Twelve

  “I’m Matt,” he said. He jerked his thumb at one of his buddies, who was also wearing jeans and a shirt. “He’s me.”

  “Ahhh,” I said. “Clever.”

  “What are you?” he said, looking me up and down.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  He flicked one of my pointy horns. “A devil?”

  “You got it.”

  “But a very nice devil,” he said.

  Oh God, had he heard me lecture Louise? Did he think I was a hopeless goody-goody?

  Then I thought, to heck with it. He was here, and he was grinning. At me.

  “Yep,” I said brazenly. “On the outside I’m a devil, but on the inside I’m all angel.”

  November

  ON THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER, I got my period. It happened on a Saturday, just a normal old Saturday, and later it occurred to me to be glad, because what if it had happened at school? Then I would have had to tell Mrs. Potter, and maybe she wouldn’t have let me go to the nurse unless I told her why, and nuh-uh, no way, there was no possibility of those words coming out of my mouth. I mean, what would I have said? What words would I have even used?

  It was after breakfast when I felt the trickle. That was the first sign. Although I guess I was in denial, because when I went to the bathroom and saw red, I just changed underwear and threw the old pair into the laundry. In a wadded-up ball, deep at the bottom of the basket.

  And then I sat very still, legs crossed, on my bed. There was something weird going on in my belly—was it a cramp? And I knew that Sandra got moody whenever she had her period. Was that why I snapped at Ty when he used too much butter on his pancakes? Oh God, was I becoming a raging mess of hormones?

  I knew I should go tell Mom, but I didn’t want her saying anything to me that had the word woman involved. As in, “Oh, Winnie, now you’re a woman.” She wouldn’t be anything other than nice about it—I wasn’t worried about that—but it was easier to sit here on my bed than to make it real by saying the actual words.

  There. A pang, deep low in my abdomen. It was a cramp. I knew it.

  And there, another trickle. Or more like a vague sensation of wetness. What if it leaked through to the bed?

  I got up and returned to the bathroom, where I folded a piece of toilet paper over and over into a rectangle. I stuck it in my underwear. I flashed to a book I’d read when I was ten, called The Thorn Birds, where a girl my age got her period and thought she was dying of some horrible disease. The Thorn Birds was one of many grown-up-type books I’d read at an early age, books that normal parents wouldn’t let their sweet little darling read. But Mom was like, “Sure, read whatever you want.”

  I’d learned a lot that way, actually. Like in Wifey, when the husband took pictures of his wife in her negligee, because being pregnant made her boobs turn huge. That was very enlightening. And then the wife went on to have all these affairs, and I was absolutely engrossed. I asked Mom if she’d ever had an affair, and she said, “Winnie, you can’t believe everything you read in a book.” And then, finger to her lip, “Not that I haven’t thought about it, in the abstract. A marriage takes hard work. You have to choose to stay committed. ”

  Come to think of it, Mom was kind of inappropriate when it came to all sorts of things, not just book-reading policies. I liked the fact that she was honest with me, though.

  In The Thorn Birds the girl cried in the bathroom and kept her bleeding to herself, until finally her mom noticed the stains and was like, “No, you fool. You’re not dying. Quit whining and wash out these rags.” Or something like that.

  I sat back down on my bed. The toilet-paper pad felt . . . noticeable. And it was slipping out of place.

  I rose and went to Mom’s bathroom, where she was drying her hair.

  “Just a minute, almost done,” she said.

  I leaned against the doorway and watched her do her thing with the round brush. Flip and release. Flip and release. So high maintenance, although I wouldn’t want her looking un-flipped-and-released, I guess.

  "There,” she said, unplugging the cord and wrapping it around the handle of the hair dryer. "What’s up?”

  “You look nice,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said. She regarded me expectantly.

  I hesitated, then blurted it out. “I got my period. I think. I’m pretty sure.”

  Mom’s face softened. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. She patted the cushioned stool she was sitting on, the one in front of her mirror. “Come here.”

