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some distance from the building were jostling one another against the chain-link fence. There were usually five or six who waited until the last possible moment to line up. Lloyd Mackey was always among them. Helen remembered Billy often being part of such a pack, too, but now he was in his second year at high school. They didn’t have recess in high school.
    Rosie and Helen stood up from the bench, but neither girl took a step. For Helen’s part, she didn’t want to leave because for the first time since that alarming night in her bathroom, she did not feel alone. The pamphlet from the library had said menstruation happened to every girl, but she still felt her experience to be overwhelmingly solitary and unique. Rosie’s bluntness had broken through that.
    â€œWhen my sisters got it,” Rosie said seriously, “they stopped being much fun. They used to throw balls with me and jump off swings and all, and after, they only wanted to lay around looking at movie magazines and trying new ways to comb their hair.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œDunno.” Rosie looked at Helen appraisingly. “You won’t change, will you, Helen? I’m sure I won’t. I don’t care what anybody says.”

    Helen wondered how Rosie could believe herself capable of standing firm against the forces of nature. The library pamphlet, which the librarian had taken from a drawer behind the checkout counter, had revealed that the messy business of periods was only the start. More changes were coming. Some would be upon them soon, others down the road, after they were married. The pamphlet was hazy about men’s part in making babies, but it was clear they were essential.
    â€œRosie, do you know about the nest?”
    â€œThe what?”
    â€œYou know, the blood. How it’s for a baby.”
    â€œOh, yeah, that. Kinda nutty, huh?”
    A few teachers had come out onto the yard, their Miss Thompson among them. The girls started walking toward the lines of children.
    â€œBut how do the babies get in there?” Helen dared to ask. She figured in the O’Brien family of eight children such information might be more available than in her household of close-mouthed adults.
    â€œMy mom said it’s like a garden. The dad plants a seed and a baby grows from it.”
    Helen frowned. The pamphlet, though it used medical terms and diagrams, had presented a similarly inadequate metaphor.
    Grinning, Rosie linked her arm in Helen’s and inclined her head confidentially. “But I heard my brother Jimmy telling his friend Tom a joke about a tootsie roll and a lifesaver, and I think that’s the real scoop.”
    An ungenerous person would have deemed Rosie’s face plain, but even an ungenerous person would have to admit it had a certain elfin charm, especially when Rosie was smiling, as she was now, her upturned eyes sparkling with merriment at her own boldness.
    They had arrived close enough to the lines to hear Miss
Thompson clapping her hands to signal for silence. The eighth-graders always led the school in. Rosie ran ahead. Helen reached the end of the line just as it began to move forward. Lloyd and fat Ron Greenberg thundered up from behind and cut in front of her. Ron, his wrinkled shirttail hanging out of the back of his pants, didn’t look at her, but Lloyd approximated an apology by turning around and winking at her. