How I’m Passing the Torch of Good Looks to My Daughter With No …

The author walking the rocky beaches of Almeria, Spain. 2007. Photo property of Blake Lane.

I walked out of the St. Peter Catholic school bathroom at 11 years old, admiring the two perfect bumps protruding from the thin white uniform shirt I’d never needed to wear anything underneath. I smiled as I walked back to class. No one would ever know, I thought, that I’d borrowed Sister Louis Ann’s masking tape and made myself a couple of boobs.

They were perfect, I thought. They stuck to my skin in the right spots and were the color of my skin, more or less. I remember getting a lot of looks that day, and I attributed it all to my new boobs. A lot of other girls in my class were starting to bud, and I had figured out a way to keep up.

I was an athlete. Faster than any girl in my class. But the boys didn’t seem impressed by that anymore, not since Heather Santos started wearing a bra.

I swore off the tape after the right ball fell out while racing Peter Miles home that day. He didn’t see it fall, but he did notice the inconsistency. So even though I beat him running that day, he still won.

“Nice mosquito bite,” he’d said. “Too bad it didn’t bite you twice maybe I wouldn’t mistake you for a wall.”

I’d just heard a zinger from my cousin over the weekend, so I was armed.

“Oh yea?” I yelled as he darted past my apartment down the street. “Your dick’s so small it could hang glide on a Dorito.”

I had a horrible crush on Peter for years. He was tall, athletic, popular. But when we got old enough to do anything about it, he got a girlfriend from the uber rich school up the hill. Stephanie Graham was beautiful, tall, big-breasted, and worst of all, really nice. I never got a taste of Peter but ran into him when we were about 25 and I had to take his word that the fat, balding, fifty-something looking man was him. I couldn’t help but think the Doritos zinger was more apt than I’d realized.

I peaked late. If Peter hadn’t noticed my lone mosquito bite that day, I may have used those masking tape balls for many years to come. Thank God Peter noticed…