Chapter 1: Mum's Secret

Mrs Duffy leaned out of the upstairs window. "Florence, come in at once and put your bra on!"

"Mum!" Florence Duffy wished the earth would open up and swallow her. It failed to happen. The younger girls who were sitting in a row on the wall watching the game squealed with delight. The boys all looked blankly at Florence's mother as she slammed the window shut.

"You'd better go and do as she says, Fluff." Danielle wrestled the bat out of Florence's suddenly dispirited hand. "It's my turn to bat anyway. Nobody else has had a go all morning." She tossed the ball to one of the boys and took up an aggressive stance at the crease, trying a few practice swings like a golfer.

Florence, Fluffy to her friends, cast a malevolent glare up at the window and slunk away. Her mother had disappeared. She was sure she did it just to embarrass Fluffy in front of her friends. "I don't need a bra," Fluffy protested under her breath as she hunched her shoulders and folded her arms in front of her. The position helped disguise things a little but it also reminded her of the facts. Her arms didn't lie flat against her chest any more. She reached the front door and looked back. On the little oblong of grass in front of the houses, the cricket was going on as if she'd never been a part of the game. Danielle's husky voice rang out, 'Oh, shit, ' as she skied the ball and three of the boys jostled each other for the right to catch it. A minor scuffle broke out to decide who would be the next batter. Normally, it was no problem: Fluffy was strong enough to grab the bat, and good enough once she got it to ensure that she batted all morning. Not even Big Vince was a skilful enough bowler to get her out. He'd even suggested that she might be good enough to play for the village team, if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't have a ladies' changing room. Then he'd looked at her chest and blushed.

Fluffy wasn't the most apt of names, really. Florence Duffy was the most unfluffy girl you could imagine. She was easily as strong and as fast as any of the boys in her school class. Best at games, best even at school lessons, although she was lazy enough in the classroom to do no more than she needed to maintain a comfortable third or fourth position academically.

Her bestest friend, Danielle, was far fluffier, and different in every way. Danielle Devonshire was petite and vulnerable-looking, with shiny dark hair down to a sub-microscopic waist. Danielle had big round innocent eyes, which looked even bigger when she wore her glasses. They gave her a quite studious appearance - misleadingly so, as academically she was so spectacularly hopeless that her teachers lay awake at nights worrying about their job security.

Danielle had been bottom of the class from the day she arrived at the school at the age of just eleven. In her first year she had scored an inglorious F in every subject apart from French, in which she had somehow achieved an inexplicable C. The French teacher had a weakness for busty young girls and later left suddenly under mysterious circumstances. On the strength of this one average mark - and despite her utter incompetence at everything else - she went into Year Eight with Fluffy and the others of her age.

It was at the end of that year that the teaching staff decided that perhaps Danielle would benefit from being allowed to find her own level and to catch up with her contemporaries later. A diplomatically-worded letter was sent to her parents carefully explaining the situation. What it neglected to explain was that Danielle was not simply being held back a year. She was bounced all the way down to Year Six, only to end that year bottom of the class by an even wider margin than ever. She was even below all the boys. "Somebody's got to be at the bottom to support you all," she would say with a flutter of her eyelashes in the direction of the nearest fanciable boy. Sadly, such womanly allure was wasted on boys three years younger than she was.

It had been even more wasted this year, when Danielle had suffered the unheard-of indignity of being dropped into Year Five. Surrounded by children now five years her junior, she came bottom again. This time in exam subjects as diverse as mathematics, general science, geography, home economics, history and English she had scored an unprecedented zero per cent. She had now achieved a string of perfect Fs for three years in succession, ending up two classes below where she had started. Not one of the teachers could recall Danielle ever supplying the right answer to anything.

Danielle was popular with boys, especially the older ones. She was ultra feminine and frighteningly mature. Despite being no taller than her young classmates, she was enviably stacked, and made sure that everyone knew it.

Danielle Devonshire had been the first girl in her age group to develop a significant bosom.

The problem now was that Fluffy was the second.

Normally, no girl would have a problem with that at all, but Fluffy didn't want a bosom. Until now, with her cropped fair hair, she was just one of the kids - one of the boys, in fact - only she was taller and more well-built than most boys her age. But now...

Her mother was coming down the stairs as she came in the front door. Fluffy gave her a sulky glance.

"I'm sorry, Florence. But you really must wear a bra all the time now. Especially when you're playing games. I was watching you running around out there and your boobs were bouncing."

