Flannery by Lisa Moore

Author:Lisa Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2016-02-12T17:17:15+00:00

15

This is the way it was when Amber and I were twelve. I’d started my period at Amber’s house on a very hot, sunny summer afternoon when time had pretty much stopped.

There was a major stoppage in the universe.

There was nobody home except Amber and me and all the windows were open and there was a breeze blowing the sheers out like big beer bellies.

We had nothing to do that day. Everybody we knew was gone to the country or they were working at Tim Hortons or their cell phones had died. Amber had already been to swim practice that morning, leaving in the dark before I’d even woken up, and Sean had dropped her off at home before he went to work and she’d come back to bed.

We’d slept half the day away and woke feeling groggy and sour. The bed sheets were twisted up at the foot of the bed in knots.

I’d gone to the bathroom and there was a brown stain on my underwear.

I knew what it was, of course.

On top of that terrifying non-talk on the edge of the bathtub with Miranda about sex and the reproductive system, we’d done the menstrual cycle in the sex-ed unit of our biology class in grade six.

The boys had been asked to leave the room and it was just girls. The boys would be doing the same lesson next week.

We felt sisterly and abandoned without the boys.

The boys were out in the sunshine having a game of basketball. We could hear them running and jerking to a stop, and running back the other way, yelling, but yelling in a subdued sportsmanlike way completely foreign to them. We heard when a foul was called, and the coach’s whistle, and some mild expressions of concern about whether it had actually been a foul.

They knew why they were outside. They hadn’t done the class yet, but they were going to do it, and maybe they were afraid.

We girls were sitting in the dark, watching an animated film of a gazillion sperms with dark crooked eyebrows and grimaces of effort and strain, snarled lips with teeth showing, all of them in a race of wiggling tails, trying to get to the egg, who was batting her long eyelashes, awaiting the lucky dude’s arrival.

Is that all they could have the egg do? Sit there and wait? Why wasn’t she charging around too, gnashing her teeth?

So, I knew what the stain on my underwear meant that day at Amber’s.

But I also didn’t know.

Because how can anybody really understand that blood? I looked in the toilet and in the cloud of pee there was a ribbon of blood sinking toward the bottom of the white toilet bowl.

I thought, What is happening to me? Even though I knew.

I wadded up some toilet paper and put it in my underwear until I got home and could ask Miranda for some pads or tampons or whatever.

Amber hadn’t started her period yet. And wouldn’t really start for a while, maybe because of swimming.

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