THE BOOBY PRIZE
A Memoir of Chocolate, Corsages, and Catastrophic Adolescence

By Steve Nourse

I’m convinced that, in the grand history of adolescent awkwardness, I was not merely a dork around girls, I was the Chairman of the Board, the CEO of Cluelessness, the Grand Poobah of Pubescent Panic. Other boys had strategies. I sweat. Other boys flirted. I hid behind textbooks and hoped no one would notice I exist. Every year I had a “special girl,” and every year my strategy was the same. It was to fall hopelessly in love, never let her know, and then suffer silently until summer vacation. But sixth grade was different. Sixth grade was the year I took bold action, anonymous action, of course, because I wasn’t entirely insane.

Her name was Susie H. She was perfect. I was a walking anxiety attack. She had braces that sparkled like disco lights and hair that smelled like strawberries, or at least that’s what I imagined from a safe distance. I bought her a large, heartshaped box of chocolates, the kind that looks like it should come with a marriage license. I spent my entire allowance on it. I even picked the one with the fancy ribbon, because nothing says “I worship you from afar” like a ribbon you can’t untie without a chainsaw.

Of course, I couldn’t give it to her. That would require speaking. Or eye contact. Or existing in her general vicinity without hyperventilating. So, I executed Operation Secret Admirer, a covert mission that would’ve made the CIA proud if the CIA specialized in preteen cowardice. I snuck into the hallway before school, heart pounding like a bongo drum in a bad jazz band. I opened her locker, because back then everyone’s combination was either 122436 or written on the inside in pencil, and placed the giant heart shaped box inside. Then I shut the locker and ran away like I’d just planted a bomb.

For the rest of the day, I watched her from across the classroom, waiting for something. A smile. A gasp. A swoon. A fainting spell. Anything. Instead, she opened it later, frowned, and said, “Ugh. My mom probably put this in here. My heart broke into 47 pieces, each individually wrapped like the chocolates she would never eat. But the real kicker came later, when she told her friends she wasn’t even going to open it because she was “watching her figure.” Watching her figure? She weighed 62 pounds and could’ve been knocked over by a sneeze. Meanwhile, I was watching my dignity evaporate like a puddle in August.

To this day, she never knew it was me. I never told a soul. Well, until now. And honestly, looking back, I’m not sure what I expected. A parade? A kiss? A restraining order?

No. What I got was the Booby Prize, the honor of being the only kid in school who could humiliate himself without anyone else even knowing he was involved. A true talent, a gift, a curse, and the beginning of a long, proud tradition of romantic misfires. I never told a soul. For fifty years I believed I had pulled off the perfect romantic heist.

Then, fifty years after the Great Chocolate Caper of sixth grade I ran into Susie in Olympia, working for the Department of Education. Feeling nostalgic, and possibly delirious and concussed by memory, (because puberty wasn’t humiliating enough the first time), just when I thought the saga of Susie Hansen had been safely buried in the archaeological layers of my adolescence, right between “First Pimple” and “First Time” life handed me a sequel. I tried to look entirely unsuspecting of the emotional shrapnel she’d left lodged in my preteen soul. Fifty years of believing I was a stealthy ninja of love. Turns out I was about as subtle as a marching band in a phone booth.

While my romantic espionage career was failing spectacularly, the rest of my classmates and I were busy navigating the bewildering world of early adolescence. We were fascinated by the female body in the same way early explorers were fascinated by the ocean: we didn’t understand anything, but we were desperate to chart the territory.

We knew exactly which girl in class was the first to wear a brassiere. It was like the moon landing, “One small step for her, one giant leap for seventh grade humanity.” Word spread instantly. Like every boy that age, we were suddenly very aware of the female body, specifically the parts that made our brains shortcircuit like a faulty toaster. We didn’t understand anything, but we were fascinated by everything.

Before that, our official “education” of women came from:

1. National Geographic, featuring confident, barechested women who had no idea they were causing seismic emotional events in American boys who still slept with nightlights.

