Twelve (13 page)

“Whoa,” I said.

“And whoa to you, too,” Cinnamon said, nodding with approval at my daring (for me) attire. “You sexy thing.”

“Oh please,” I said. I tugged at my top, worried now that it dipped too low. Plus, the word
sexy
was just plain silly, especially applied to me.

“Shall we?” Cinnamon said, opening the door to the girls' bathroom.

“We shall,” Dinah and I said together.

In the gym, a fog machine generated misty, moisty smoke, and one of those Halloween CDs offered up howls and wails. Cinnamon took off to join a group of kids doing the Time Warp, and Dinah and I migrated toward the wall. Vanita waved from across the room in a cute pop princess outfit, and Dinah waved back.

“Check out Malena,” I said, jerking my head at the refreshment table. She was dressed as a harem girl, her toned tummy on display.

Dinah sighed enviously. “You think she works out?”

“I'm pretty sure,” I said.

A girl with long fake braids walked by, wearing a hoop skirt and carrying a crooked cane. One of her friends trotted behind as a sheep.

“Who's that?” Dinah said. “Is that Amanda?”

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “That's Tammy Wells.” I looked for Amanda, but I didn't see her anywhere. No, wait. There she was, dressed up in twinsie outfits with Gail. They were both French maids wearing actual fishnet stockings.

“Oh-oh-oh, there's Lars,” Dinah said excitedly. I followed her gaze and saw him in his normal jeans and shirt.

“He looks good no matter what he wears,” Dinah said.

He sure does,
I thought.

Louise pranced by wearing thigh-high black boots, a black dress, and a jaunty red cap with a sequined brim. She was doing a jerky dance move that involved a lot of hipshaking, and her eyes flew from face to face to see who might be noticing.

“What's she supposed to be?” Dinah asked.

“A Brat,” I said. In English we'd had to do a freewrite on our alter-identities; that's how I knew.

“A brat?” Dinah said.

“You know, as in Bratz?” I said. “Those big-headed, big-lipped doll-things?”

“Ew,” Dinah said.

We watched as some teacher apparently asked Dinah's same question. “A Brat,” Louise told him. Then, louder and with a frown, “A Brat, okay? I'm a
Brat
!”

“That's for darn sure,” I said to Dinah.

“It's pretty sad when you have to get your fashion cues from a doll,” she replied.

I laughed, and a sudden confidence enveloped me. I told Dinah I'd be back, and then I marched over to the Brat. I tapped her shoulder.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

She turned around. The song over the loudspeaker ended, and there was a big old blare of nothing.

“What?” she said.

“Uh . . .” I waited for the music to come back on. It didn't.

Louise again said, “
What?
”

I lifted my chin. “You shouldn't have been mean to Ms. Braddy.”

“I shouldn't have . . . omigod.” She snorted. “Are you serious?”

I barreled on. “And you shouldn't have called her Miss Fatty.”

The kids who could hear us snickered.

“That's all I wanted to say,” I said. I marched back to Dinah as “The Monster Mash” boomed through the gym. Dinah's eyes were wide, and I knew she wanted to dish, but I put her off because a noncostumed, extremely cute boy was heading my way.

“Hey, Win,” he said.

“Hey, Lars,” I said. My heart thumpity-thumped. “Great costume.”

“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.”

“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 tampons.”

“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
.