4

The next day, I’m lying on my bed on my stomach, enjoying the way it doesn’t hurt my chest. My orange notebook is open beside me, a page full of cross outs and revisions turned up toward the ceiling. My chin is resting on the huge textbook I’m reading. Theories of Complex Equations. It’s one of my mom’s. I have Mozart playing in my headphones. I’m totally captivated by math and patterns and rhythms. I’m happy.

Then there’s a knock on my door.

I glance at the other side of the room. The empty side. I wish it were Eloise knocking, even though that makes no sense because no one knocks on their own bedroom door. And it’s a Saturday. She probably won’t be home until Monday.

Eloise didn’t used to live with us. She used to live with her mom, who I barely know. We’re sisters because we have the same dad, but he peaced out of both our lives right after I was born. Our moms became friendly after our dad left, and we all hung out sometimes. Then, about five years ago, something happened to Eloise’s mom—I don’t know what because Mom says it’s private. But Eloise started sleeping over most weekends, then sometimes for whole weeks, and eventually she moved into my bedroom. I know that the something that happened was a bad something, so I wasn’t supposed to be happy about it. But I can’t help but be happy any time Eloise is around.

Whatever it was must have gotten better though, because lately Eloise has been spending more and more time with her mom. Or she’s at school. Or at her job. Or volunteering at the dog shelter. She still technically lives with us, but she’s so busy it seems like she barely lives anywhere these days. It’s different now because she’s seventeen, which is almost an adult, so Mom says she can choose to live with us or with her mom or go between both houses.

Mom says we should be happy for Eloise because she’s closer to her mom again. But I know Mom misses Eloise the way I do. Mom treats Eloise like she’s her second daughter. Or third daughter, now, I guess. Or first daughter because she’s the oldest?

Anyway . . . I think the person Eloise is actually getting close to isn’t her mom, but her boyfriend, Bobby. He lives near her mom, and, in my opinion, that’s the real reason she never sleeps here on weekends. She’s too busy having fun with him to drive all the way back to this side of town after a date. And I don’t have to be happy about that.

Right?

Knock, knock. Again.

I roll over and pull my headphones off one ear. “Come in.”

The door swings open. “Whatcha doing, Sweet Pi?” Calvin says.

I sit up, cross my legs, and shove Mom’s math book under my pillow. I’m supposed to ask before taking her textbooks, but when I went to find her today, she was feeding Gladys, so I didn’t.

“Nothing,” I say, shrugging.

Calvin leans on my doorframe. He slides his bottom jaw back and forth like he always does when he’s thinking, his rust-colored beard rearranging on his face. He wrinkles his nose to push his brown glasses higher. Mom and Gladys appear beside him.

“Can we come in, honey?” Mom asks.

I don’t answer, but suddenly they’re all in my room. Four people live in this house with me, and the only one I actually want to talk to right now is the only one who isn’t here.

I wiggle closer to my pillow trying to block their view in case a corner of the book is sticking out or something. Mom always tells me that when I take her books without asking it’s stealing, not borrowing, because she’s not a library. But she sort of is a library because I always return them. She’s only caught one-fourteenth of my supposed “stealing” incidents. In metaphorical math, that’s a very insignificant number.

Mom shifts Gladys to one shoulder and uses the heel of her hand to rub her eyes. She has dark rings around them.

“I’d like to have a chat.”

I know she wants to talk about the puberty stuff from Dr. Grand’s office, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

“OK. Guess what?” I jump to my knees. “Tallulah told me that Ms. Gates told her that the decathlon is—”

“No, no,” Mom interrupts me. “About the shots.”

“Oh.” I fall onto my butt. A corner of the textbook pokes into my back.

Mom crosses the room and tries to sit on the edge of my bed, but the minute her body even leans toward me, Gladys starts fussing and she stands up again.

“I need you to . . . explain . . .” Mom says. She trails off. She’s looking at Gladys, shifting her around.

“Piper, Mom said something about you trying to avoid puberty?” Calvin says, finally.

“Yes, thank you,” Mom says, as if Calvin is some big help and not two of the four ears that don’t belong in this room for this conversation.

I look from Mom to the back of Gladys’s head to Calvin and his shifting red beard. I nod.

If only I could find a way to explain why I need the shots that’s as clear as Ivan’s Pinocchio metaphor.

“But, honey,” Mom says, swaying in front of me so Gladys cries a little more quietly. “Puberty is OK now. It’s natural.”

But it’s not. Natural puberty was going to happen to me at seven years old. When we stopped it, we made it unnatural. It won’t ever be natural. That’s impossible.

I open my mouth to try to explain, but the same thing happens. No words appear.

Mom sits, Gladys screams, and she stands back up. She looks so tired. I want to change that, to be the easy one, but I can’t hurry into puberty because Mom is tired.

“You don’t even like Dr. Grand,” Mom says.

“It’s not about him.”

“What is it about, honey? I’m listening.” She says it like she means it, but her face is so focused on Gladys, I don’t see how she can be listening.

I try to explain anyway. “I want the shots because . . . you know . . . all the . . . the stuff.” I fail.

Mom’s eyes narrow. “What stuff?”

“Baaaahhhh! Aaaaah!” Gladys screams. Even when she’s happy, she’s still interrupting.

“Like . . . you know. Like the stuff with you,” I manage.

Mom and Calvin both look surprised. They take a half step away from me in their shock.

“Me?” Mom says. “Stuff with me?”

“Yeah . . . like . . . what happens to you.”

“What happens to me?” Mom points to herself. “Me?”

I stare. I have to do better than this.

Gladys screams.

Mom is still pointing to herself.

“Ugh. Like how Dr. Grand is always calling you Mrs.”

“What?” Mom laughs. “That sounds like a reason to stop seeing him.”

She looks at Calvin who smiles at her like this is a joke. My face is starting to heat up.

“But lots of people call you the wrong thing.” I’m shouting now, but not because I’m angry. It’s just that Gladys is so loud.

“And?” Mom yells back. It’s like she’s purposely trying to not understand me.

“And . . . and then they act like you’re annoying for caring about your own name.”

“Piper. What does that have to do with you and puberty?”

I knew it. I knew she wouldn’t see the link. I need more examples.

I stand. “Plus . . . like . . . remember how you’re always saying that at those math professor conferences the air conditioning is so high, and all the women are freezing, but the men get to wear suits, so they don’t even notice?”

“What?” Mom says. But I know she must remember. She says that all the time.

“Or . . . OK. What about all those books you read Gladys?”

“What books?” Calvin asks. There’s an edge of a chuckle in his voice that makes me want to hit something.

“Like Soar Far, Race Car and Win the Game, Airplane.” I move my hands around ridiculously as I say those stupid titles.

“What about them?” Mom says.

“How come all the trucks and cars and boats and planes use he/him pronouns?” This time they just stare. “And did you know that Eloise says that at her dog shelter almost no one comes in looking to rescue a girl dog?”

“Piper!” Mom yells. This time she actually yells. “Stop trying to distract me.”

“I’m not,” I shout over Gladys. “I’m answering you. Also, there’s never been a woman president.”

I stomp my foot on the word never.

Gladys screams and cries like this fact upsets her the way it should.

Mom shouts over her. “I don’t care about any of that!”

“You don’t?” I cry. “There’s never been a woman president and you don’t even care?”

“Of course she does,” Calvin says, trying a reasonable voice. He’s always way too reasonable in these moments, like he doesn’t understand the value of a good fight.

Mom shoots him a look. “At this moment, I don’t, actually,” she says. “At this moment, I care about you, Piper. And none of this has anything to do with you.”

Are you nuts?

It has everything to do with me.

Or it would. It will. It will when I’m in a body like Mom’s and Eloise’s and Kamala Harris’s. It will when I have to grow into what they are.

I sit back on my bed.

“Piper,” Mom says softly. “Just tell me the truth.”

I snap my mouth shut and stare at her. That was the truth.

Gladys writhes and screams between us.

“Listen, honey, you’re eleven and—”

“Only chronologically,” I say.

