You'd never guess that Mike has a genius-level iq. He graduated from Warren with the highest gpa in the history of the school. The summer after he graduated, he turned down scholarship offers from four universities. Then he went tree planting for the summer and bought himself a one-way ticket to Australia. That was two years ago. Mom and Dad say they're not worriedâ Mike is apparently “finding his own path.” Path to where, I wonder? Sleeping on the beach at forty-five? Working as a waiter in a cheesy tiki-torch restaurant when his knees give out? Mom says Mike and I are chalk and cheese, and that both chalk and cheese have their uses. I'm pretty sure I'm the chalk. Useful, reliable, tall, skinny, pale, a bit dusty, snaps easily.
I'm trying to convince myself that it's not wrong to lust after my brother's girlfriend (if that's what she is), when I hear the back door slam. Leah. I shut down the computer and head downstairs. When I get to the kitchen, my mom is saying, “You must be joking.”
“Joking about what?” I ask.
Mom is standing by the back door, purse in one hand, keys in the other. “Leah can fill you in, Jack. I have to run. Your dad's waiting.” She seems in an awful hurry to get away.
I glance over at Leah, who is leaning against the fridge, her face watermelon red. The back door slams after my mom. “What the hell?” I say. “What's going on? You look terrible.”
“Thanks, Jack. What a friend.”
“No, seriously. Are you okay?”
“I told your mom about my birthday present, and sheâ¦sheâ¦saidâ¦well, you heard her⦔ Leah turns away from me, but not before I see that she's crying. I'm not good with crying. Put simply, I'm an empathetic crier. You cryâI cry. When I was little, it was cute. Now it's a social liability. I'm better at controlling it than I used to be, but as Leah gasps and sobs, I can feel the familiar sting behind my eyelids. I blink and press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
“What birthday present?” I ask. Leah wipes her nose with the sleeve of her gray hoodie. She knows about the crying thing, so she must be pretty upset to cry in front of me, even for a couple of minutes.
“From my mom. For my sixteenth birthday.”
Uh-oh. “What's she giving you?” I ask.
“A boob job,” Leah says. “Isn't that awesome?”
“You must be joking,” I say.
Leah bursts into tears again. But she still manages to kick meâhardâin the left kneecap. Now I really have something to cry about.
“Why are you like that?” Leah asks.
We are in my room. I am lying on the floor, a pillow under my leg and an ice pack strapped to my knee with a red-and-white-striped tea towel. Leah is sitting cross-legged on my unmade bed, glaring down at me and tossing Cheezies at my head. Once in a while I open my mouth and catch one.
“It's
RICE
,” I say. “Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. If you paid any attention in pe class⦔
“Not that, you moron. I mean, why do you have to be so unsupportive? Why can't you just be happy for me? You of all people. You're likeâ¦a mammary maniac. You love big tits.”
She suddenly flips over onto her stomach and hangs off the edge of the bed. Her hair sweeps the carpet as she peers into the gloom under my bed. I know what she's looking for, but she won't find it there.
The Big Book
of Boobs
is hidden inside one of my speakers.
“Gross!” She sounds as if she has a bad cold. Crying and then hanging upside down will do that to you. I turn my head and watch her pull a bowl, two plates, three glasses and a gravy boat out from under the bed. “A gravy boat! My mom would kill me if I kept dirty dishes in my room.”
I shrug, which is sort of hard, lying on my back with one leg up. It feels like the time my mom took me to her Pilates class. Weirdly difficult for something where you hardly break a sweat.
“Mom and I have an agreement,” I say. “She's cool with the dirty dishes as long as I don't keep anything up here more than a week. And I'm always responsible for emptying the dishwasher. She hates doing that more than she hates dirty dishes, so it's a mutually beneficial deal. Plus, I have a spreadsheet on my computer. I log in a dishâa cereal bowl, for instanceâand I get an alert when it's time to take it downstairs.”
“You are such a loser.” Leah slides off the bed, shoves the dirty dishes to one side and lies down beside me on the floor. “âMutually beneficial'? Who says that? A normal person would say âwin-win.' A normal person would take the dirty dishes downstairs when they're done with them. A normal person doesn't keep a computer log of crusty china. A normal person doesn't turn against his best friend.” She leans over and grabs the pillow out from under my knee. I yelp as my leg straightens. “Pussy,” she says. “I didn't kick you that hard.”