Fluffy said nothing. She had felt it herself; an unpleasantly heavy feeling. She was beginning to feel ponderous and leaden footed unless she put more effort into her play, and that, as her mother pointed out, made her bounce. She slumped on to the couch and pulled her knees up to her chest. Her mother watched her, hands on hips.

"You want to get out there again, don't you? You were batting quite nicely. I heard them all clapping when you reached your fifty."

"It's no good now." Fluffy didn't want to be patronised. And she didn't really want to go out there again. Those cheeky eleven year-old spectators would laugh at her. Only soppy girls wore bras. "I've got nothing to do," she complained. The second week of the summer holidays and she was bored already. Now that her mother had effectively stopped her playing games, what was left?

Fluffy's mother wasn't listening. She had come storming in with the vacuum cleaner, howling round the couch, defying her daughter to put her feet on the floor. She switched the device off.

"You can't sit round here all day, getting under my feet," she snapped, unnecessarily loudly. "Put your brassiere on and get outside." The howling started up again as she didn't wait for an answer. Fluffy was sure her mother deliberately bumped the noisy thing against the couch just to be annoying. She wasn't hoovering the rest of the floor at all, just the area of carpet immediately around the couch. Thump, she went again.

Fluffy got up and flounced out. At least, she tried to flounce, but her chest wobbled too much, and she had to hold it still. You can't flounce effectively with your arms folded. She never made it upstairs. As she passed the front door, a determined knocking startled her.

Danielle stood there, the bat raised ready to thump the door again.

"There is a doorbell, you know!"

"The game's over. The boys had to go home." She came in and followed Fluffy up the stairs without a word, into her bedroom. She leaned the bat against the bed and studied the posters on the wall, while scratching herself beneath her bra strap. "We were winning. Vince got out first ball. I think that's why they all had to go home."

Fluffy sat on her bed, her chin in her hands. "What was the score?" she asked dully.

Danielle looked blank. "Fuck knows."

"You're useless."

Danielle knew that. Her teachers told her the same thing fifty times a day. "What can we do?" She moved around the room restlessly. She picked up the bat and laid it down again. She picked up a small brass bell from the dressing table and tinkled it. She studied her reflection in the mirror and did things with her hair. Then she drew circles round her protruding nipples with her fingers. "Let's go into town on the bus. I've got some money." Danielle always had money.

"What for?"

"We could buy some stuff. I need a new earpiece for my walkman."

The idea sounded distinctly unenthralling to Fluffy.

"There'll be boys."

That sounded even worse.

Danielle set off on another tour of inspection. "Can I borrow this?" She held a T-shirt against herself, turning from side to side and looking in the mirror.

"Why?"

"Because it would fit me. Besides, it goes with my hair."

"No, not that. Why do you want to borrow a shirt off me. You're already wearing a shirt."

"To go into town, of course. Come on, Fluff! You can borrow something of mine."

"I don't need anything of yours."

"Suit yourself." Danielle held the T-shirt beneath her chin and stretched the front across her big, interestingly shaped chest. "Can I try it on?"

Fluffy sighed. Anything for a quiet life. "Yeah."

With a succession of little squeaks of excitement, Danielle pulled off her own shirt and dropped it on the floor. "You like my bra?"

"It's just a bra, Dan."

"It's not just a bra! It's a D cup. A 30D. A D cup isn't just a bra. A D cup isn't just anything. What size is yours? The one you're not wearing?"

"I dunno," Fluffy lied, folding her arms defensively. Bras weren't high on her list of favourite subjects, especially this morning.

Danielle had climbed into the T-shirt and smoothed it down across her rounded breasts. She seemed to be breathing very deeply. "Hey, cool! I'll wear this. Let's go, Fluff. We can just catch the eleven o'clock bus. What are you going to wear?" She flung open the wardrobe and rummaged. A pair of shorts sailed out, followed by a pale blue tank-top.

"I can't wear those. They're too small."

"I'll have them, then. They'll look good on me. Not the shorts, they'll come down to my knees. Just the top. Got any more... ?"

Fluffy rolled off the bed and stood up. At this rate, Danielle was capable of emptying her wardrobe in five minutes. "Let's go, then. You're paying."

Danielle dropped an armful of clothes on the floor and hopped up and down in excitement. "Right! You coming like that? You look all right. But you'd better put your bra on, or your mum will go ape-shit." Danielle was already on her hands and knees, opening drawers and fishing out underwear. "Here's one. It's a 32 something. A 32B? My boobs are bigger than yours and I'm only four feet nine. Quick, put it on!" She tossed the bra at Fluffy and stood there waiting.

Chapter 2 »