Jerrys Shirt 1 3

Jerry's Shirt

(1)

Dawn

High school to college was going to be a big transition, everybody told me. Cute girl, smart girl like you — all the sororities were going to rush me, I was going to get into honors classes and blow the world wide open.

I didn't know from cute — I wasn't into makeup, because all the teenage girls tended to paint themselves up like tarts and I didn't know who was going to teach me

good

makeup, because my mom was not gifted in that department. She knew two levels of makeup: Raccoon and Clown.

I figured I could settle for matching my skin tone to cover zits, and since my acne had backed off in junior year, I got a zit about once every six months. Never thought about makeup.

So, was I cute because I wore

no

makeup, and that made me look young and unsophisticated? Or was I cute because nobody could bring themselves to say "pretty," let alone "beautiful," with a straight face?

No. I was called cute by high school boys for one reason: I didn't have tits, I didn't have knockers, I had

jugs.

Mom was no help. "Women pay thousands of dollars to get implants that don't end up looking half as nice as your bosom." Yeah? How much to get them cut down to a reasonable size? Or at least, how much for tiny helium floats I can put under them to make it so they weren't dragging my shoulders down.

"Stand up straight, Dawnie, you look like you're ashamed of your body."

No, Mom, I look like I'm tired of carrying these feedbags around on my chest all day.

But teenage boys being the repulsive creatures that they are, started noticing my chest when I was eleven, and the nickname Pritty-titty first surfaced.

Why couldn't I have been freakishly tall, like my friend Gloaming, whose mother mated with a sasquatch, or so Gloaming claimed. "I'd be happy to have a name in progressive tense," she said, "but nobody knows what the verb 'gloam' means. 'Let's go gloaming tonight!'"

As freaks, we hit it off pretty well. And we both agreed that we'd rather have her affliction — six-two as a high school girl — than mine — tits that take more than three letters to size properly.

Any brassiere big enough in the cup was way too huge in the chest, because usually it was fat ladies or at least big-boned women who needed my cup size. I wasn't skinny but I was what you might charitably call "slight" of frame, which made my breasts feel even heavier, considering how little bone and muscle I had to hold them up and balance them.

Sometimes I thought I might as well fall over on my face and just lie there until somebody shoveled me off the sidewalk. I

always

had something I wanted to get off my chest.

So no, I pretty much disregarded all those encouraging words about college, and wished my dad would pay for me to go on the Grand Tour or something. "Yes, I can afford the money for you to go," he said on Facetime, "but I'd also have to send two bodyguards, because you set foot in Italy with those knockers of yours, Baby Doll, and they won't stop at pinching. The French and Spanish aren't much better."

"Send me to Sweden. Plenty of blonde big-breasted women there."

"And you could study their whole art scene in a week and then what do you do with your Grand Tour?"

"Iceland," I said. "Maybe my tits would freeze off."

"You're beautiful as you are, Baby Doll. Everybody sees that instantly."

He was a cock-driven bounder, my dad, but he had a lot of money and his alimony and child support kept me and Mom and my big brothers in pretty good style. Now my brothers had moved out to go to

their

colleges — athletic scholarships both of them, Jerry in football and Sterling in baseball — so it was just me and Mom at home. And her encouragement was killing me.

"Let's get you an early start at State," Mom said to me late in senior year. "Summer school isn't a punishment in college, it's a chance to get ahead in your studies, finish in three years instead of four."

"Like skipping first grade?" I asked.

"We all agree it was a mistake," said Mom. "But you were so far ahead of your grade level —"

"And then making me take sixth grade twice —"

"I look forward to when you're old enough to sue me," she would say.

Well, now I was eighteen and could sue anybody, but only if I could find a lawyer willing to take on my case. "Sue your parents for letting the school skip you straight to second grade?" the one lawyer I talked to asked, incredulously. "And then holding you back in sixth grade — they got you special tutoring and you took that college typing class. How much do you think any jury will award you in damages for

those

crippling mistakes in child-rearing?" I fired him despite his insistence that I hadn't hired him anyway, since he never got a retainer.

Anyway, we enrolled me in summer school with a bunch of general ed classes, all of them honors sections of course, because I couldn't be allowed to have a relaxing term of just showing up and getting

A

s in regular classes.