2. The family medical encyclopedia, which showed a halfwoman cutaway diagram that looked like someone had sliced her with a deli machine. Not helpful. Not inspiring. Mildly terrifying. And:

3. And then there was Nelson’s Barber Shop, home of the forbidden glossy magazine, Playboy. None of us dared touch it. We simply hovered behind the old guy reading it. Every boy knew that tucked between Field & Stream and Popular Mechanics was a glossy magazine featuring anatomically complete adult women. None of us dared pick it up, we were too scared of being judged, arrested, or struck by lightning, but we all crowded behind the old guy reading it, craning our necks like a flock of hormonal flamingos. We pretended to be reading the sports page. We were not reading the sports page and our eyes drifted like heatseeking missiles.

By the time I was a freshman, my friends and I had developed the emotional maturity of a fruit salad and the sense of humor of a middle school locker room. Lighting farts in the locker room, “blue flamers” was the height of hilarity. Let’s just say that adolescent boys had an endless supply of slang for the female anatomy, creative, ridiculous, and everywhere. We treated anatomical terminology like it was radioactive, so we invented alternatives. Dozens of them. Some of them made no sense. Some sounded like camping equipment. Some sounded like household appliances.

It was the linguistic equivalent of cavemen discovering fire. But beneath all the awkwardness, confusion, and whispered nonsense, there was a kind of innocent wonder. We were trying to understand a world we were not prepared for, and failing spectacularly. We also thought we were comedic geniuses. Our favorite bit was taking Barbra Streisand’s famous ballad about remembering the past and without ever singing the actual lyrics to “Memories,” we substituted a certain anatomical term that sounded very similar, “Mammaries”. We thought this was the height of sophistication. Nobel Prizeworthy. Our parents thought we were idiots. They were correct.

And yes, as a freshman I wore sunglasses indoors like I was auditioning to be the next James Bond. I thought it made me mysterious. It made me look like a kid who’d lost a fight with a vending machine. But in my mind, I was suave, I was debonair, I was a secret agent of love. In reality, I was a 15-year-old who couldn’t talk to girls without sweating through his shirt.

By the time high school rolled around, I had matured. I had evolved. I had stopped wearing sunglasses indoors like a lowbudget James Bond, mostly. The first big dance was the Freshman Frolic, with the theme: “Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain.” Everyone knew this was code for: “Some poor kid is going to get dumped tonight and cry behind the bleachers.” It was an acronym for the universal freshman tragedy, a kid crying because his girlfriend found someone else and delivered the nuclear phrase: “Let’s only be friends.” That phrase hit harder than any dodgeball ever thrown in P.E. I was fortunate because I only tried to drown myself in the bathtub once by a girl who shall remain nameless. Let’s just call her encounter one of a long line of encounters.

The gym was decorated with crepe paper raindrops, umbrellas hanging from the ceiling, and a cardboard moon that looked like it had been cut out by someone who’d never seen a circle before. The lighting was dim, the music was slow, and the air smelled like a combination of Aqua Net and teenage fear.

High school boy, dances, and cologne were a tragic combination, like giving a toddler a chainsaw or giving your son who has just obtained his driver’s license the car keys and fifth of liquor. None of us had the faintest idea how to apply the stuff. The instructions on the bottle might as well have said, “Use sparingly,” because we interpreted that as, “Apply until your eyes water.” Every dance featured at least three boys who had clearly bathed in their father’s aftershave, leaving a visible fog bank hovering over the gym like a lowlying weather system. Chaperones walked through it coughing. Girls tried not to pass out. And the boys, proud, clueless, and reeking of Jade East, Hai Karate, and English Leather, stood there believing they smelled irresistible, unaware that they were one spritz away from violating the Clean Air Act.

