I shook my head. I didn’t know how to tell Daddy. He had little to do with anything intimate about us, and according to Mother, he’d never even changed a diaper when we were babies. I suspected she never would have permitted him to do it anyway.
“Keri? What is it?” he called.
Mother poked her head out and said, “The reason some men give thanks they’ve had sons instead of daughters.”
“What?”
“Just go to work, Mason. As usual, I have everything under control when it comes to the girls,” she said, and disappeared back into the bathroom.
Daddy looked at me, still concerned, and I decided to mouth, “She’s having her first period.”
He widened his eyes and nodded. Then he flashed a smile and fled, as if having a period was catching and he might be the first man to experience it.
When Mother came out of the bathroom with Haylee, who looked calmer, she held out a pad for me, even though I hadn’t had a period and wasn’t even having stomach discomfort.
“She doesn’t need it!” Haylee cried out in protest. She was happy I hadn’t had mine.
Mother glared at her. “She will, now that you have,” she snapped back.
Haylee looked away quickly but muttered, “I’m just saying what’s true.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that, Haylee. Wouldn’t it be stupid, embarrassing, for me to ignore that it will surely happen to her very soon, too, and send her along with you to school unprotected? Well?”
“Yes, Mother. I’m sorry,” Haylee said quickly. She sneaked in an angry look at me even so. Mother then gave me the same instructions I imagined she had given Haylee in the bathroom. All the while, Haylee stood off to the side, her arms folded tightly across her chest, pouting.
The moment Mother left us, Haylee grabbed my right wrist, almost twisting my arm, and said, “You’d better not lie about it and tell the girls you had your period, Kaylee. You’re still a little girl.”
“I’m not a little girl.”
“Of course you are,” she said with glee.
Haylee finally had something that made her different from me, and she didn’t want to lose it too quickly. Until I had my period, she was going to use hers to prove to her friends that she was more mature than I was, even though nothing else physically about her was any different from me. Both of us had begun to grow pubic hair and develop breasts. Haylee claimed I had less hair and smaller buds. She wanted to count hairs and measure the way Mother had counted our freckles, but I wouldn’t do it. That satisfied her, because she could claim I was afraid to see that she was right.
She wasn’t, of course, but I did look at her when I could to be sure. Sometimes when I gazed at myself naked and saw Haylee undressed, I felt as if we were being sculpted more intensely and frequently, as if God came to us during the night and made subtle changes with his miraculous fingers that were becoming more and more pronounced. It caused me to become more curious about myself and even a little thrilled with the changes I was seeing. I could almost feel the child in me dwindling, sinking in a pool of toys and picture books.
Despite Haylee’s claims up to the day of her first period, neither of us seemed to be moving into adolescence faster than the other. What I was seeing in her I was also seeing in myself. Mother measured us regularly to confirm it. Haylee and I were exactly the same height, four feet eleven inches, and we each weighed ninety-two pounds. Haylee was just a few ounces heavier, but Mother didn’t count them. We still had the same shoe size, too, and remarkably, neither of us yet had any of the skin blemishes we saw on other girls occasionally. Unlike our classmates, neither of us had a single cavity. Our dentist, Dr. Baxter, always remarked about how perfectly identical our teeth were and how healthy, too. Mother told him that it shouldn’t surprise him. She was compulsive about our brushing and flossing together and forbade us to chew gum or eat candy.
“My girls always will be perfect,” she insisted. “Unlike other siblings, they look after each other.”
She was right about that. During our early school years, Haylee was always watching me and I would watch her to be sure neither of us accepted gum or candy from anyone. When other students, especially boys like Stanley Bender, teased us about it, Haylee was more upset than I was, but while Mother was hovering in the hallways or in our classroom doorway, she didn’t dare disobey. When I was teased, I bragged about our dental health, and eventually, Haylee, seeing how that took the steam out of any ridicule, did the same.
“It’s like they have one mouth, isn’t it?” Mother had commented when we had our most recent checkup. She was always looking for her view of us to be reinforced.
Dr. Baxter nodded. “I could never tell you whose teeth I’m working on,” he said. “Not a single tooth is different from the other’s.”
His dental assistant, Shirley Camp, said similar things, all of which pleased Mother but annoyed Haylee, even though only I could see her displeasure when Mother wasn’t with us or wasn’t looking at us. Haylee so wanted her own eyes, her own mouth, and her own nose and ears.
“I hate mirrors!” she once exclaimed, reluctantly admitting that when she gazed at herself, it was like looking at me through a window. We never played that game anymore where we pretended to be looking into a mirror when we looked at each other and touched our noses and ears with opposite hands perfectly. Once when I bumped my head and had a tiny bruise, she was as happy as a bee drowning in pollen, even though hardly anyone but her could see it. She dared not mention it in front of Mother. I think she was afraid Mother would have her bump hers in the exact same place. I wondered myself, recalling how she had cut my finger with that same piece of glass years ago.
I understood why Haylee avoided looking at herself. I supposed it was as if we had a mirror walking beside each of us, but finally, Haylee had something very different about herself to cling to. Getting her first period was like being admitted to a private club that I couldn’t join. It was populated not only by her friend Melanie and the two other girls in our class who had their periods but also by three other girls in the seventh and eighth grades who were friends with Melanie. Now the seven of them had something special in common. They sat together in the cafeteria as if something magical had occurred and so changed them that they were almost a different species from the other girls their age.
Haylee saw the look on my face when she first sat with them and made no room for me to sit beside her. I stood there dumbly for a moment, holding my tray.
“Go sit somewhere else, Kaylee. We have m
ore mature things to talk about, things you wouldn’t understand,” she said, dismissing me.
I couldn’t help the tears that came to my eyes.