I flex my knee. It feels okayâa bit cold, but not really sore at all.
“I'm not turning against you,” I say, sitting up. An avalanche of Cheezies slides off my shirt and onto the rug, leaving behind a trail of what looks like radioactive orange dandruff. “I'm just, uh⦔
“Stupid?”
“No.”
“Ignorant?”
“No.”
“Annoying?”
“No. I'm worried.”
“Why?”
“ 'Cause it's surgery. You know. General anesthetic. Scalpels. Sutures. Pain. Scars. Foreign bodies in your body.”
“Dr. Myers says there won't be any scars. Not that you can see anyway. And my mom says it's better to get it done at my age because my skin is still so elastic. She wishes she hadn't waited so long to have hers done.”
“How old was she?” I ask. For the record, Mrs. James's boobs look like grapefruit and feel like baseballs. She hugged me once when I was little and gave me a black eye. I'm not kidding. According to Leah, she's also had her ass lifted, her tummy tucked, her face sanded and a few other things too gross to mention.
“Twenty-one,” Leah replies.
“Ancient,” I say.
Leah throws the pillow at my head and stands up. “It's totally safe,” she says. “I should have known you wouldn't understand. I thought maybe you'd get it, but you don't, do you?”
“I do get it,” I say. “You want bigger boobs. But can't you just wait and see what happens? I meanâyou never know, right? I mean, why put yourself at risk?”
She bursts into tears again and runs out of the room. I continue to lie on the floor even after I hear the front door slam. I grab the pillow and put it under my head, eat a few Cheezies off the carpet and doze off. The next thing I know, my dad is standing over me, laughing.
“Nice to know some things never change,” he says as I wipe the drool from my chin.
“Hey, Dad,” I mumble. “Welcome back.” I extend my hand up to him, and he pulls me off the floor and into a hug. My dad's tall and skinny like me, but he's in really good shape. He has to be for his job. Lots of the places he goes are totally remote. If you can't hike for days, you're screwed. When he's home, he bikes or walks everywhere. It's kind of annoying.
When he finally lets me go, he says, “Your mother tells me Leah's getting a boob job.”
“Not if I can help it,” I say.
Dad laughs again. His face is very tanned, and he has deep indentations on his nose from wearing his sunglasses all the time. “You must be the only teenage boy in the world who doesn't want his girlfriend to have bigger boobs!”
I sigh. “She's not my girlfriend, Dad.”
Dad raises an eyebrow at me. Why is it so hard for people to believe that a guy and a girl can be friends? Not a discussion I want to have with my father. He likes to tell me and Mike how many girlfriends he had before he met Mom. This information is what she calls
unverifiable
. Which basically means Dad is full of it. He also says that she is his best friend. That's a bit confusing, if you ask me.
“How long are you home this time?” I ask.
“A month, give or take,” he says. “I thought maybe we could go camping some weekend. Just the two of us.”
“Sure.” I nod and smile. Camping is my worst nightmare, but I'm not about to tell him that on his first night back. If Mike were here, he'd be all over it. Anything that's outdoors and allows him to wear shorts is Mike's idea of a good time. Not mine. I've got research to do.
Where to begin? Online, obviously. I type
plastic surgery horror stories
into Google. The very first article I read says that teens usually have plastic surgery for all the wrong reasons. Because they're insecure. Because a celebrity did it. Because their boyfriend wants them to. Basically the same reasons adults go under the knife. And there's always a doctor who's happy to oblige. Want your lips to look like Angelina Jolie's? Here's a shot of Restylane. Oh, so sorry you look like a Bratz doll. It'll wear off in a few weeks. Want some of that ass fat to disappear? Oh, so sorry your butt's numb. It'll wear off in a few weeks.
Here are some of the things I find out about cosmetic surgery:
1. Teenagers don't worry much about the risks of unhealthy behaviors like smoking, tanning and drinking. Well, duh. They are likely to pay even less attention to the risks of cosmetic surgery.
2. Teens who hate the way they look will almost always feel better about themselves a few years later, whether or not they have surgery.
