In exchange for our attention and mercy, Mrs. Carly returned most of our work with high grades and stopped talking early each period so we could start. Of course no promises could be made as to how much sympathy a husband’s death (sudden and unexpected) could buy, but no one ever questioned heavy, wet clouds threatening to sit a brutal heat wave down; they just sighed “finally,” set a chair at the nearest entrance, and waited for the wet-wind breeze. So Mrs. Carly, a stout Black woman who wore clown-hair wigs, never cried in our third-period biology class like I heard she did in all her others. We hadn’t done a thing with the substitute, so a month after we started it we were still on the reproduction unit. Mrs. Carly told us for the rest of the year we would be taking our time.

I think about now what I didn’t have a reason to think about then: how I was almost mechanically obsessed with opening my 543-page Human Biology book right to the page where the embryos were pictured. To me, they were plain and hideous. Deformed little aliens really, begging my fingers to trace them out on the page. How I didn’t want Jewel slapping my behind no more, like I was suddenly too grown. How I started eating all the expensive fruit Jewel forced down me and Ma’s throats in a more hungry way—down to sucking a peach pit or pomegranate seed, pulling it out from my mouth and wondering how such a little thing could make all that sweetness grow around it. Then there was that day I was late to third period, told Nakesha, “Girl, just go on,” ’cause I suddenly felt slippery between the legs. I made it to the ugly, pink, shit-scented girls’ bathroom to find just two milky smears of rust had showed up when a flood of red should have, and that was the one day in class that I didn’t feel like opening that book.

The milky rust smears had followed my sore breasts, my heavy eyes that Ma pointed had suddenly cast gray, my cold that had come at the end of October and wouldn’t go away. By the time Nakesha and I came back in two weeks for that orientation and our appointments, I knew something was up.