“Oh, this again,” Mom sighs. She hates metaphorical math. Every time she reminds me how much she hates it, it’s like a pin in the balloon of my heart.

I pull my pillow onto my lap and sink my elbows into it, trying to give myself a hug.

“Piper!” Mom yells suddenly.

I jump.

“What is that?” she demands. She lunges behind me, and then I remember her textbook. I exposed it when I moved the pillow. She reaches for it, screaming baby and all. “Complex Equations. Again? Seriously?”

I shrink away from her.

“Anna,” Calvin says, quietly. “I think she was just reading a math book.”

“Yeah! Why do you even care?” I yell. “It’s not like you need your books.”

“I will soon. I’m going back to work,” Mom says through clenched teeth.

“I would have returned it way before then.”

“OK, OK,” Calvin says. He speaks in the annoyingly slow and patient way he often does with Tallulah. “Piper . . . there’s nothing wrong with you being interested in math, but—”

“Actually, there is something wrong with it, Cal!” Mom yells.

“There is?” Calvin asks with that half step of surprise again, and I’m glad because I have the same question.

“She should be spending her time doing something normal.”

“Normal?” I ask. How come she gets to use that word?

“You know what I mean,” Mom yells in Calvin’s direction, even though she’s answering me, and I’m clearly the one she’s mad at. “She should be acting like a kid. Having fun. Not holing up in her room with math books.”

My jaw drops. I fall back onto the bed, muscles loose again. This is the thing about my mom. As soon as she’s making me the most angry, she says something that reminds me of how easily she loves me. I’d rather have a mom who’s mad at me for studying too much than one who forces me to study all the time.

“I’m going outside to hang out with Tallulah in a little while, Mom,” I say.

“Oh. Good,” she says, nodding.

I’m still sort of angry, but my mouth is twitching into a half smile. My family is confusing. Mom is both impossible to understand and really good at loving me. Calvin is both compassionate and annoying. Eloise is perfect but almost never here.

Gladys is only one thing: loud.

“And, honey,” Mom says, putting a soft hand on my shoulder, “if you had asked to borrow the book because you want to relax with some complex math equations or whatever . . .” Now Calvin and Mom and I are all giggling because even I know that it’s funny to find math textbooks relaxing. (And yet they are so relaxing.) “I’d say yes. But you need to ask.”

“OK.” I don’t say that I didn’t want to ask because she was feeding Gladys, and I don’t like to be right next to her when she’s doing that.

“And if you ever do borrow my books without asking,” Mom says with a little twinkle in her eye, “and it happens to be one of the very uncommon times that I catch you doing such a thing . . . maybe you can find a way to defend yourself without reminding me about how I don’t get to work right now because I’m stuck at home with a screaming baby twenty-four seven?”

“Huh?” I say. “Oh.” I tilt my head at her. “OK.”

She doesn’t want to be stuck at home with a screaming baby twenty-four seven? That has never occurred to me.

Gladys wails louder.

“Honey, I need you to understand that you can’t not be eleven. Numbers aren’t metaphorical.”

It feels like she slapped me.

I open her textbook and point to a small, italicized i. “What’s that?”

Mom breathes in sharp. “That’s an imaginary number, but—”

“If numbers can be imaginary, they can be metaphorical. It’s just that no one has figured metaphorical numbers out yet.”

Calvin is laughing out loud now, a big, round belly laugh. I don’t know if that means he’s on my side or Mom’s. Mom looks at him with a face that’s so different from the one she just used for me. When she was looking at me, her face was saying, Please stop making my life impossible. To Calvin, her face is saying, You’re also difficult, but it makes me happy because I love you a lot.

She takes a deep breath. “OK, Piper. Fine. Just give me a reason, all right? Just one good reason that you need to stay on the shots. Not nonsense about dogs and books and presidents. Please.”

“I . . . I have a million reasons.”

And you just called them all nonsense.

Mom sighs and puts her arm around me. Gladys settles down once she’s wedged between us. “Honey,” she says. “I mean . . . give me the reason from your heart.”

