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die?”

    â€œHeavens, no! Everything is as it should be. Just sneaked up on us is all. Now, let’s get back to sleep, shall we?”

CHAPTER 6
    Helen was excruciatingly aware of her body below her waist. She worried constantly that the outline of the ungainly sanitary napkin might be visible through her skirt. Afraid to turn her back on anyone, she didn’t volunteer to write on the blackboard, and she sketched with a dull nub of lead rather than go to the pencil sharpener. At recess, she kept on her long tweed coat even though an Indian summer sun had sidetracked autumn’s chill. The coat would have hampered her at tag or jump rope, but the pamphlet in the Kotex box had advised avoiding strenuous exercise, so she’d declined all invitations to play.
    Watching the other girls play, she wondered if any of them had been struck yet. She looked at the teachers and at women on the street and even her own mother as if she’d suddenly acquired x-ray vision, like Superman, and had just discovered that beneath their dresses and slips, these women had bodies that did amazing things quite apart from their wills or wishes.
    On Helen’s third day of sitting out recess, Rosie O’Brien came over and put her foot up on Helen’s bench in order to retie the shoelaces of her scuffed brown and white saddle shoe.
    â€œWe’re gonna play Giant Step,” Rosie said. “Wanna come?”
    Helen looked up from the book on her lap, smiled, and shook her head no. Rosie sat down beside her. Helen read a few more sentences of Lad, A Dog, then closed the book.
    â€œYou don’t have to sit here with me, Rosie.”

    â€œOh, I don’t mind. Not enough time left for a good game, anyway.”
    Together they gazed at the schoolyard of children noisily engaged in various pursuits, most involving running and tagging, as either part of an official game or as a tease.
    â€œIs it a good story?” Rosie pointed to Helen’s book.
    â€œPretty good.”
    â€œGood enough to keep you on this bench an awful lot.”
    Helen felt herself blushing. She knew Rosie was looking at her, but she kept her eyes focussed on the playing children.
    â€œYou got the curse, don’t you?”
    â€œThe curse?” Helen gave her a startled look. She hadn’t heard the term before, but she was sure she was guessing its meaning correctly.
    â€œHow can you tell?”
    â€œYou don’t usually mope around.”
    â€œI’m not moping.”
    â€œYou’re not playing Giant Step, either.”
    Rosie’s tone was conclusive. As one of the younger children in a large family, she had learned early to put forth opinions with a confident air, and she could rarely be shaken from them, even by indisputable evidence to the contrary. Rosie believed there was always room for dispute.
    â€œI just don’t feel like it,” Helen asserted.
    â€œCould if you wanted to.”
    â€œYou don’t understand.”
    â€œDo so, too.”
    Helen searched Rosie’s defiant, freckled face for any trace of bluff. She was not above it. But this was too tender a topic for Helen to let Rosie get away with a fib.
    â€œMakes you feel kinda sick,” Rosie described, “and like you don’t want anyone looking at you. And me, I even get worried sometimes … well, can maybe anybody … smell me.”

    Though she stressed the word smell, her voice was almost inaudible when she said it.
    â€œBut you get used to it,” she continued more robustly. “And it doesn’t always hurt. My mom said it ain’t nothin’ next to having babies.”
    â€œI didn’t ever know you had it,” Helen said, impressed. Rosie was thirteen, too, but a few months younger than she.
    Rosie nodded. “A few times. Five now, I think. Or maybe four.”
    An electric bell on the side of the brick building rang loudly and long. Children began swarming into lines. A pack of boys