  I walked over and scrunched in beside her. Mom put her arm around me.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” she asked.

  Don’t say it, I prayed.

  “It means you’re a woman.”

  Aaargh.

  “But what if I don’t want to be?” I asked.

  “All right, not a woman woman,” she clarified. “A young woman. A beautiful young woman I am so very proud of.”

  I hunched my spine.

  “It also means you’re . . . capable of conceiving a baby. You know all about that, right?”

  I was officially a thousand shades of purple. “Mo-o-om.”

  “All right. Okay. Just . . . keep it in mind. It’s part of you now.”

  Enough, enough, enough, I thought. I could feel my face burning to a crisp.

  Mom said, “When I got my period, my mother didn’t talk to me about it at all. She just said, ‘Well, go take care of it.’ ”

  I pictured Grandmom Rosie, who made wreaths out of pinecones and who drank prune juice with her breakfast. “That’s all she said? Go take care of it?”

  “I don’t think she knew what to say,” Mom explained. “It was a different time. A different generation.” She grazed my hair with her fingers. “If you ever do want to talk about any of that stuff, you can.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Because it’s likely you’ll have questions. Your body is going through a lot of changes.”

  “I know, I know, I know.”

  “Okay,” Mom said. “Just so you know.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.” There was a pause. Then she said, “So do you have . . . supplies? Pads, I mean?”

  I looked at her in her mirror. Where would I have gotten pads? Did she think I kept a pack under my sink just in case?

  Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. I would do that when I had a daughter, stock a pack under her sink. That way she wouldn’t have to do the toilet-paper thing.

  “Right,” Mom said briskly. “You can use one of mine—as many as you need.” She got up from the stool and pulled a plastic-wrapped package of Long Super Maxis with Wings from the bathroom cabinet. With wings. It said it right there on the wrapper.

  “Here you go, baby,” Mom said. She was trying not to let it be awkward, but it was awkward. That was just the way of it.

  In the safety of my bathroom, I fitted one of the ginormous pads to my underwear. It was as big as a boat. I figured I’d be safe from spotting, though, as it came complete with reinforced four-wall protection, an antileak core, and a cottony-dry cover designed to absorb faster and help keep fluid away from my body. Good heavens, no wonder it was as big as a boat.

  Product is nonflushable, the packaging also warned. Go figure.

  I pulled up my jeans and checked my reflection in my full-length mirror. From the front: fine. From the back: fine again, even though it felt as though the pad was bulging out. It was enormous between my legs. It was a diaper.

  I waddled to Sandra’s room and told her my news.

  “Yeah?” Sandra said. She swiveled her computer chair to face me. “Cool. I mean, poor you, because it pretty much sucks, but . . . cool.”

  I appreciated her effort to be big-sister supportive.

  “Did Mom give you one of her mongo pads?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh. Can you tell?”

  “Don’t worry. You always feel like people can tell, but usually they can’t. But eventually you’re going to need to switch to ta
mpons.”

  “Er . . . let’s not go crazy, ’kay?”

  “Tampons aren’t bad,” Sandra said. “They’re a thousand times better than pads, I promise you.”

  “Not today,” I said. I sat gingerly on her bed. “How long do the cramps last?”

  “A couple of days,” Sandra said. “Mine are actually worse before my period. That’s how I know it’s coming.”

  “Oh,” I said. Come to think of it, I’d been crampy yesterday, too—though I hadn’t defined it as such. “How long will my period itself last?”

  “Mine’s five days, but everyone’s different. I knew one girl who had her period for two months straight.”

  I paled. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “That probably won’t happen to you, though. It was some kind of glandular disorder.” She tapped her fingers together. “I read about another girl with a glandular disorder, only hers made her boobs grow to be the size of watermelons. I saw it in People.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Yeah-huh. Can you imagine how awful that would be? I mean, you want to have some boobs—you don’t want to be totally flat-chested—but not like that.”

  “What did she do?” I asked.

  “The girl in People? She got put on some kind of drugs, but they didn’t do any good. She’s just going to have to live with it. Her boobs are seriously the size of watermelons— there was a picture.”