3. Women with breast implants are four times as likely to commit suicide compared to other plastic surgery patients. So get a nose job, if you mustâjust leave your boobs alone.
4. Most women have at least one serious complication (infection, loss of nipple sensation!) after getting implants.
5. Implants don't last forever. You'll always need more surgery later on.
6. The general public has an inflated (ha-ha) sense of the benefits and a minimized sense of the risks of plastic surgery. Thank you,
Us Weekly
.
7. Plastic surgeons like to talk about something they call “degree of deformity.” Which means anything from a big nose, sticking-out ears or one breast being larger (or lower) than the other. Deformity is in the eye of the beholder. Conformity rules.
8. Even smart people make mistakes. Kanye West's mother, for instance.
9. Lots of men have cosmetic surgery. Man-boob reduction is big, as is ear-pinning.
I start writing all this stuff in a new notebook I name
Plastic
. I could have added to
The Big Book of Boobs
, but it seemed wrong. For one thing, plastic surgery isn't all about boobs. And the
BBB
is based mostly on observation, not research. Unless you call watching Megan Fox movies research.
I'm staring at some pictures online of a woman called “Catwoman.” She thought if she made herself look more feline, her husband wouldn't leave her for a younger woman. He cheated on her with a Russian model. Number 8 (above) does not apply to Catwoman.
I definitely need to talk to some people who've had cosmetic surgery, but not people like Catwoman or Leah's mom. Anyway, their views on cosmetic surgery can be summed up in three words:
Bring it on!
So where am I going to hear some different viewpoints? Where does anyone find out anything these days?
I go to Blogger.com and set up a blog called
Slice and Dice
. I post my nine facts about cosmetic surgery. Then I post a request for personal stories. Then I wait. While I wait I limp downstairs and hang out with Mom and Dad, who are sharing a bottle of wine and some cold pizza. Mom is lying at one end of the couch; Dad is at the other. They have their feet in each other's laps. The coffee table is a mess of pizza boxes and empty bottles, and they are listening to Van Morrison's “Into the Mystic.” My parents are, in a word, wasted. Yup, that's right. Dad's been home all of three hours and they're already totally hammered. Smashed. They do this every time Dad comes home. Then they go back to having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at the end of the day. It's not like they're alcoholics or anything. They just like to celebrate being together again.
“Jack-o!” my dad says, waving his arm at me. “Join us. Tell me everything.”
Mom giggles and pokes Dad in the thigh with her bare foot. I notice she has painted her toenails bright blue. “There's no room,” she says. “Jack's growing like stink.”
This strikes my dad as hilarious and he snorts wine out his nose, which cracks Mom up.
“Not much to tell,” I say. The only thing to do is ignore them. They're like toddlers on a sugar high. One minute they're all hyper, and then they crash. The next day they sleep in, drink a lot of coffee and shoot each other meaningful glances over their toast. By dinnertime it's as if it never happened. Mike and I have learned to wait it out. Let them have their fun. Tonight, though, I want someone to talk to. Ordinarily, I would talk to Leah, but she's pissed at me. I grab a piece of pizza and head back to my room, where I shoot Mike an email.
Dad just got home, so guess what?
Mom and Dad are blitzed (again). I'm
doing research about cosmetic surgery
(long story shortâLeah's mom wants to
give Leah a boob job for her 16th b-day.
I think it's a bad idea. And yeah, I'm
aware of the irony). Check out my blog
http://sliceanddice.blogspot.com
. Who's
the hot chick in the pix? Real boobs, am
I right? Let me know what you think of
the blog.
I sign it
BB
(for Baby Bro) and hit
Send
. Then I check my blog to see if anyone has responded to my request for information. Even though it's only been a couple of hours, there are already twenty-two comments. Five are from “anonymous” supporters of plastic surgery. Four are links to porn sites. Six are from wack-jobs who want to convert me, have sex with me or sell me something. One genius manages to combine all three. If I pay him twenty bucks, I can have sex with all the members of his cult in northern Minnesota. I hit the Delete key a lot. Five women and two girls (fourteen and sixteen) send their horror stories. Most of them also send photos. Reading their stories and looking at their pictures makes me feel sick. Then it makes me sad. Then it makes me angry. Innocent people are getting mutilated. Other people are making boatloads of money. Something needs to be done.