The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs by Dawn O'Porter

seventy-five per cent of your problem will disappear if you let me work on your wardrobe, grooming and getting you a bra that actually fits.’
    Rosie took the bait at last. ‘What’s wrong with my bra?’
    I came right out with it. ‘You have a mono-boob. There’s meant to be two of them, not one long sausagey thing hanging there. I’m not a lezza or anything, Rosie, but I’d really love to know what’s going on under your clothes.’
    I hadn’t even finished my sentence before Rosie bolted across the road and narrowly avoided getting mown down by a bus.
    And that was that. If Rosie wanted to spend the rest of her life being a mono-boobed freak, it was nothing to do with me.
    But three days later after Big Don had been in to give us our wages, Rosie sidled up as I stacked my magazines in a neat pile. ‘It’s late-night closing, isn’t it? Will you help me buy some new bras?’
    Rosie had a long list of acceptable behaviour for our bra-buying expedition. She refused to have her boobs measured. I wasn’t allowed in the changing room. The words ‘knockers’, ‘bristols’, ‘norks’ and all other variants were banned and I wasn’t to speculate on what her size might be.
    I agreed to everything because even walking to the main shopping drag together was a big thing for Rosie. Acceptance was the first step to recovery, blah blah blah. And I almost shed a tear as I saw the light dawn on Rosie’s face as I extolled the virtues of underwire bras and she snatched a handful and hurried to try them on. She was actually figuring out the basic rules of girl stuff before my very eyes.
    When Rosie reappeared, and headed towards the cash register with her hands full of new bras and one greying old one, she was walking very oddly, as if her centre of gravity had totally shifted. Maybe it was because her boobs were no longer one weird roll propped on her chest, but like actual proper breasts. They were still enormous but at least they didn’t look like they should have their own national anthem any more.
    â€˜You have a waist now,’ I told her in amazement after she’d paid. ‘You look super fierce.’ I expected Rosie to give me another speech about how she only wanted to be judged for her lame personality, but a tiny, pleased smile played around her lips.
    â€˜I’m having this major epiphany,’ Rosie confessed. ‘I always thought it was superficial to care too much about clothes and hair and it was the inner me that counted. But maybe the outer me should look more like the inner me.’
    She really needed to come with subtitles.
    â€˜What does the inner you look like,’ I asked.
    Turned out that Rosie’s inner me looked like the girls in the books she read; quirky and mysterious, which I translated as a muted colour palette and lots of V-necks and wrap tops to minimise her mammaries. We trawled through New Look, Primark and H&M and Rosie tried on everything I suggested. I wouldn’t say we were becoming friends, more like teacher and pupil.
    Every day the skies got darker and the rain got more biblical and we’d camp out in one of the booths, so I could impart all the wisdom I’d acquired in my sixteen years.
    Rosie took notes and when I was done imparting she made me laugh by inventing this whole other life for Big Don where he ordered girlfriends off the internet. She was dead sarcastic and funny once you got to know her.
    There were hardly ever any customers but when Cardigan Boy came in, Rosie would hide from view and whisper: ‘You serve him, Cath, please.’
    But on Thursday when the bell above the door jangled I’d just given my nails their second coat of The Lady Is A Tramp, so with a long-suffering sigh, Rosie hauled herself up.
    â€˜Hey, I haven’t seen you for ages,’ he said and she almost tripped over her feet.
    Then his eyes widened at new improved Rosie in a