My classes were fine. The kids in summer school were either losers who flunked their classes the first time around, and were retaking them, or gung-ho eager-beavers who were proud of being smart and wanted to get a head start on their college careers. I was none of the above.

But the sororities came recruiting, because the gung-ho types would raise the whole sorority's grade point average, and the slackers had shown themselves to be real sorority material.

Nobody recruited me. My grades were perfect. But when I asked one recruiter why they didn't want my grades in their average, she explained very clearly. "Nobody would mind you have better grades than all the rest of us put together, darling, but from what I've been told, eight of them put together couldn't match your cup size. You think they want that kind of competition?"

"It's a competition no woman in her right mind wants to win."

"Easy for you to say," she scoffed. "You've already won."

"What about in the fall?"

"Dawn," she said, "no sorority is going to rush you, period. Our girls have the biggest average tit size on campus, but nobody wants to beat us with the addition of a single pair of tits."

"Do people really keep track of stats like that?" I asked.

"They do if they want people to come to their parties. Our Bra-less Tuesday dances are amazingly well attended, because the boys know that if they bring enough beer, by midnight only about half of us will be wearing tops at all."

I think she thought that was a selling point for her little clubhouse, but she was right — if the sorority party drew boys and beer with their tits, mine would be too intimidating. The half-dozen boys who took me out in high school found that even if I let them get their hands into my bra, half the time they couldn't even find my nipples. Their hands just kept wandering blindly around. Don't get me wrong here — it felt very good. And the guy who found the nipple fastest knew what to do with it, so I had the closest thing to a sexual experience I've ever had. Never went out with him again, because of how he bragged about titty-fucking me, which did not happen. Liars and braggarts. Who needs them.

Summer school was almost over, and I decided to forget the whole idea of living on campus. I had a decent car — thanks, Dad, for not forcing me to drive that Porsche you offered — and if I ever needed to carpool I could take four other people with me. But I was mostly grateful for the car because I could live at home and commute to college. I wouldn't be trapped in some dorm or sorority. I could get to campus and then get off of campus and be myself again at home, instead of always having to minimize my breasts by hiding them behind books or bags or the sloppiest sweatshirts in Iowa.

So summer classes were all winding up or reviewing for finals when a different kind of recruiter started prowling the outdoor lunch-eating area. I saw them, but I knew by now that no group of girls wanted

me

. I rejected all such conversations because invitations were never extended to me.

But these recruiters were different. They didn't look like they were in sororities, for one thing. They were pretty enough, good makeup, but nobody looked like money — or rather, nobody looked like they were

trying

to look like money, which was kind of encouraging, because people who don't care about money dress pretty much the same whether they actually have money or not. It's hand-me-down chic, in a way. If you look like you got your shirt out of your dad's closet, you'd fit right in with these weirdoes.

I raided my brothers' winter closets at home and from among mostly flannels I picked some lighter-weight shirts that I knew they didn't wear anymore. So when one of these recruiters got to my table at lunch, it happened to be a day where my brother Ster's baggy Hawaiian shirt was covering my bra and making me look, in a word, cool. Or desperate.

"We're not a residential club," Willa explained to me. "No alumni foundation, no reunions, no national rules. Our work is to find lonely people on campus and hook them up."

"No thanks," I said.

"Not that kind of hookup. I'm saying friendship."

I studied her. Very little makeup, but some, anyway. "Would you teach me to apply makeup like yours?"

"I don't wear any —" Then she stopped. "I wear minimal.

You

don't wear any."

"I'd like to see if I can improve on ... what nature gave me," I said.

"Sister, nature poured herself empty, making you," said Willa.

"Thanks," I said, pretending not to be offended by the obvious reference to the amplitude of my breasts, because she seemed to think it was a compliment.

"Also, there's a call out for nude models for the figure-drawing classes," Willa added. "Two hundred bucks a session."

"I can't afford that," I said.

"They pay

you,"

she said.

"But nude means ... naked, right?"

"The art students will want to paint or sketch you."

"Because of my jugs," I said softly.

"They need naked models because it's hard to get shapes and musculature only from memory," she said. "But yes. They don't want to paint or draw only models who look like everybody else."