I stare at her. My brain wants to keep giving her all kinds of reasons—reasons from math, history, biology, literature. My brain has reasons for not wanting to be a full-grown woman from every possible subject, every possible Academic Decathlon specialty.

But my heart has no words. It just wants to scream.

Gladys does it for me. She screams so loudly, she’s suddenly puking all down Mom’s back and Mom is saying, “For Pete’s sake!” and running out the room. “Cal!” Her voice ricochets down the hallway. “I need wipes. And burp cloths. And please fill her bath.”

Calvin hesitates. “You know we love you more than life, right, Sweet Pi?”

I nod. I do know that.

Then he leaves, and I realize Mom took Complex Equations with her, so I have nothing to distract myself from how sad and desperate I am.

I need those shots. If Mom needs a reason, and she can’t help me figure out the real one, I’ll have to find others.

I move to my desk and switch on my desk lamp. I pull six colored index cards out of the drawer: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and orange. I’ll give Mom all the reasons. A rainbow of reasons. Then she’ll have to let me stay on the shots.

I start with red, Ivan’s favorite color. If Ivan’s on the shots and he’s thirteen, I should be allowed to stay on them at least that long. After I write it, I pin it words-down to the corkboard above my desk.

I shuffle to yellow. Yellow is the color of the inside of a daisy, so I write, None of my friends has a period. If I go off the shots, I’ll still be the only girl I know with a period. I’ll still be first. And isn’t that what we were trying to avoid? I pin that one down, too.

Green is the color of the puke Gladys just splattered all over Mom’s sweater, so on the green card I write, Besides, puberty and periods are about having babies one day and I NEVER EVER EVER want to have a baby.

On the blue card I write, And Dr. Grand said the shots are totally safe! because the needles from Dr. Grand’s office are always blue.

Purple is Tallulah’s favorite color, so on the next card I write, This is my decathlon year. I can’t be distracted by things like periods and hormones. Now I have a row of five colored rectangles pinned to my corkboard, each hiding one reason that I should stay on the shots.

I reach for the orange card. My favorite color. I want to write my heart’s reason on it. But my heart’s reason is all mixed up. It’s all these tiny things that are connected somehow, even if I can’t say how.

I need a metaphor.

Ivan said he was being controlled by invisible marionette strings, like Pinocchio. But the tiny things I notice—Dr. Grand and abandoned girl dogs and male presidents—are super visible. They’re happening around me all the time, attracting my eyeballs like something gross you can’t help but stare at. And whatever they are, whatever it is that connects them all into one thing, it isn’t controlling my mom’s movements like in Ivan’s metaphor. It’s more like she’s tied up. Restricted.

It’s like every example I see is one link in a chain that weighs on every adult woman I know, but there are only words for the little pieces of the chain, not for the whole thing.

Hey, that’s it. It’s the Wordless Chain! That’s why I don’t want to stop the shots.

I did it. I have a metaphor.

For a second, I’m thrilled. For a second I feel accomplished. I pick up my pencil and I write it out on the orange card. The real reason. My heart’s reason.

I need the shots because of the Wordless Chain.

Then I stare at it, deflating. What good is a reason if it’s wordless?

I hear the door creak behind me.

And there she is, standing in the bedroom doorway. My big sister. “Eloise!” I don’t think I’ve seen her since last week except when I roll over in the middle of the night and find her sleeping in the twin bed across from mine.

Being near her always makes me feel the same way I do when I smell lilacs.

Her thick black hair is pulled back in a low ponytail with a purple headband outlining the top of her head. She’s wearing skinny jeans that stretch over her hips and butt, and a black T-shirt that’s cut low in the front. A necklace with a silver tree on it hangs below her collarbone.

“Iper!” She greets me with the name she made up for me when I was a baby and she was, like, six. She barely ever saw me then, but when she did, she’d always leave the first P off my name. Even once her speech improved, she never stopped calling me Iper. I still love it.

“Hi,” I yelp.

I’m so excited to see her, my heart is jumping rope. Maybe we’ll pop popcorn and watch Netflix on her computer. Maybe we’ll go together to walk dogs from her shelter. Maybe we’ll do something else, something new. For some reason, I feel like I need to swallow my excitement, though. Like it’s in the Can’t Say That column or something. Even though being excited to see someone is definitely nice.