  I put my hand on my belly. My cramps were getting worse.

  “Oh, well,” Sandra said. “Like I said, it’s unlikely to happen to you.”

  “It’s so unfair,” I said. “Everything about being a girl is so unfair. Why don’t boys have to go through any of this?”

  “Ah,” Sandra said. She held up one finger, then stood and went to her bookshelf. She tugged a battered paperback free and tossed it to me. It was called Then Again, Maybe I Won’t.

  “What’s this?” I said. On the cover was a boy with a pair of binoculars.

  “Read it and you’ll see,” Sandra said. “Boys do have to go through stuff, just not periods and boobs.”

  “You mean . . .” The word hard-on floated into my brain, but I wasn’t prepared to speak it. I’d heard of hard-ons, but I didn’t really know what they involved.

  “Just read it,” Sandra said. She went back to her computer. “Now go away. I want to finish IM-ing.”

  I took Sandra’s book and waddled back to my room.

  “Oh, and congratulations on being a woman!” she called out, loud enough for the entire universe to hear.

  Then Again, Maybe I Won’t was an eye-opener. It was as shocking as Wifey, if not more so, and surprise surprise, it was written by the same author, Judy Blume. She wrote embarrassing-yet-utterly-fascinating books for kids and grown-ups. Wowzers.

  In it, a boy named Tony lived across the street from a girl named Lisa, and in the evening, sometimes, he could see her getting undressed. He knew he shouldn’t watch, but he did. And he felt really guilty about it, but also really excited, and it made this crazy thing happen to his . . . boy-part. And the crazy thing that happened was called an erection.

  That’s what a hard-on was. An erection. The boy-part actually did get hard and, I guess, erect.

  I imagined being a boy and getting erections, and I decided that okay, maybe that was as bad as getting your period. Maybe worse, because apparently it could happen anytime. And if somebody was looking, well, too bad. It wasn’t something you could hide, even through your pants.

  I read the rest of the novel in one long marathon sitting, and when I finished, I was a changed person. Or woman. Whatever. And the whole experience made me grouchy.

  I stomped back to Sandra’s room and smacked the book down on the bed.

  “Here,” I said.

  “That was quick,” she said. She was still on the computer, because Saturdays were like that, with everybody doing their own thing. “Next you should read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

  “Is it by Judy Blume, too?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s about a girl who does all these exercises to develop her bust.”

  “Sheesh,” I said. “Who is this woman? Is she obsessed with every single humiliating thing that can happen to a kid?”

  “Basically, yeah.” She turned toward me. “When you’re older, you can read Forever, which is about two kids having sex for the first time.”

  Whoa. Too much, too much. And I didn’t think Sandra should call it “having sex.” She should call it “making love.”

  “I’m leaving now,” I said, backing out of her room.

  “’Kay, see you,” she said. “Hey—have you changed your pad?”

  I guess my face betrayed me, because she said, “You have to change it, Winnie. Every three to four hours, otherwise it could start to smell.”

  My thighs clamped involuntarily together. “Ewww! That is just wrong!”

  “Chill,” Sandra said. “It’s just biology.”

  “It’s insane,” I said.

  Sandra laughed, because she could. She wasn’t the one with a yacht between her legs. “Ain’t it the truth.”

  At school on Monday, I saw the world through Judy Blume eyes. Ms. Duncan: period. Mr. Gossett: erection. Period, period, erection, erection. Period, erection, period. I confessed to Dinah that I was turning into a pervert.

  “You were already a pervert,” Dinah said, giggling. I swatted her.

  “You’ll understand when you get your period,” I said. “Then you won’t be laughing.”

  “I know—that’s why I’m laughing now.” She squeezed my arm. “Winnie, what am I going to do when I do get it? Can you imagine telling something like that to my dad?”

  Yikes, that’s right. She’d have to tell her dad, because he’d be the only one around to tell. I hadn’t thought about that.

  “I’ll help you,” I said. “And you should, like, go ahead and get some pads now, to keep under your sink.”

