‘I don’t know,’ Lucy had said, stalling so that she could collect her thoughts. She could hear the hum of traffic on Davey Street, and imagined all those people, sitting side by side, contained in their cars, waiting vacantly for the lights to turn green. ‘I guess my body became unfamiliar when I had those new breasts. It was like I—the me that’s self-aware: ‘I think therefore I am’ and all that—had been peeled away from my body, which had become something else entirely. It was like I was watching myself from the outside rather than existing inside myself, if that makes sense? And perhaps it was because I didn’t feel like I belonged in it anymore, and perhaps it’s because I felt like it had become this kind of grotesque feminine caricature, but I became so aware of Jem’s eyes on me, and of other people’s eyes on me. I felt like they were looking at me as this female body—as this hunk of processed meat—and not as me anymore, and that just exacerbated the way I felt about it.’

‘And now?’ Suzette had asked. ‘How do you feel now?’

‘How do I feel now?’ Lucy had echoed. ‘Now I hate the scars. I just hate them. I know they’re going to fade with time, but still, they will be the feature on my chest, you know? I don’t even have nipples anymore. I’m not even like a pre-pubescent child. It’s just going to be … scars, or the ghosts of scars, and I hate that. I won’t get prosthetic breasts again, and I do feel good about that decision. But still, I hate that my chest is never going to be something I love or even remotely like about myself anymore.’

It had felt so good to say it. To really say it, and not just in a half-sleep, half-drugged state. It’s the sort of thing she’d been wanting to talk about—to talk to anyone about, but especially to Jem about, but she hadn’t been able to because of the way he’d say: ‘You don’t have to make a decision now’, or, ‘You still have options’. He’d say that, as if she hadn’t already made a decision and as if she hadn’t already been limiting those options with every day that passed in which her chest healed flat, and with every visit she made to the various doctors and plastic surgeons who were doing their best to reduce the scarring on this: her flat chest, here to stay. Even though he said he’d support her, no matter what, she could tell he missed having a partner with breasts. And while she understood this—she did; he was a heterosexual man, after all—she didn’t want to give him space to air his thoughts on the matter. She didn’t have any room inside her for his opinions; she was occupied, brimming with her own. And earlier today, in Suzette’s office, she had relished the chance to let them out.