I was eager to hear everything Grace Rose had to say. She was tall, with light-brown hair and calm green eyes. Although she was too thin, she wasn’t unattractive, but she was twenty-three and unmarried and, as far as I knew, not promised to anyone, which I found more curious. There were all sorts of rumors about her, ranging from a terrible early romance that ruined her future hopes to that she simply didn’t like boys. People like my mother who wanted to employ her medical expertise overlooked all that. They would never ask her a personal question. But not me. I wanted her to talk about herself.

“To be honest,” she told me, “I was far more frightened and frantic about it when it first happened to me than you are. Most girls dread it, but I have to say that your mother wasn’t exaggerating.” She smiled. “You do look like you’re happy.”

“I’m happy to be a woman and not a little girl. My mother can’t stand it. How old were you?”

“Thirteen and five months,” Grace said.

She smiled, remembering. I could feel her honesty. Why couldn’t my mother be more like this? Why did I have to turn to a stranger?

“Is it weird that it happened to me so soon?”

“Oh no. It’s not that unusual.”

“My mother thinks so. You saw that.”

She kept her soft smile. There was more in it. She wasn’t just trying to be a good nurse. She saw something in me that she really liked. Maybe she saw herself.

“Mothers don’t want their daughters growing up too quickly.” She tightened her lips. I was confident that she was remembering her own mother’s reactions. “I was told to keep it secret, but from the look on my face, all my girlfriends knew what had occurred. We were all anticipating it for ourselves.”

“Did boys know?” I wasn’t at all interested in other girls’ reactions.

“None I told,” she replied, “but there were some . . .” She widened her eyes, implying one or two might have realized it.

My mind went wild with thoughts. Could boys really tell? How did your body change? Was there something different about the way you walked, even talked? I nearly overwhelmed her with my flood of questions.