Before I could go to class I had to stop at the restroom to rearrange my bra and shirt. That was when I discovered I had lost the top button and I didn’t have a safety pin. Anyway I arrived in class after the bell and even though I explained what happened I was still marked late. Even worse I had to stay after class listening to a lecture on being punctual and what was especially galling I was told to be more considerate of others when walking between classes. I tried to explain that Kevin had crashed into me on purpose and HE HAD ripped off my shirt button. Oh I should mention the teacher was a male so my explanation just gave him another reason to gape at my plunging neckline.

Oh yes, did I mention that Judy is absolutely stunning, I guess I did, but I should say that I was a very grownup junior and well proportioned too. People often wondered if Judy and I are twins. Actually we are a lot alike but Judy is a natural blond and I’m a dish-water blond. We are both about 5 feet 9 inches tall and are a size 8 to 10.

Anyway, where was I, oh yes, the bumping continued and Judy and I complained to our teachers but all they ever did was talk to Kevin and his buddies about being more careful and stop running in the halls. Evidently they thought Kevin and his geeky friends were just clumsy and awkward teenage boys meaning no harm. So Judy and I tried our best to avoid them but that ended in our senior year.

In the second half of our senior year we quite by accident signed up for PE at the same time as Kevin. If you are thinking girls and boys don’t have PE together in high school you’re right. But even though there were nearly 800 students in our school we only had one gymnasium. It was a big one but in the winter both the boys and girls had to share it plus we often had coed activities. Our PE class met the last period on Tuesdays and Thursdays and during February our class was playing “half-court” basketball just like the boys.

There were nearly thirty girls in our class and with the bleachers pushed back there were three half-courts at our end of the gym and the same at the boy’s end. There were always three or four girls absent but it really didn’t matter to us if one team had one more player. The boys were more serious though. There were several guys in the boys class that were on the school’s basketball team so with the tournament approaching they were working on plays and that kind of stuff. Even the boys not on the team tried to act as if they were.

I should mention that Kevin was not too tall, about 5’ 10”, pudgy, and definitely not athletic. I suspected he was self-conscious about his weight since he usually wore baggy clothes even in PE. Even though Kevin wasn’t much of an athlete he wasn’t bashful about voicing his opinion on how the game should be played or blaming others for his mistakes. His personality didn’t make him very popular with the guys in his class. His behavior became more obnoxious after he learned he was awarded a full scholarship to a prominent Midwestern university. I must admit I was surprised when I heard about it and envious since I was positive my grades were as good as his although I hadn’t taken all the math and science courses that he had.

Well Kevin again surprised me the first time I saw him playing half-court basketball. He was on a “skins” team -- that’s the team that plays with their shirts off. It wasn’t the roll of fat around his waist that looked like a small inner-tube that was the surprise, it was his breasts. He looked as if he had a larger cup size than some of the girls in our class.

When our class met the following Thursday the boy’s coach picked team captains and had them pick in turn who they wanted on their team. When they were done choosing Kevin and two other boys were not selected. The coach must have talked to our PE teacher Ms. ____ before class because he sent them over to play basketball with us.

Judy and I were playing on the same team but the team we were playing had two girls absent. So as fate would have it Kevin was put on the team playing against us. Judy and I were concerned that basketball would raise Kevin’s bumping to a higher level so Judy announced immediately that our team was shirts and that made Kevin’s team skins. Don’t get excited, a girl’s skins team is not topless. We do take off our tee shirts but under that we all wore a sports bra that was like the top to a modest two piece bathing suit. But for Kevin it meant he would be topless. I won’t bore you with the details of the game except to say he did do some totally unnecessary bumping and so did I. By the time the game was over, which we won, all of us were calling Kevin “Jiggles” although “Fumbles” would have been a fitting name too. Twice Karen, the best player on the other team, threw the ball to Kevin so quickly that it bounced right off his face; the last time brought tears to his eyes and had Judy and I giggling.

At our next PE class Kevin was again sent over to play with us and this time he was on our team. Judy called “skins” and received a withering look from Kevin. He peeled off his shirt and tried to cover himself by keeping his arms crossed. During the whole game Kevin was yelling what to do and again blaming someone else for his mistakes. We lost and we were really mad because of all of Kevin’s blunders and insults. I was also incensed because he deliberately ran into me when I was under the basket trying to get the ball. As the ball came down he fell forward knocking me down with him on top of me. His fat sweaty body was disgusting. It was his stupid smile that really made me angry because I knew he had done every bit of that on purpose.

I complained about Kevin to Ms. ____ after the game only to find out that Kevin had gone to her before class whining about us calling him Jiggles. She suggested that it was up to me to “get on” with boys. I realized later that I had made a mistake complaining about Kevin to her. I didn’t understand that Ms. ___ was the kind of woman that felt girls need to be tough; withstand verbal taunts, and certainly be able to deal with males one way or another. She told me to “put on my big girl panties and deal with it.” Well I was furious. It took me a week before I was able to calm down and decide what I would do.

A week later, after lunch time, I waited for Kevin to leave the cafeteria. As he came out into the hall I walked up to him and said “hi.” He turned around with a surprised look on his face and mumbled “hello” clearly wondering why I was speaking to him. I explained “I felt bad about how things were between us and I would like to talk to him after PE, maybe in the gym.” He smiled and said “sure.”

