That thought was the drop that made the bowl spill over. I gasped loudly, clutching at my stomach as my whole body underwent a series of contractions. Those in my vicinity, including my own mother, looked at me alarmed, as though I were going to be sick. The woman with the baby offered me a putridly sweet smelling rag.

“You. Wha’s de matter wit’ you?!” my mother asked me as we left mass.

For some reason, I felt horrendously ashamed. Pleasure seemed more embarrassing to confess than did pain.

“It felt like someone kept stabbing a knife into me, here,” I misled her as I pressed down on my lower stomach.

Belinda Moors smiled at me before getting into her old dented beetle. I turned my head the other way. The blood that had invaded my lower parts rose to heat my face with shame.

I helped my mother carry Cecilia back to bed. As soon as the lights in the house went out, I slipped into our bathroom. I expected, anxiously wrenching my underwear down to my knees, to find blood, or some side effect of the newly opened hole. All the way home, I’d sensed my crotch was drenched. I was bewildered to find nothing of the sort, let alone a colourful drop.

Upon closer examination, I discovered a gooey substance, that of egg white, that had miraculously dripped out of my flesh and onto my underwear. I pinched some off the fabric, though it was not at all easy to seize. As I slowly opened my first three fingers like an orchid come to life, I studied the tightrope lines it left in between, like when someone sleeping yawns and a similar gooeyness trails between their upper and lower teeth. If beaten, would it make a meringue, I wondered, at the same time fascinated by and disgusted at Mother Nature’s recycling ability.

CHAPTER 10

“Are you sure, Mrs. Lester, she’s menstruating?”

Dr. Kreushkin fingered my boobies; I kicked my legs and shrieked with laughter.

“Wha’ you mean, am I sure? She ruined me a whole week of un’erwears, de child, den it stop like dat, for months, an’ now she has pains like a knife in her ovries …”

“What are ovries?” I sat up on the examining table to ask; the long paper towel doctors cover their examining tables with fell off the side.

“You, please keep quite, you.”

“When you say she bled, did she flow heavily or just spot?”

“Spot, only spot, bu’ she so skinny, look a’ her, how can you expect more?”

My mother used her hands to brush my hair away from my face as she spoke, gathered it together like a ponytail, and looked around for an elastic band; finding none, she held it there too tightly.

Dr. Kreushkin contemplated my young body that my baggy white Tuesday underwear and bare feet only accentuated; it looked like I was wearing a nappy. When Dr. Kreushkin asked me to take my underwear off, I stared at the wall, and wished I could be sucked into it. I untangled the undies from my feet, glanced worriedly at my crotch, and looked around as to where I could dispose of them, when my mother offered me her hand.