Eloise sits on the side of my bed. I want to collapse into her, to put my head in her lap, to sleep with her in my bed the way we did when she was twelve and I was six, and she first moved in with Mom and Calvin and me. She and I would sleep all tangled together because that seemed like the only way to make up for all the lost time. Then . . . simultaneous puberty. Regular for her, precocious for me. Now I have to settle for her balancing on the edge of my mattress.

She bumps her shoulder against mine.

“Want to watch a movie?” I ask, my words plowing out of me like I’m Tallulah. “I’ve been waiting for you to watch this documentary about dogs who saved—”

Eloise sits up straighter, so our shoulders aren’t touching anymore. The movie is not going to happen.

“Where’s Bobby today?” I ask. A guess.

Eloise fidgets with her silver tree. “He’s picking me up at 12:30.”

I glance at the clock. It’s 12:20.

One doctor appointment with Mom.

Ten minutes with Eloise.

That’s it.

“How was Dr. JerkFace yesterday?” She’s the only one who knows my nickname for him.

“He called me fat again,” I say.

“What?” Eloise says. “Don’t listen to that.”

“Don’t worry.” I smile. “I never do.”

Eloise stands up and does a spin on our gold carpet, followed by about six steps of salsa. She wiggles her curvy hips and waves her thick arms, showing off every bit of her. “I mean, maybe you are fat. But who cares? Fat isn’t bad. It should be like saying you’re tall or have long hair. But I’m guessing he didn’t say it like that?”

I laugh. “Nope.”

Eloise spins. “Well, Dr. JerkFace may be smart, but I know two things he doesn’t. One, I’m fatter than you. And two”—she spins once more, then leans back on the bed like she’s just dipped herself—“I’m beautiful.”

She giggles and so do I. She really is beautiful.

She yanks me up, and the next thing I know I’m salsa-ing with her, spinning under her arms, wiggling my hips the way she does. If this is the post-puberty version of sleeping curled up, I’ll take it.

We collapse back onto my bed together. “If Dr. Grand is such a jerk . . . and he is . . . why do you want to keep seeing him?”

Oh. Mom must have talked to her on her way in.

I shrug.

“It’s . . . I’m . . . I’m a kid.”

A kid who doesn’t have to think about being a girl unless I’m looking for the correct bathroom door. A kid who doesn’t have to worry about . . . whatever links all those things I see. A kid who has better things to think about.

Eloise nods. “When I first got my period, I definitely still felt like a kid.”

My eyebrows go up. It sounds like she might understand. “How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“And you were upset? You didn’t want it, either?” I ask.

She shakes her head, laughing. “I wasn’t so wise. At first, I was happy about it.”

“And then?” I ask.

She groans and falls backward on the bed, covering her face with my pillow. “And then . . . cramps.” She laughs, and it almost sounds like that secret code, so I do, too. But I can’t decode this one. Maybe it’s something I’ll understand after puberty.

“But . . . you’re not thinking about my period when you say you don’t want to go through puberty, right?”

I lower my eyebrows and shrug. Of course I am.

“Oh, Ipey. Yours probably won’t be like mine. Most of my friends have periods that aren’t a big deal.”

“I guess. But—”

“And the period isn’t the point, sis. It’s just one part. The rest of growing up—that’s the fun stuff!”

“It is?” I ask, surprised.

Eloise beams. “Do you know how fun my life is right now?”

“No,” I say. It doesn’t look fun. It looks complicated and busy and confusing. And periodically predictably painful.

Her phone buzzes. She flips it over and I see Bobby’s name on her screen.

“Listen, Iper,” she says, not looking up. “Every woman you know has gotten a period. And they’re all fine.”

“No, they aren’t,” I whisper.

I don’t think she hears me, though. She’s looking at her phone.

“I gotta go,” she says, standing. “You’ll be OK. I promise.”

Then she leaves, and for the first time ever it seems like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because she said I’d be OK, but I’m not OK with her leaving at all.

It’s only 12:28.