We both went off to our classes and in the few minutes before the bell rang I told Judy that Kevin was all set to meet me and asked her if she was really ready to help. Her smile told me she was but I was so nervous I hardly remember anything up until the time I went to PE. In the locker-room I put on an old sports bra that I had worked on the night before. I had “picked” most of the stitches on the left shoulder strap. One good yank and the strap would come loose. Next I carefully pulled on my old PE tee-shirt, it had been washed and bleached so many times it was ready to fall apart. I waited for Judy and we went out to the gym together. The class time went by quickly and Kevin stayed on the boy’s side of the gym chasing balls since the boys were practicing free-throws.

Ms. ___ blew her whistle the same time the boy’s coach did and most everyone headed for their locker room. I went over and sat on a bleacher and waited for Kevin. In a few minutes he came back out on the gym floor and said “hi.” I looked over at the door to the hallway leading to the girls locker-room and saw Judy had the door open just enough that I could see the toe of her shoe.

I motioned to Kevin to walk around the side of the bleachers so no one at the boy’s end of the gym could see us. He followed me over to the corner and leaned against the wall. I gave him my brightest smile as I walked up to him and then hit him as hard as I could in the solar plexus. A punch to this area causes the diaphragm, which is the muscle that controls your lungs to spasm. When this happens the guy is unable to take a breath -- he just can't inhale. This was one of the four blows we had learned in our self defense class that I taken. Up until that moment all I had ever done was strike a manikin that would light up if the blow was delivered in the right place and hard enough to get through the padding.

Well I managed to get through Kevin’s padding. He bent way over as he staggered forward but didn’t fall down. He was gasping; he couldn’t cry out or scream. I immediately reached up and grabbed the neck of my tee shirt and yanked down causing it to rip clear across my shoulders. I pulled it down to my waist and then grabbed the top of my sports bra and yanked. The left strap broke and both of my breasts popped out. I hadn’t intended to be totally exposed but I didn’t have time to cover up and I was afraid if I pulled my bra up it would ruin the effect.

While I was doing this Judy ran out and pushed Kevin backwards. Only 15 or 20 seconds had passed since I had punched him but Kevin was now flat on his back. Judy pushed me aside and then kicked him viciously in the groin. He had changed into jeans so it was hard to tell if she had hit him squarely in the nuts. As he rolled over on his side with his hands over his crotch Judy pushed him the rest of the way so he was lying on his belly. He tried to curl up but she kicked his legs apart. Next she stepped between his legs and kicked him as hard as she could one more time and then turned around and slapped my face hard with her open hand. I screamed and so did Judy. She pushed me back and had me sit sprawled out at the side of the bleachers and made sure I was fully exposed. I was crying from the slap and Judy was screaming “help us! Oh my God, help us!” In what seemed like a long time but probably no more than half a minute several girls ran out into the gym from the locker room. When they saw us they started screaming. Well Ms. ___ came running as well as some boys and their coach. The boy’s coach grabbed a towel from one of the gawkers and covered me.

Kevin had curled up in ball and was lying on his side gagging and crying. He had vomited all over the front of his shirt and on the floor. The coach knelt down next to him and eased him back from the pool of vomit. Judy told me later that the expression on the coach’s face was a combination of revulsion and loathing. His first words were “what the hell did you do?”

I was helped up and taken to Ms ___ office. She questioned me for nearly a half hour about what had happened. I told her that I had taken her advice and had asked Kevin to meet me after class so we could work things out between us but he just attacked me, hit me in the face and then ripped my clothes off me. I explained “when my bra strap broke he took a step back to get his balance and that gave me a chance to punch him and then Judy heard the commotion and my screams and came to help me. I think she hit him too.”

This was when I realized I had done what Ms. ___ expected a woman to do. She said. “Let me get this right, you defended yourself; you punched him after he slapped you and ripped off your clothes?” I nodded my head yes and she smiled as she picked up the phone and called the Superintendent’s office. She was put through to him right away and explained that a boy tried to assault a young woman in her gym class. The Superintendent was in Ms. ____ office five minutes later. After I repeated what happened he asked Ms. ____ to get Judy and bring her into the office. Judy explained that she heard me scream and ran out into the gym seconds later and saw Kevin stumbling back from me thinking I must have hit him. She ran up to Kevin and before he was able to throw another punch she kicked him in the groin.

The Superintendent then asked what she did next. Judy explained she went over to help me – “Susanne was sitting on the floor dazed with her shirt and bra ripped off. Then others arrived and we helped her to Ms.___ office."

Well over the next two days there was lots of meetings and discussions. The Superintendent managed to convince Ms. ___ and some of the other concerned teachers to not contact the police and he had a meeting with me and my Aunt. He wanted to assure us that Kevin would be severely dealt with. I was relieved the police did not get involved although no one suspected what we had done and Kevin’s protestations that I had attacked him just made him an outcast even to his friends.

The evening of the attach Kevin’s parents took him to the emergency room at the hospital. Evidently Judy’s blows did land where she intended. A reporter for the local paper was there getting material for the “accident report” when she overheard Kevin’s mother explain to the admitting nurse the nature of his injury. She teased out the story and the next day it was on page two of the paper and a week later Kevin’s scholarship was withdrawn.

At lunch the next day Judy and I didn’t get a chance to eat anything, everyone insisted on hearing our story firsthand. What really angered the girls were Kevin’s protestations. It went on like that until graduation. In private Judy and I couldn’t stop giggling thinking about what we did to the pudgy nerd. Even today years later I smile thinking of Kevin being bumped off that fall to being a bag boy at a grocery store working on his GED instead of a freshman in college on a full scholarship.