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I picked up my pace and rubbed the edge of my training b
ra through my shirt to make sure the $3.00 my mother had given me to buy some more of those elephantine sanitary napkins hadn’t fallen out.
chapter
three
Have you ever been so utterly embarrassed and ashamed that you wanted to crawl up in a hole and die?
That’s exactly how I felt the following Monday at George Washington Carver Middle School. Even though it was a Monday, I affectionately renamed it Hellday.
Hell! That’s what Jason tried to put my ass through that day. He went to school, obviously still feeling the sting from my refusal to go with his ass, and told everyone he could get to listen that I was on my period.
Looking back, I realize it wasn’t such a horrible insult. After all, periods are periods, and all women have them just like all women have coochies in the first place. Periods are a fact of life.
I couldn’t relate to that philosophy in the eighth grade, though. For me, it was a traumatic experience to have all the boys pointing at me while I walked down the crowded hallways between classes.
The girls weren’t any better, giggling and snickering behind my back like they didn’t already have them on a monthly basis or, for the late bloomers, weren’t ever planning on getting them. The nerve of the heifers!
By the time lunch period rolled around, I was doing battle with a migraine and contemplating taking Jason out in the parking lot so I could whup his ass in front of the entire student body.
I got my tray of slop. That’s exactly what school lunches were—slop. One of the local network news stations did an investigative report about school lunches and discovered that most prisoners in the United States ate more nutritious meals than schoolchildren. That’s a damn shame, but I deemed it a true statement, even though I had never seen the inside of a penitentiary.
Usually, I sat right smack in the center of the cafeteria, but not that day. I took my ass over to an empty table in the far corner, hoping I would become invisible to my peers.
After taking a bite of the cheeseburger I had selected over the pepperoni pizza and egg salad sandwich, I spit it back out in a napkin. I couldn’t even deal: it tasted more like a rat than a cow. I wondered if the city of Atlanta had devised a sneaky, underhanded method to get rid of the rodent overpopulation.
I glanced over toward the serving station and noticed Brina standing there, surveying the room in an effort to locate me. We didn’t have any morning classes together that semester, but we always ate lunch together come hell or high water. I stood up just long enough to flail my arms in the air. Once I saw her acknowledge my presence with a nod, I quickly sat back down.
She came over and plopped her tray down across from me, throwing her legs over the bench one at a time to sit down.
“Zoe, why are you sitting all the way over here?” she asked, confused. “Everyone else is at our regular table.”
“Haven’t you heard?” I whispered, diverting my eyes from hers and trying to hold back a tear.
“Heard what?”
“Jason’s trick ass has been going around school telling everyone I’m on my period and that I had on a sanitary napkin at the party Friday night,” I blurted out, ashamed to even speak the words.
Brina started falling out laughing. She laughed so hard, she had to take a swig of her iced tea to prevent herself from hyperventilating.
“This shit’s not even funny, Brina,” I hissed, ready to smack her ass for betraying me. If I was upset, she damn well better be too.
“I’m sorry,” she stated adamantly, holding her stomach-and sucking in air in an effort to calm down. “But it’s not like you’re the only girl in school with a period. Like I told you the other night, I’ve been having them for two years now.”
“That’s you,” I said, smacking my gums and crossing my arms over my chest. “Besides, when you started your periods, you didn’t have a knucklehead running around school telling every damn body!”
“You’re right! My bad! Jason should be ashamed of himself for doing this to you! I’m going to tell him off when I see him.”
“No, that’s okay! That’s my job! I’m going to fix his ass but good!” A look of worry overshadowed Brina’s face. “What’s wrong with you, Brina?”
“Nothing.”
“I hate it when people tell me nothing. Now tell me what you’re thinking about?”
“It’s just that when I started my period, I was bigtime embarrassed too. That’s why I never mentioned it, even to you. The only person I ever told was my mother so I could get some napkins from her. She didn’t care though. She was drunk that night. She just threw a bag of Stayfree at me and slammed her bedroom door.”
I was speechless. I had become suspicious about Brina’s mother and alcohol about a year before but never asked any questions. This was the first time Brina had come straight out and admitted it.
