After Her by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

through the hoop and scored her points. Then she was off again.
    Kids wanted my sister on their team when they saw her. Even boys did, if they were smart. And one more thing about Patty: Even though she was such a star on the court, she never hogged the ball. She appeared to feel no requirement that the points her team scored be hers. She was a true team player. But she was probably never happier than when she was alone on a court, as she was that first day, when it was just her and the ball, dribbling and shooting. That was the sound that let me know my sister was coming—the sound of a basketball hitting the pavement. Steady as a heartbeat.
    I SPENT ALL OF SEVENTH grade waiting for the blood to come. Other things must have been going on that year, but that’s how I remember it. Waking up and sliding my hand under my pajama bottoms to check if anything had happened in the night, moving it over my belly, my two new breasts—hard little mounds—and the soft place where a small tuft of pubic hair had sprouted, but there was nothing more.
    As far as I knew I was the only girl in my class who hadn’t gotten her period yet. Nobody said this. I’d figured it out by process of elimination, based on all the girls who talked about their cramps, or stood around the Tampax dispenser, exchanging stories about accidents or pool parties they had to navigate, wearing a cover-up. I alone had none to tell.
    The fact that I, alone of the girls I knew, had not begun to menstruate obliterated all else as summer approached and I passed my thirteenth birthday. Ever since school started the fall before, I’d been carrying a sanitary napkin in my book bag. I lived in fear of being one of those girls we’d all known, who stands up to go to the blackboard to write out a theorem, and they’ve got this red spot on the back of their skirt. Maybe, if she’s got a good friend, someone says something to her later. More likely people just whisper and stare.
    My sister said she hoped it wouldn’t ever happen to her—meaning getting her period, not the accident part. Good luck with that, I told her. But I had started to worry that it never would happen to me. I’d be the one girl in the history of our school who got all the way to graduation without ever seeing that gash of red in her underpants.
    It was an odd thing to hope for. Who would want blood dripping out of them? Gushing out possibly, I wasn’t even clear.
    Only I did want it. Because everyone else had that happen to them, and it gave you something to share with the other girls. I was different enough as it was, without this. I figured if I could stand around the Tampax dispenser holding my stomach, complaining about cramps, I might fit in with the rest of them. Instead, all I did was carry around that same unopened sanitary napkin that had been lying in the bottom of my book bag so long now it had sandwich crumbs and bits of melted chocolate bar stuck to the wrapper, ballpoint pen marks, and lint. Checking my underpants every time I went to the bathroom. Finding nothing. Feeling like a freak, though hardly for the first time.
    Our mother was not the sort of person you discussed these things with, but she had to know. She did our laundry.
    Our father, when he touched down to see us, had started treating me differently, as if I was breakable. With Patty, he’d roughhouse—pat her on the butt, toss her a basketball, never mind if it hit her in the stomach, because she’d just laugh if it did, pick her up (tall as she was) and twirl her. With me he displayed a new and unfamiliar distance that sometimes made me feel as if he didn’t even know me anymore.
    It must have unnerved my father to think of me entering into the territory of sex. He knew how to act with little girls, and I knew—Patty and I both did, from all those times at Marin Joe’s, and every other place we ever went with him—that he definitely knew how to act