  “You’ll have to come with me,” she said. “I don’t know what kind to get. I don’t even like going down that aisle!”

  “We’ll get Sandra to take us,” I said. “Just be warned: she’s going to try to talk you into tampons.”

  Dinah looked appalled. I laughed.

  Cinnamon plopped down beside us on the concrete steps. She’d just come from history; her big old textbook was weighing down her backpack.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  I bit my lip, then leaned in close. “I got my period.”

  “Oh, man,” she said. “You have it right now? This very second?”

  “Uh-huh.” I kept my legs close together, my arms wrapped around my knees.

  She whistled, like boy, that’s tough. She turned to Dinah. “Have you gotten yours?”

  Dinah shook her head.

  “Me neither,” Cinnamon said.

  “For real?” I said.

  “For real. My mom didn’t get hers until she was fourteen, so I’ll probably be late, too.”

  Dinah didn’t say anything, but I knew what she was thinking. She didn’t know when her mom got hers.

  “So what’s it like?” Cinnamon asked me.

  “No fun,” I said. “It’s like, I keep thinking it’ll be gone, but it’s not. Sandra says it’ll last five days, so I’ve got two more to go.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I’m pretty crampy,” I admitted. “In fact, I need to go to the bathroom before next period starts.”

  “Next period,” Cinnamon said. “Ha.”

  I got to my feet, and Cinnamon and Dinah rose with me. Wherever I went, they would go, too, and that made me so glad.

  “Am I okay?” I said to Dinah. I kept walking so she could check my jeans.

  “You’re fine,” she said.

  She and Cinnamon escorted me to the bathroom, where I changed my pad and put the old one in the little trash box attached to the side of the stall. I wrapped it up in toilet paper, the way Sandra told me to. Then I flushed and came out.

&nbsp
; “Everything good?” Cinnamon asked.

  “Everything good,” I said.

  In the hall, kids jostled and chatted. It was a mass of humanity, everyone with their own weird and particular body. Biology, Sandra had said.

  Out of the throng, one especially gorgeous body emerged. Lars, with his jaunty stride and messy hair. Lars, who was a boy and had . . . boy-parts. He walked beside Matt, his books tucked under his arm, joking and laughing and not yet noticing me with all the people between us.

  My pulse quickened. I liked Lars—a lot. And when I talked to him, I seemed to turn into a me that was somehow not so stupid as I’d have expected. I made jokes. I acted confident. Sometimes I was witty.

  Last year, I’d liked a boy named Toby Rinehart, who was really good at drawing airplanes. I thought of Toby fondly, but he went to Woodward now. He’d be drawing airplanes to impress other girls, if he still drew airplanes at all. Maybe drawing airplanes was more of a sixth-grade thing to do.

  I’d thought, at one time, that maybe Toby was my Bo. But Toby was simply someone from my past, back when we were young.

  Was Lars my Bo? I could see us having doughnut-eating contests, like Bo and Sandra. And Lars would watch Oprah with us and make smart-aleck remarks. I could see him being that kind of guy. Bo and Sandra could sit on one sofa, and Lars and I would sit on the other, and Bo and Lars would talk back to the TV while Sandra and I slugged them and told them to hush.

  Stop, I told myself in my head. Just because I liked Lars didn’t mean Lars liked me. I was crazy to let my mind go off like that, especially as our paths were getting nearer every second to crossing.

  I pressed my spine abruptly against a locker. “Hide me,” I begged.

  “Why?” Dinah said. “Don’t you want—”

  Cinnamon yanked hard on Dinah’s arm, pulling her in front of me.

  “So,” she said loudly, her body and Dinah’s forming a shield. “Did you see the caftan thingie Mrs. Potter was wearing?”

  “What caftan thingie?” Dinah said. “I was just in her class—she wasn’t wearing a caftan!”

  Cinnamon stepped on Dinah’s toe.

  “Oh!” Dinah said. “That caftan! The one she changed into for Dress Like a Poet Day!”