When me, T, and Mama are all on our periods, things get volatile. Women menstruating at the same time is a myth except when it’s not. Sudden irrational displays of emotion during PMS are also a myth but happen from time to time. Mama threw a shoe at us one of those times. White laces propelled up and out, spiraling like knotted antennae from the sneaker, whizzing out of the hall in an arc, a teeny-tiny helicopter hunting over a city, a warning shot. She had the latent power of a full-grown woman, which we figured made no difference because she was just old and out of shape. It made all the difference.
I used to get away with the big maxi pads in softball. The uniforms of wrestling were not so forgiving. Even with undershorts the outline of the pad came through like a surfboard. T gave me a tampon and assured me it had nothing to do with virginity and all those other girls were dumbasses. She left me alone in the bathroom. I half read the instructions and didn’t understand the difference between applicator and tampon; they were one and the same and I figured everything had to go in and stay there.
The entire tampon and applicator rested in my vagina like a ballpoint pen when the bone assignment was explained. I held still as possible, curious about the pain women had to have. We needed to go to a butcher for this one, Ms. Lancaster explained. Buy a pork or beef bone, a femur, have the butcher saw it in half lengthwise, tip him for the extra effort, boil the halves for x amount of time, then let them dry or wash them off, but that didn’t make sense, and print out pieces of paper, which also didn’t make sense, and color the bone in a code of some kind. I took notes quickly but still too slowly to get all of the details. The assignment seemed illicit and creepy, with the promise of something beautiful at the end, a colored code, a rainbow after such barbarity. I loved it. I loved that an animal would give up its bones for me to play with in my kitchen then prepare a design, cast labels on the parts like Adam.
T half caught the other shoe Mama threw right at her, held back like a grenade; half caught, half absorbed the impact right in the chest and collarbone, her reflexes whip quick. The third rolled sideways at T, a boot. I deflected it with a smack, didn’t bother to catch it, a mistake really, the ammunition returned. This went on for three more rounds in silence, no screaming, no arguing, just the swing of footwear colliding against palms, meaty sounds from the rubber, nylon, and skin as it all tumbled through the air.
Science kept me alert, the smells of formaldehyde-laden desks half cleaned for decades, enormous black desks with a special chemical coating, dinged and chipped and scratched. They let me do the dirty work, trusted me to peel the gladius from the baby squid, extract the pigeon brain (difficult; one girl slit her nail with a scalpel on the skull), and line them up on a tray. Now I had a bone to work with all to myself.
Mama ran out of breath and gave up the exercise or punishment and retreated to a pot of coffee. No one died. I hated her. I appreciated her. In the abrupt end to the weird conversation between T and Mama and me, one thing rose from the breath of it, a shapeless feeling that scratched and whistled too loud to let anybody take a nap.
When I told T the plastic made the tampon more than uncomfortable, her eyes jostled in her head like gelatin, the white tissue layered around the deep red rippled. Glee took over her whole body, and I realized I’d been making a painful, messy error. I knew not to tell her about the bone because I wanted that for me and no one else. Her laughter struck me as unbelievable, like raising a body from the dead, the kind of miracle better left in our past because to perform it now only raises questions we can’t be bothered to ask.