"So if I had burn scars all over my face —"

"Big boobs aren't burn scars, but ... yeah."

"Your lonely-hearts club," I said.

"We call it the Company of Friends," said Willa.

"C. O. F.," I said. "Coff?"

Willa was taken aback a little. "Well, nobody calls it

that,

" she said. "Sounds like a prostate exam."

"I wouldn't know," I've said. "Never had one."

"I examine prostates all the time," she said. "And I never make them cough." She laughed at what she apparently thought was a joke. I wasn't sure if she was bragging about sexual encounters or medical expertise. But no matter what I said, I was pretty sure I'd sound ridiculous.

She finally realized I wasn't laughing. "Look," she said. "Can you at least tell me your name?"

"So you can tell your club about the biggest tits on campus?" I asked sweetly.

"I don't need your name to do

that,

" she said. "I need your name so they don't invent names

for

you."

"Like?"

"Don't ask

me

. I don't make up names to ridicule people," said Willa.

"Does that mean you're nice, or uncreative?" I asked.

"Wow," she said. "Bitchy, ever?"

"Willa," I said. "I'm at summer school to learn and get good grades. I'm out here at these tables to have my lunch in the shade. And you came to me to point out how freakish my tits make me, in case I didn't feel isolated enough already. And

I'm

bitchy?"

She looked kind of stunned. "I ... that's the opposite of what I ... what

we

are all about."

"Company of Friends," I said. "So far, it seems to me you're trying to recruit me for the Collection of Freaks."

"Oh God," she said softly. "I'm so sorry. So so so so sorry."

"No sweat," I said. "It'll only take me a couple of decades not to feel humiliated at the memory of this lunch hour conversation. If you see me around campus, Willa, please don't wave, don't call out to me, don't talk about me or point me out to anybody. Please pretend that we never had this conversation, and you never sized up my huge boobs, and I'll pretend you didn't mortify me and make me feel incredibly lonely and sad."

"Incredibly?" she asked.

"Lonely and sad," I said. "Eating lunch alone, I wasn't ashamed. Now, after our conversation, I am. Now I'm pretty sure that I will never make friends at college, when I get assailed and insulted by a representative of a club committed to making lonely people feel like they belong."

She laid her forehead down on the rough picnic table. "I'm so sorry."

"Your 'so' count is up to six, I think. Unless you count the first two letters of 'sorry,' in which case you're at nine."

"Is that your idea of joking?" she said, not raising her face from the table.

"It's my way of rubbing it in. Trying to make you feel even worse about visiting your 'friendly' abuse on me."

"Good job," she said.

"It's my one talent. Besides providing milk enough to make the county's whole supply of cottage cheese."

"You don't have

milk

in those, yet, do you?" She raised her head from the table and stared at my chest.

"I haven't ever been pregnant," I said. "I've never fed a baby from my big beautiful tits. The cottage cheese joke was one I came up with so that no matter what crude thing the morons at high school said about me, I could top it."

She grinned. "You said 'so that' which brings the 'so' count to ten."

"With the two you said in that last sentence, we're at a dozen, so we can stop counting, don't you think?" I said.

"I beg you to tell me your name," she said. And she really sounded sincere — about the begging. She really seemed to feel shitty and I supposed that finding out my name was part of the remedy.

"My parents named me 'Dawn,' after rejecting Aurora and Eos. And Alba, Danika, Easter, Roxana, Sahar, Tamsin, and Svitlana."

"Some of those aren't awful. Like Tamsin."

"They didn't ask my opinion," I said. "They decided Dawn was best."

"Good choice, really," Willa said. "With the name 'Willa,' I don't think

anybody

else's name is in any way unfortunate."

"You do realize you're implying that if your name was Jessica, you

would

think my name was unfortunate."

She ignored my umbrage. "This campus has way too many Jessicas," she said. "But only one Willa."

"And at least one Dawn," I said.

"Dawn," Willa said, "Can we possibly be friends after this? Because I'm really sincere when I saw that I

do

want to be your friend, no matter how unbefuckinglievably I fucked up this conversation."

"Am I supposed to start counting fucks?" I said. "Cause that was two in one sentence."

She laughed. "Because I like you. I really do. I want to be your friend because you're

cool."

