What We Choose novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Flat

I read it with Colter's hand still on my ankle.

Bigger, if you want.

My body was a car he'd dented and was offering to fix.

I turned the phone around so Colter could see.

He read it. His jaw moved once.

He handed the phone back.

"You want me to answer that?"

"No," I said. "I want to."

I typed with my thumb.

Don't text me about my body. Not now, not after Friday, not ever.

I sent it and put the phone face down on his mother's quilt.

Colter picked up his coffee again.

"That was a good one."

"I had a lot of practice in my head."

The plastic surgeon's office was on the ninth floor of the cancer center.

It had a view of the Citgo sign and a bowl of wrapped mints on every table.

Thursday morning. One day before the deadline.

Kenna had an exam she couldn't move.

So Colter took the morning off and sat in the chair by the wall, too big for it again.

The surgeon was a small woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain.

She laid it out in four sentences.

Implants at the same surgery, or expanders first and implants later.

Tissue from my stomach, which she looked at and said I didn't have much of to spare.

Or flat.

"Some women know right away," she said. "Some need the full week. Both are fine."

She slid a binder across the desk.

Photographs. Women from the neck to the waist, no faces.

I turned the pages slowly.

Round new breasts with thin pale scars under them.

Then the flat ones.

Two long straight lines across a smooth chest. One woman in a tank top, laughing at someone off camera, with her arms up.

My mother had chosen implants.

She'd had three more surgeries for them.

One got infected the year I was thirteen.

She spent that Christmas in a hospital bed with a drain in her side, telling me the tree looked great on FaceTime.

I closed the binder.

"Flat," I said.

The surgeon didn't blink. "You're sure?"

"I want one surgery. I want to be done with people deciding what goes in my chest." I put my hand on the binder. "This is for me. Not for anyone in your waiting room."

She wrote it down.

"Then I'll make it smooth," she said. "No extra skin, no dents. You'll be able to wear whatever you want."

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