Put yourself in my shoes.

It’s not an option to keep your natural body. You have to remake it, one way or another. So, what would you do?

This is what I did: I paused, briefly, then decided: ‘A little bigger’, when they simulated my previous size. I paused again, then decided: ‘Just a tad more. Just a tad more. Yep, that’s it. Actually, just a tad more.’

‘You’re sure this is it?’ There was no judgement in the surgeon’s query; he was simply checking the measurements.

‘Mm-hmm.’

I was too slight to have breasts built from my own body fat, and so had been advised that silicone implants were my best option. I’d gone in intending to get the same breasts, or as close to them as they could manage, but what I realised as I stood there—frozen like a living statue, lit up in fluorescent light, with gel implant sizers spacing my useless bra—was that my old breasts were gone and nothing would bring them back. And there was something in that moment, which realisation—and, if I’m being honest with you, in Jem’s stupid comment—that caused me to recall two childhood episodes which were stamped in my memory, episodes I might have forgotten if it weren’t for the fact, despite the years that had passed, a sense of humiliation clung to them so profoundly they still had the capacity to affect me deeply. They still do now, even with the breasts been and gone.

The first was of a sleepover at my friend Chloe Milligan’s house. There were six girls there that night: me and Chloe, Jacinta and Bonnie, Maggie and Sarah. We’d rolled our sleeping bags out in front of the television in the rumpus room and proceeded to watch back-to-back Disney movies while cramming potato chips and lollies—snakes, raspberries, milk bottles, pineapples, jelly babies, false teeth, black cats and the like—into our greedy red mouths. As each movie finished, Chloe would jump up, prod the eject button on the VCR player with one of the fingers I’d decorated so painstakingly with sparkly nail polish earlier that evening, and select a new video from the seemingly endless pile. One by one, the others fell asleep. As Ursula squelched and plotted in her cavernous lair in The Little Mermaid, I noticed that the numbers 4:45 glowed green on the digital clock (which meant it was the latest I’d ever stayed up), and that I was the last awake. Triumphantly, I let my eyes close.