Soy

Content Warning: Young Character Minimizing Cancer

“Grampa has cancer?” I asked. “Will he be okay?”

My mother’s rhythm didn’t falter as she stirred chocolate chips into the runny banana bread batter. “He’ll be fine. They caught it early, so he just needs to have an operation and take some medicine.”

“Chemotherapy,” my older sister Lara said with a nod. “What kind of cancer?” She picked up a rag and started washing dishes. She handed me a bowl and gestured to the drying rack. She was in high school, and I was just starting seventh grade, so of course she thought she was the queen of chore assignments.

“Breast cancer,” Mom said.

“I thought only girls got that,” I said. 

Lara closed her mouth and rolled her eyes, knowing she’d get in trouble if she called me a numb-brain again. “Anyone can get breast cancer. Everybody has breasts.”

“Oh.”

“What caused it?” Lara asked Mom. “Is it genetic?”

“No.” Mom tasted the batter. “He said it was all that soy milk he was drinking.”

“My science teacher doesn’t think soy causes cancer,” Lara said.

Mom only shrugged. 

“So what are they gonna do?” I asked. “Do they have to take away his boobs?”

Lara swatted me with the dish rag. “Not his boobs. His breasts.”

Mom nodded. “Just one, but yes. It’s called a mastectomy.”

Can I have one? I almost asked, but nearly choked on the words. What a terrible thing to say. Don’t say that.

I vowed to keep that thought to myself, hoping that it would dissipate on its own, but it never did. The thought grew along with the tissue on my chest for the next several months.

…

Lara and I only shared two interests: art and TV. We did this thing where we’d watch fantasy shows and sketch new characters for them, and sometimes we’d pretend to be these characters and make up stories for them like we ourselves were in these magical worlds.

I used to draw myself in dresses and mermaid tails and with long flowing hair—whatever the story called for—but now I didn’t like it when Lara’s only compliment was “that’s pretty.” I knew it wasn’t really me in the drawings, but I saw my characters as extensions of myself, and “pretty” didn’t feel right for some reason. I started drawing my characters as younger, so Lara would call them cute instead of pretty, and it worked. Sometimes she even called my characters cool. 

“Is that a girl or a boy?” Lara asked, pointing to this one kid I drew. They had short hair and were holding a sword.

“I don’t know,” I said. Was I even allowed to draw boys?

“Looks like a boy,” Lara said. “What’s his name?”

“Colton. I like Colton.”

I drew Colton a lot. With every new show we watched, I drew Colton in different contexts. I even drew him into the older stories we’d already designed, because it felt like he needed to be there. Lara thought it was weird. I didn’t care. I quit overreacting, because every time Mom yelled “girls, stop fighting,” I was confusingly embarrassed.

I figured I just didn’t like getting in trouble, so I tried behaving a little better. Letting Lara win the arguments. Biting my tongue. We were no longer “bickering sisters,” and my stomach started to ease.

…

Grampa never came to visit, and that didn’t change even after the deea—dia—diagnosis? Yeah, diagnosis. I always got that word wrong. He did call Mom a few times to say he was doing well, though. I knew I shouldn’t, but I started thinking breast cancer was worth it because you could get your boobs chopped off and I really didn’t want mine. It felt like they weren’t supposed to be there and sometimes the hatred was so intense I debated cutting them off myself.

“Mom, can we get soy milk?” I asked one day. 

“What’s wrong with almond milk?”

“It’s bad for the environment,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how true that was. It was something Lara said once that I hadn’t followed up on. Mom didn’t question it, but she did question why soy, of all things. I said I wanted to try something new. She said she’d put it on the grocery list.

Turns out I hated soy milk. It tasted bitter and beany and kind of like barf. But it went into my cereal, every glass at dinner, and the smoothies that Mom made to hide the flavour of my nasty autoimmune medication.

I didn’t get a lot of computer access at home, but Mom said I could have extra time if I used it for schoolwork, so I told her I had a science project to finish. I researched symptoms of cancer, treatments options, causes, and something called “carcinogens.” I took notes of everything and stored them in my orange social studies folder from last year.

“Why do you drink that stuff if you don’t even like it, numb-brain?” Lara asked at breakfast one day. I was drawing another picture of Colton. I wrote his name at the top of the page so everyone would know what to call him.

“Because it’s good for you,” I said.

“Not really. Mom says we’re switching back to almond milk. She told me to tell you.”

My head drooped. It was a relief in some ways, but I hadn’t achieved my goal. 

“Whoa, don’t get so upset,” Lara said, before twisting to direct her voice towards the kitchen down the hall. “Mom, she didn’t take it well.”

Mom groaned and called me over for a chat. I folded up my drawing and put it in my pocket. Mom tried to be tactful with her words as she explained the choice for our family to discontinue the use of soy milk. She’d noticed I was drinking a lot of it and she didn’t think that was healthy for me—or her wallet—so she thought maybe we should take a break.

I didn’t say anything at first. How could I? This was embarrassing. Everything I did lately was embarrassing. Puberty. Fighting with my sister. Getting caught drinking too much soy. Wasting my mother’s money on a product none of us actually liked.

“Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?” Mom asked.

I shook my head. Don’t tell her.

She put one hand on my shoulder to give it a squeeze. “Did you maybe read that article that soy can sometimes lower chances of breast cancer in women?”

“No, I was trying to get cancer.”

“What?” Now both her hands were on my shoulders. “Why would you say that? Cancer is really, really serious.”

“I want the masecta-thing. What Grampa had.”

“Mastectomy? Honey, why do you want a mastectomy?”

“I don’t… I don’t like my boobs.” 

My face felt hot and sticky but my throat felt dry. The “my” before “boobs” was so humiliating I wished I hadn’t said anything.

“So you’ve been drinking soy because you thought it would give you breast cancer like Grampa?” Mom sighed in a I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening sort of way. Was it because I was being insensitive? Or because I was being a numb-brain again, just like Lara always said? “Sweetie, that’s just what Grampa thought happened. Some people believe that certain types of estrogen can be bad for boys, but you don’t have to worry about that, okay? You’re not a boy.”

“I’m not?”

I clapped a hand over my mouth like I could shove the words back in. Why did I ask that? I knew I wasn’t a boy. But then why did I feel like one—

And then she asked me that very thing. And she was my mother so I couldn’t lie… I did feel like a boy. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t understand why, but now the words were hovering in front of me and all that recent embarrassment plaguing me no longer felt so vague.

Mom hugged my shaking body as I tried not to cry—I was twelve years old. Almost thirteen. Crying’s for babies, as Lara would say.

“What do I do?” I asked in a whisper, my cheekbone pressing into Mom’s shoulder as she traced circles on my back.

“What do you want to do?”

I didn’t know, so I shrugged. “I’m scared, Mom.”

She had me sit between her legs like when I was a little kid. She scrunched up the edges of my mid-length hair, the hair I didn’t bother to care for anymore, and held the curls in place as she evaluated. 

“Should I give you a haircut? Would you like that?”

I tried to not seem so eager, but the smile came out immediately. “Okay.”

“Do you want me to call you something different? Like, he, or a different name?”

I took out the piece of paper I had folded neatly into my pocket. I slowly undid all the creases and handed the drawing to Mom.

“Colton,” she read aloud. “That’s very nice.”