The first thing you noticed about her was the smile. I mean, it’s polite to smile at people when you meet them for the first time. It’s only worth mentioning here because noticing the smile first is so cliche that you’d assume she’s normal, at least until you sat down to eat somewhere. Then you’d notice the soy sauce. And it would be all that you would ever notice about her again.

To be fair, I fell into that trap, big time. Maybe I deserved it. When I started dating, I was doing it to fit in—the other lacrosse guys all had girlfriends to eat lunch with, study with, even sneak out of class early for little get-togethers in the backs of their cars with just before our scrimmages. I felt left out and alone, and wanted something to fill that hole in my social life. So I spent a day looking around Rainbow River Prep for the hottest chick with the least risk involved and wound up picking her. I didn’t know much about her, but I still asked her out to lunch on the way out of a bright, sunshiny pep rally. She agreed, and I spent the whole weekend waiting on Taco Tuesday’s arrival.​

She showed up to lunch in a cute lavender dress and boasting a big, hearty smile. We got our food together and sat down at one of the two-person tables near the back of the cafeteria. We got to talking. She had this sweet, bubbly voice, a perfect match for her kind of simple, geeky cuteness. The curls in her brown hair bounced whenever she gushed over how linear algebra is used in machine learning algorithms or whenever she excitedly showed off her Panic! At The Disco temporary tattoos. To be honest, I thought it was cute how hard she was trying to keep my attention. I could tell that she was almost as desperate for affection as I was, but way worse at keeping it bottled up inside. I thought that maybe I’d done all right for myself picking a starter girlfriend and checking off that box.

And then I saw her pull a bottle of soy sauce—yep, a full restaurant-sized bottle—from her messenger bag and drizzle it all over a Caesar salad. I guess I gave her a funny look, because she suddenly got all defensive and gave me some side-eye from behind her glasses. At the moment, I thought it was odd, but maybe not deserving of so much judgement. But when she turned to her tacos and drizzled those with soy sauce, followed by adding it to a glass of lemonade, my slight confusion warped into something not quite at the level of horror but definitely more severe than mere bewilderment.

On our second lunch date, she explained that her one vice is her soy sauce addiction. She doesn’t remember when or how it started, just that she craves the somewhat salty and bitter taste of soy sauce at every meal. She carries that little bottle around with her everywhere, since she can’t rely on restaurants to provide their own all the time. A few weeks later, on a camping trip we went on together, she started shaking out of nowhere. I thought it might’ve been heat exhaustion or something (we had a ridiculously long hot spell), but it turned out that she was panicking at the mere thought of having lost it. (The bottle turned up in the bag we stored the tent in with just enough sauce left to tide her over until we got back home.) I don’t even think she can taste anything else. So long as it has soy sauce, she’ll devour it. The fact that her name is Sawyer—Soy for short—well, that’s just serendipity.

The other guys didn’t let me forget it. In the locker rooms they’d joke about finding a protective cup with soy sauce stains on it. They’d ask if I wanted to borrow their Gatorade bottles in case I’d accidentally grabbed hers on the way out and it was filled with soy sauce. No comments about how she was doing in the school Math Bowl or Green Club, or how sometimes she snorted like a piglet if I made her laugh too hard, or how I’d made the mistake of calling her my Soy Toy once in public—I was one of the guys now, and the hilarious soy sauce addiction of the girl stuck on my arm was my ticket in. And as it seemed as though everything had changed except for that empty feeling inside, I held out the faintest sliver of half-hearted hope that if I held onto Soy tight enough, maybe that would change, too. So I laughed it all off.

I never asked Soy how she felt about the jokes. I don’t think she ever knew about them anyways. She might’ve. But I can’t know for sure.

One time she invited me to a Green Club meeting after school. I accepted, not because I liked the club or anything, but because rain had canceled practice early and I needed something to kill time. I dropped in and listened to a member of a local climate activist group talk about a recent report on climate change. They talked about a lot of things—coral bleaching, hurricanes, forest fires—but what terrified poor little Soy the most was the activist’s doom-and-gloom warnings about massive crop failures. Corn. Wheat. Rice. And soybeans. Forget the oceans rising up to swallow Miami whole—Soy almost fainted at the thought of a world with no more soy sauce.

As it turned out, that world was right around the corner. It started over the summer with the Sennemar Heights fire. Two months of firefighting with no progress was how we knew that the world was too far gone. An entire city block sank into the sea on the other side of the country. My lacrosse group chat was full of panic over the weather disasters and sketchy videos claiming to have miracle cures for the heat waves stacking on top of each other like a hot, sticky tsunami. All Soy could do was text me in worry—panicked people were making runs on grocery stores. With every passing week of near-apocalyptic disaster, the odds of Soy being able to restock grew longer and longer.

Things hit a breaking point when the next school year started. The crop failures hit, and they hit hard. Soy broke down crying when the news of a massive soybean failure broke during the back-to-school assembly on Monday and it took a quarter bottle of pure soy sauce to soothe her nerves. She shivered through the rest of the day. I didn’t see her much on Tuesday, but when I did, she was compulsively checking her personal bottle and gauging how much she could spare per meal. She didn’t show up at all on Wednesday. Ditto for Thursday. On Friday I arrived at Rainbow River Prep to find a sticky note from Soy stuck to my locker, stained with spilled sauce. “Soybean famine gone too far. Food runs spiraling out of control, all stores near me picked clean. Can’t stay, leaving to find the place where they make my sauce. Goodbye forever. I love you.”

I didn’t know what to feel at that moment. I didn’t know if, were she here, I would have been able to say “I love you” back to her. I didn’t feel too much different than normal, to be honest. Thinking back, that normal feeling was emptiness, but of a different kind. Soy hadn’t done much to fill the void in my soul—she had simply replaced it with another one, one that came in the form of an empty glass bottle with a flat green cap.