Every boy stood on one side of the gym, every girl on the other, and the middle of the floor was a no man’s land patrolled by chaperones who looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. Somewhere in that humid, hormone-fogged room, a kid was already crying because his girlfriend had dumped him for a sophomore with a mustache that looked like it had been drawn on with charcoal. And me? I was standing there in my best shirt, trying to look casual while praying someone, anyone, would ask me to dance so I wouldn’t have to make the first move. I must have been a bad choice, because God forbid, girls were dancing with other girls. I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of a long, glorious career of romantic misadventures, each one more awkward than the last. But, before I could even get to the dance, I had to survive The Pickup.

I arrived at Ann’s house wearing my best shirt and my best attempt at confidence. Ann came down the stairs looking beautiful and carrying a tiny makeup kit complete with a toothbrush. She explained that if she ate anything, she’d need to brush her teeth immediately. I think girls came down the stairs like that, only to humiliate boys.

This was adorable, responsible, and completely irrelevant, because the idea of me eating anything on a date was unthinkable. My stomach had shut down hours earlier out of sheer terror. Then came the parents. I attempted a greeting that came out as a cross between a cough and a squeak. Her father nodded. Her mother smiled. And her little brother, lurking behind the couch like a gremlin or one of the dolls from Barbarella, popped up just long enough to give me the finger—a bold move for someone who still watched cartoons in pajamas with footies. I pretended not to see it. Ann’s parents pretended not to see me pretending not to see it. It was a beautiful family moment.

Just when I thought I had survived the worst of it, Ann’s mother said the sentence that nearly ended my life, “I want to get a picture of you pinning the corsage on Ann.” A camera appeared with flashbulbs! Flashbulbs? I froze. My brain shut down. My soul left my body and hovered near the ceiling like the girl in “The Exorcist.” Pinning a corsage on a girl was not something I had trained for. I had never been that physically close to a human breast since maybe I was an infant and nursing. And now I was supposed to perform a delicate, intimate, surgical, finemotorskill operation while being photographed?

I stared at the corsage. I stared at Ann. I stared at her mother, who was winding the camera like she was preparing to document a lunar landing. All I could think was, “Please, God, don’t let me poke her. Don’t let me stab her. Don’t let me faint.” The only scenario worse than this would have been if her mother had said, “Now pin it on using only your teeth.”

Why would I even think that? Al Heuther, my best friend, was right, I was a “perv.” Of course, he always dated the cutest girls, but I knew it was only his baby-blue sports coat with black piping that drew them in. Thankfully, she did not. But the terror was real. My hands shook like I was defusing a bomb. Ann stood there smiling politely, unaware that I was experiencing a full cardiovascular event. The flashbulb popped. I had a sudden vision of Dr. Kildare bursting through the door in slow motion, shouting, “Stand back! This boy has no idea what he’s doing!” In my imagination, Ann was seconds away from hemorrhaging because I’d punctured an artery with a floral pin. Her mother would faint. Her father would call the police. The little brother would cheer. The dog would bite me. But there was no escape. So, I did the only thing I could do. I closed my eyes and stabbed the corsage. When I opened them, no blood, no screaming, no fainting, no Dr. Kildare, but the dog did hide, but I did not wet my pants. The crushed orchid hung there like a wounded soldier, but it stayed on. Ann survived. The flashbulb popped, capturing my terror forever. The moment was immortalized, and I survived, barely.

Ann and I swayed awkwardly. I tried not to step on her feet. She tried not to laugh at my attempts at rhythm. And then, that was it. I didn’t see her again except in typing class for the next three years, where she typed 80 words per minute and I typed like a man trying to defuse a bomb with oven mitts.

I survived sixthgrade heartbreak. I survived the hormonal jungle. I survived the corsage. I survived the Freshman Frolic. And, somewhere, in a dusty photo album, there is a picture of me looking like a terrified raccoon in a borrowed shirt, pinning a crushed orchid onto a girl who deserved a much smoother date. But hey, I lived, I learned, and I earned the booby prize.