I laughed louder, and it wasn't fake. I was surprised. "Unbemotherfuckinglievably, Willa, I'm honored. Thank you."

"To tell the truth," she said, "I really do count fucks Not the word, the deed."

Okay, that took things into a really weird county. "Are we talking about incidents of sexual intercourse?"

She nodded. Big nods, like she thought she was a trained horse.

"Your

own

fucks, or everybody's?"

"I'm doing it again," she said. "I'm making it weird."

"No, no," I said. "Here in Freakazoid County, you're perfectly normal."

"What about you?" she asked. "How do you think you're going to get along in Freakazoid County?"

"I know I'm not going to be adding to anybody's fuck count."

"With those knockers, you don't have guys trying to jump your bones?"

"Trying isn't succeeding," I said.

"My own fuck count is only at three, depending on what you count as a fuck."

"I'd've thought that would have been a pretty clearcut definition."

"At first I counted blow jobs as fucks, or at least fuckish," she said. "And then I only counted blow jobs where the dick was down my throat so I didn't actually have to swallow, the jizz went straight down."

"Has anyone ever discussed the concept of Too Much Information with you?"

She smiled. "If I had sat down here and started talking about what does and does not count as a fuck, would we be friends now instead of you being mad at me?"

"You live in a different world," I said. "I've never given a blow job. I've never even

thought

of giving a blow job to any guy I knew. And I sure never imagined deep-throating a guy."

"See? I

do

have something to offer you."

"Willa, I'm not

equipped

for you to give me a blow job."

"No, no. I can teach you. Coach you for deep throating."

"In my experience," I said, "I can't get their mouths off my nipples long enough to even

find

their dicks, let alone get my mouth near it."

"Actually, you're not missing anything. That's why nowadays my fuck count is at three. The cocks that have been in my pussy long enough to get my juices flowing."

"I think there's a story in that set of rules."

"High school boys, they

see

a naked pussy and they start to come. They can barely touch my slit with their dick before they're jizzing all over me. I get messy underwear and zero sexual stimulation."

"I can't believe that," I said. "You really are a beauty, and you have the breasts I would like to have if anybody had given me a choice."

"Dawn," she said, "those words have just made you my friend for life."

I rolled my eyes.

"So with complete candor, I'm going to tell you, not counting your breasts," and she held up her hands to block out my chest from her view, "you are a very pretty girl."

I squinted and winced a little.

She went on. "Your face is lean, your jaw is cut, your smile is warm, and your complexion is smooth."

"This week," I said.

"And you've got really beautiful eyes," she said. "I have only one thing to ask you that I can't see about your beauty."

"What?" I asked.

"Do you shave your pussy?" she asked.

I didn't just roll my eyes, it felt like I was rolling my whole head.

"Dawn, I'm serious."

"Willa, what makes you think I can actually

see

my twat?"

"Oh God," she said. "I never thought of that."

I shook my head. "Yes, Willa, I'll be your friend, and you'll be my friend, and we will have the strangest friendship in the history of college."

"What you need is to get a wax," she said. "Somebody else can get you clean as a baby's pussy."

"Why would that be my goal?" I asked.

"Guys don't like to get hair in their mouths or noses."

"My plan is to get cunnilingus only from guys who already have moustaches," I said.

"Nobody's ever gone down on you, have they."

"If you're volunteering, I decline," I said. "I don't roll that way."

"So you've never done a threesome with another girl?" she said.

"I've never done a twosome," I said.

"Guys don't like threesomes with another guy half as much as with two girls. So the girls have to do things for each other cause the guy has only one dick."

"These are topics that have never crossed my mind."

"See?" said Willa. "I'm educational."

"Yes," I said. "You are indeed."

"But with two guys, you've got enough holes to keep them both busy. Kind of creatively, too. And a threesome like that,

you're

the star,

they're

the supporting cast."

"And how many fucks would you count that as?"

"Two," she said. "I've been in one threesome where I was the star."

"Never had a second one?" I asked.

"After that one time, they both went out together a lot, but I wasn't invited anymore."

It took a moment to realize. "You don't mean they double-dated, you mean they were into each other."

"That's the danger with having threesomes with two bisexual guys. You aren't necessarily the star after all. You might turn out to be an extra."