I was horrified. Auntie Choo Neo had told him. I wanted to wash the blood away and everything that came with it. I felt like I was an exposed open wound, and Mother should have been there to take care of me.

At the Oriental Palace that night, the mood was sombre. The chatter at the large round tables was subdued when Auntie Choo Neo announced to everyone, “Lily has started menstruating!”

I stood there, dumbfounded. Rage started to climb from the floor up through my body. Auntie, who was so careful to prevent me from hearing any talk about Mother, was now broadcasting the most humiliating news all over the community. I was angry at all my aunties, who revelled in this new gossip, who had abandoned Mother. I wanted to yell, “I’m a woman now! Tell me everything! Tell me the truth! I know you have so much to say about Mother.”

But they didn’t know where Mother went either. If they did, I would have heard already. That’s why her disappearance seemed not only drastic but permanent. She deliberately cut herself off completely from her family, her friends, from everything in Sparwood, so we couldn’t find her.

Auntie Choo Neo’s declaration enlivened the conversation among the women. They started talking about their own first periods, laughing uproariously. Hilary looked at me in amazement. Bea asked Carmen what a period was, and Carmen only snickered. Worst of all, the boys started whispering and laughing, taking turns throughout the evening trying to touch my back to see if I was wearing a training bra. I hid in a corner with my back to the wall. Hilary and the other girls kept playing and ignored my sulking. I felt like they were avoiding me, afraid they would catch their period, too.

If Mother were there, she might have brought me to her side while she played mah-jong. Or she might have been onstage, singing vibrantly. But she was not there. Looking at the stage cluttered with boxes of empty takeout containers, I started to let go of her, shedding her like my body was shedding a moon’s cycle for the first time. Bea arrived at the hospital a few hours after I gave birth. She rushed in, sweeping aside the curtain dividing the room, and bellowed, “Surprise!”

A woman on the other side of the curtain muttered, “Shit. Seriously?”

“You’re here,” I said, slowly pulling myself up to a seated position. I was urgently reminded of the throbbing pain in my pelvic region and winced. After just having fallen asleep, the jolt of my sister’s entrance felt like being startled awake to an emergency. Coming down from the shock, my body felt heavier, clunkier, harder to move.

“You don’t look happy that I’m here, Lily,” Bea observed.

“Sorry if I’m not bouncing out of the bed to greet you,” I snapped. “I just spent the last forty hours in labour and learning to feed a newborn.”

“Speaking of which, where is the little bambino?”