No one told me the thing I most needed to know.
No one prepared me for it.
Not the way they prepared me for every little bit of my body changing—the way they told in advance about all the tubes and canals of my inner chambers, warned me for years about parts I’d never see, talked on and on about my period coming, what it would look like, what it would feel like, what it would mean.
“You’ll be a woman when it comes,” teachers said with patient smiles, as though menstruation were a crowning of sorts. I thought of all the girls I knew and how their lives were just the same after a period, only messier. I thought of my mother and my older sisters. No tiaras there. No roses, no glowing halos.
Still, they sat us down to scratchy filmstrips and clumsy health class lectures about developing boys and girls coming to terms with the strangeness of bodies that had begun to leak and groan.
“Looks like Janie’s got it,” said the filmstrip mother to her husband as she emerged from the pink-canopied bedroom where her daughter sat glowing.
“I guess our little Janie is a woman now.” The filmstrip father smiled, his voice swollen with pride, as though Janie had just swum the length of the Atlantic.
Everyone laughed and celebrated Janie’s blossoming. The buttercup mother and robot father held hands. Their teeth gleamed as they welcomed Janie to the wonderful world of menstruation. But to a roomful of kids without handholding parents and canopy beds, their words came out high-pitched and squeaky, in sounds that hurt our ears.
And all those visits from community educators teaching us about STDs, pregnancy, and how to roll the latex onto the shaft just so. All those diagrams and diaphragms and maps of our bodies. None of it really mattered.
While my own period was a source of mild pride as I told Steph and bragged to my friends and tried to feel like I’d been transformed somehow, it was basically a disappointment. My insides cramped and blood came each month, but nothing was different. My mother still wrapped a kerchief around her head and barked orders, then hibernated for days. Bill collectors still called. People on Lamont Place still fought. A little blood, sure. But nothing like the exciting transformation Janie seemed to have experienced.
All that time and all that talk, and no one ever talked about the stuff that mattered.
The most important thing of all.
Steph and I went together.
We had to get physicals first. We tacked ourselves to the end of a long line at the free health clinic near Monroe High School, where the nurse would probe our backs and scribble our weights. While waiting for Steph to finish her appointment so we could take a bus downtown, I endured a group of boys putting their lips on my neck and trying to talk me into a dark corner. But finally, it was done, and I had it in hand.
A work permit.
It was everything. Practically magic.
Small enough to fit into my pocket; the little blue card changed my life more than a period ever could.
I had always been a worker—even in grammar school, I’d sold Olympic greeting cards with Annmarie VanEpps, raked yards, shoveled the walks and drives of strangers. I had despised scrubbing blackboards at Nazareth Academy, but it wasn’t the task itself that had annoyed me. Only the idea of being seen as poor had bothered me.
But lots of kids had jobs.
With a job, I might feel like everyone else.
I discovered that there was always someone willing to ignore the fine print on the back of the card and hire a fourteen-year-old, somebody who’d allow kids to work well into the night.
Once I started working, I didn’t stop.
I’d quit a job from time to time, but I’d always find another. I worked at a fast food restaurant, H&L Greens’ five-and-dime store, Varden’s photo studio, Seabreeze Amusement Park. Ringing up burgers and fries, stuffing envelopes with flyers, spinning sugar into cotton candy, selling low-grade underwear to old women on tight budgets—these were things I could do.