It was true—there was something different about him, something even I could witness during the day. He had always seemed like someone struggling against invisible forces, but now there was a peacefulness about him—as though he had arrived at a place and recognized it as a true home, as though he had discovered a back door into heaven and waited patiently for the rest of us to find him there.
I tried to speak to him. In the cafeteria a couple days later, I brought him a banana as an offering. I had always been kind to him—more than most, I believe. I said hello. I asked him how his day was going. Usually he smiled back and uttered a few guttural words of greeting. That day, though, his eyes didn’t even meet mine. He was gazing upward, as though he could see the sky through the ceiling. He reached out and put his big hand over my little one, and he just held it there for a long time. I didn’t know what to do, so after a while I took my hand back and left him there smiling to himself.
I had wanted him to share his secrets with me, but instead what I got was consolation. The last thing I wanted was to be pitied by Hondy Pilt.
Amenorrhea. I looked it up. That’s what it’s called when you don’t get your first period by age sixteen. At first I wondered what it had to do with the end of a prayer—where you say, Amen. But then I realized it was probably “men,” as in “menstruation,” and “a,” as in “not”—so “not menstruating,” amenorrhea. That’s the word I tried to counteract with my magic word menarche.
Where did all that blood go if it wasn’t evacuating my body? I worried. Did it collect somewhere? Did I have a sac in my thorax that was growing larger every day with unshed blood? That was crowding my other organs? If not blood, what was my body spending its time in the production of? All flowered fantasies and brain work?
Two months after Hondy Pilt and Peter Meechum went breach, the second, smaller Parker twin went breach. That meant I was the only one in my grade who hadn’t. In fact many of the people in the grade below me had already started going. It was something you couldn’t hide. Your absence on those nights was noticed.
Polly tried to console me. She said it was a sign of great maturity to breach late. Rose Lincoln was not so kind. She said it was because I was underdeveloped, obviously—that I was repressing my womanhood. “You have to have a grown woman somewhere in you scrambling to get out,” she explained. “How come you don’t want to let her out? You can’t stay a girl forever, you know. After a while, girlhood’s just a shell for something else.”
To Rose Lincoln I was a shell. A dry husk. One of those disappointments like cracking open a peanut only to find there’s no nut inside.
I knew I wasn’t going to go breach at all. But I hadn’t known what it would mean—watching everyone else as though we were on opposite sides of a wide river. I could hear them frolicking in the distance with their puffed-out bodies and their bleeding wombs. I felt that I was waving to them from my exile. Sometimes someone waved back.
So I said my magic word every night, and I looked at myself in the mirror every morning to see if any part of me had grown.
Peter Meechum petted me like a poodle and was in constant care not to corrupt me with his newfound adulthood. I wanted his hands on me, but he was reluctant.
And one day after the last night of the full moon, Polly came to my house and told me that Wendy Spencer had gotten an empty soda bottle stuck up in her the night before. She lurched all the way home with it inside her, and the paramedics had to break it this morning to get it out.
“Can you imagine!” Polly said. “It was stuck. How deep must it have gone to get stuck?”
“Suction,” I said, picking at the cover of my history textbook.
“What?”
“It’s not how deep. It’s suction. They probably had to break the bottom to let the air in.”
“Oh. How do you know that?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. It just makes sense.”
And so that was something else for me to think about when I couldn’t sleep.
Something was coming, and it had broken glass for teeth. I was running from it, hiding. But in the middle of the night, when I lay awake in my bed listening to the howling outside, I didn’t know which I really and truly wanted: this life or that one.
*
I pleaded with Mr. Hunter not to read my essay in front of the whole class, but he said modesty would get me nowhere in life. I said it wasn’t modesty, it was just that I didn’t like people reading my writing.
He gave me one of his curious looks, one that I could feel in my belly.
“You’ve got a toughness in you, Lumen. More spine than all of them put together,” he said in a low tone. “Why do you hide it?”
I didn’t know what to say. Why was he talking about my spine?
“If you want me not to read it,” he said, “tell me not to. Don’t ask, tell.”
But I could say nothing.
So he read it aloud and told everyone to pay attention to the diction and the transitions. He didn’t say it was mine, but everyone knew anyway. I hunched in my seat.
“You’re an excellent writer,” said Rose Lincoln after class. “You’re a master scribe.”
Later, in math class, when we were all supposed to be working through a sheet of problems, she leaned over and whispered to me.
“How’s your boyfriend?”
“What boyfriend?”
“You know, Peter Meechum.”
I hadn’t thought about him as my boyfriend.
“Things got pretty vicious last night, you know,” Rose continued. “He got into a fight with Blackhat Roy.”
I had seen the scrapes and bruises on Peter’s face, but he was avoiding me in school that day so I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about it.
“Why?” I asked Rose.
“Why what, sweetie?”
“Why were they fighting?”
“Come on, Lumen. I know you’re a little behind us, but you must’ve heard something about what happens. There is no why. Instinct. Besides, you know how Roy is. He’s got a meanness you can’t do much about. So Peter did what he had to.”