Reconstructing Natalie

Chapter One ; I'm obsessed with breasts. ; ; Not in the lesbian sense. I'm a card-carrying heterosexual woman with a serious crush on Johnny Depp. And I never really noticed them before. Breasts, I mean. They were just a fact of life. Like day and night. Sun and rain. God. And Krispy Kremes. ;But now that I'm about to lose mine, I can't stop staring at them everywhere I go. The mall. Work. Church. The gym. Even my parents' house. (Sorry, Mom.) ; Large ones, small ones, black ones, white ones, perky, even sagging--to me, they're all a thing of beauty. ;My name is Natalie. I'm twenty-seven years old. And I have breast cancer. ;Oh yeah. And I'm single. There goes my dating life down the toilet. ;I never dreamed I'd get breast cancer. That was for older women. Right? I mean, you can't even get a routine mammogram until you're forty. There's gotta be a reason for that. ;Right? ; ... ; ;I discovered the lump by accident. ;Wish I could say it was during my regular self-exams, which I learned how to do during a women's health class in college. But my monthly self-exams were more irregular than regular. And I never could tell one lump from another anyway. They all felt the same to me. Squishy. ;Like more than half the women on the planet--including my sixty-seven-year-old mother, I had fibrocystic breasts. Lumpy, in other words. But to my knowledge, there's no history of breast cancer in our family, so I really wasn't worried when I felt the lump while trying on a gel bra at Victoria's Secret. ;My best friend, Merritt, and I were goofing around one Saturday at the mall, wondering how we'd look if we were both a little bigger in the boob department. ;Although I needed more help than she did. ;We each tried on one of those padded gel and water bras like they use in Hollywood all the time. And Merritt, who'd grabbed a black double-D, was vamping for the dressing-room mirror, sucking in her cheeks, making her lips all pouty, and trying to look appropriately sexy as she admired her now-bountiful cleavage beneath her straining white poet's blouse. ;I shook my head. "Too Anna Nicole Smith." ;She swung her tomato-red (this week) mane and examined her double-basketball profile. "But they helped her marry a millionaire. Who knows? Maybe they'll do the same for me." ;"Right. And then you'd have to sleep with a guy who's as old as your grandfather. Correction, great-grandfather." ;We scrunched up horrified faces. "Eew!" ;Faster than a Hollywood marriage, Merritt whipped that bad boy off from beneath her blouse and dropped it on the reject pile. Then she glanced at me and did a double take. "Hey, whaddya know? You've got boobs!" ;"I know! Can you believe it?" I turned sideways and scrutinized my B-cup self. "The double-fried-egg girl finally has curves." ;"You've always had curves. They're just small." She stared at my basic black T-shirt as I pirouetted in front of the mirror. "But, honey, those double fried eggs are now a couple of blueberry muffins. You have to buy that miracle-worker bra." ;"Nope." I took a last regretful look at my curvy front. "With me, what you see is what you get." ;"I know. I know. Little Ms. Candid and Up-front. But what would it hurt to be a little mysterious every now and then?" She twirled in her gauzy Indian broomstick skirt over leggings, lowered her head, and made her eyWalker, Laura Jensen is the author of 'Reconstructing Natalie', published 2006 under ISBN 9781595540676 and ISBN 1595540679.