Mrs. M had seen how precise and lifelike the drawing was, down to the headmistress's weirdly square head, she'd forgiven her. Now the portrait was framed and hanging on the wall in Mrs. M's office, much to Jenny's chagrin.

"I know you're going to win," Dan told her confidently. He was about to give her a nice, big-brotherly hug when he realized that Jenny had her hands inside her bathrobe and was feeling her chest again, really giving the ol' hooters a good going-over this time.

Nice.

"I'm going to go now." He loved his little sister, he did, but he wasn't really into watching her develop right before his very eyes, no matter how motherless she was.

Just wait till she takes him shopping for her first real bra.