Eggs - Carol Arnold

So, I leave this place. It’s my 13th birthday and I leave my mother Delores on her couch, my sister Kiki’s little empty bed, my friend Horace in the clinker, school, the five and dime job, the whole fat mess. The bus to Bakersfield takes four hours, the guy tells me. Four hours. What will I do all that time?

Well, turns out I have a lot to do. I’m sitting there on that bus seat, a Mexican guy sitting next to me snoring with his head falling over, kind of like Delores does, I’m watching all the cows go by, the trees, the barns, and some kind of metal thing that goes up and down and looks like a huge dinosaur poking at the ground, and what happens? I get my period. For the first time, on my 13th birthday, it decides to start up. Now Kiki had told me all about periods. The curse Delores calls it, but Kiki was more modern. She said it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

I didn’t know it was my period for sure, but I guessed it was. And I guessed right. I could feel something funny happening down there, so when we stopped at the next bus station I excused myself to that snoring Mexican guy and went to the bathroom. Sure enough, there it was, a little red spot. I didn’t have any of the things Kiki told me to have, Kotex and belts and stuff, so I just wadded up a bunch of toilet paper and stuffed it down there. Kiki said the reason we have periods is so the eggs can get out when they aren’t having babies. Something like that anyway.

I sit there on that bus and think a lot about having a period. What it means and all, that I’m now a real woman. Kiki would be proud of me. More than anything that’s what I always wanted. For Kiki to be proud of me. Going to Bakersfield like this, going out in the world on my own, I might be able to make a name for myself so she’ll be proud of me up there in heaven. She’ll brag to the other angels. She’ll say “My sister Spidee is out there in the world making a name for herself.” That makes me feel good when I think that. It doesn’t bother me so much that I have a wad of toilet paper in my pants and that metal dinosaurs are going by out the window. Kiki’s here with me, we’re in this together.