“I know,” Devon said, cringing back in her chair. “But I’m not like that. Not like the girls at school, talking about boys and their abs and muscles. And their phones. All they do, Mom, is take pictures of themselves all day and send them to each other.”
“Well, that’s what girls do,” Katie said. “Some girls. And it’s okay if you look at boys. Because, Devon, they’re definitely looking at you.”
Devon pressed her highlighter hard onto the page, a blot spreading.
“Everything’s always ending,” she said.
Katie had no idea what she meant. What was ending? Childhood? She started to ask, reaching out, but Devon pulled her book up, gathered it closer to her face, as if starting to read.
Like any teenage girl might.
The hard thud of adolescence still hadn’t fully arrived for Devon, or for any of the other girls at the gym. Like any parent, Katie’d braced herself for it, and then at some point stopped waiting. Ages thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen came and went for the BelStars, and their bodies remained flat and smooth as scythes except their perky muscled behinds.
Once, when she was seven or eight, Devon announced that she didn’t need to worry about growing, as if she could control it through sheer force of will. “I’ll grow a few inches when this is all over,” she said, her eyes grave, as if the words all over bespoke an unimaginable horror.
We need to get her before she changes. That’s what Teddy had said, all those years ago.
But Devon’s body didn’t seem to change. It only got harder.
It wasn’t until a few months ago, February, that she’d had any reminder at all that Devon was a teenager, nearly a woman.
Arms pushed in the laundry basket, Katie saw it. Glaring at her from the knot of leotards, white, blue, red. The glossy red-brown stain, smaller than a dime, at the center of one crotch.
At last, she thought, and smiled to herself.
But it was fleeting, then the next thought: Oh no.
The Mom Moment anticipated and dreaded was, in Devon’s case, magnified a hundred times. So many years past the expected age, the anticipation had stretched thin, the dread deepening as Devon would talk about other girls who’d “turned,” their hips and breasts slowing them down, heavy and monstrous.
Can you believe what happened to Michele McAlpine, Mom? She was so good, but look at her now. I feel so sorry for her, all that new flesh dragging her down.
Whenever Katie asked Dr. Kemper, the BelStars’ favored pediatrician, about it, about what he called “delayed-onset puberty,” he’d assured her everything was fine and it would come.
“You’ll be sorry then,” he said. “They all are.”
But it had happened, and Devon held the tampon Katie handed her as if it were a loaded gun.
“Do you need me to show you how to put it in?”
Devon looked at her like she might die.
Together, mother and daughter curled on Katie’s bed. Heating pad, half a muscle relaxant, Devon’s hands between her legs, Katie stroking her hair. It was what her own mom had done, one of the few motherly things she’d managed, her life so full of the tripwires of bad men and paycheck-to-paycheck living and now the slippery signs of early dementia at only fifty-eight, the result of a brain softened by margaritas and two bad marriages.
“Oh, honey,” she said, her hand on Devon’s back, workout T-shirt stiff with sweat. “It’s okay. Everything will be fine.”
“No, Mom,” she said, running her hand over her stomach queasily. “You know it won’t.”
Katie did know. No matter what, it was a sharp slash into the center of your life. It changed things and you couldn’t pretend it didn’t.
“Don’t tell Dad,” Devon said. “Mom, don’t tell Dad.”
“Why not?” Katie said without thinking. Then adding, “I mean, of course. It’s private.”
She knew it wasn’t possible that Devon might fear her dad’s disappointment, that he might see it only as the loss of that aerodynamic missile of a body, low, tight, no drag. An efficient machine. Devon knew her dad better than that.
(“Oh,” Eric said when she finally told him. “Okay. Well. You sure? She’s so small.” Almost as if he didn’t believe her.)
“I don’t want anyone to know,” Devon said. “Not anyone.”
And moments went by, Devon descending at last into some kind of sleep, the telltale shift of her body weight.
“No one ever tells you there’ll be so much blood,” she whispered, ebbing away.
“How much blood?” Katie asked. “There shouldn’t be—”
“No one ever tells you any of it,” Devon mumbled. “No one warns you.”
“Baby, it’s nature. Your body.”
“I made it happen,” Devon murmured, and she had to be talking in her sleep. “And now it’s forever.”
Which was true, in a way.