At the grocery store, my mother told me to keep my head down and my mouth shut, which was impossibly difficult to do in a new place, seeing new things for the first time. I snuck a few glances here and there—a woman in tight blue pants (jeans, I later learned) and a red sweater standing in line with a cardboard box called Bud Light; a girl my age with short yellow hair asking her mother for a book of stickers: “If you get me this, then I’ll have something to do at Kevin’s soccer game and I won’t complain, not even once”—but it wasn’t until we were at the checkout counter, transferring our haul from the wiry cart onto the moldy black conveyor belt when my mother realized she’d forgotten pinto beans.

She looked up and down the grocery store, then let out a deep sigh. “Stay with the cart,” she told me. “Don’t move.”

When I looked up—my mother now gone—a magazine was an inch away from my face. Cosmopolitan. Staring back at me was a brunette in a blue polka-dot bra and underwear, her curly hair blowing in the wind, her eyes huge and outlined in black-and-blue makeup. Her belly button was long, unlike mine, which squinted when I sat down.

This woman did not look like me or my mother. None of the women on the covers did. Their big eyes, long torsos, wind-swept hair. There were no lines around their eyes. No red acne scars on their chins. No itchy fabric hanging over their makeshift belts. Is this what beautiful was supposed to look like? And, if so...how?

I was mesmerized. I couldn’t believe real women looked like that. Maybe one day I could look like that. That’s when I saw the headline tucked under my thumb: Your Period: All the Questions You’re Too Afraid to Ask was bolded on a pink background.

It may as well have been written specifically for me. I was spotting at the time, but I didn’t know it. I thought I was dying. I thought I was slowly bleeding out like Jesus on the cross. It was my penance for something. Or maybe I was eliminating the sins of the world one blood-coated pair of underwear at a time.

It wasn’t until I saw that headline that I realized I had my period, a word I only recognized because I heard Lucy Gibbons whisper it to her mother after she attended a church session called “The Role of a Woman” that you were allowed to attend when you turned thirteen, apparently the acceptable age to start menstruating in the eyes of the church.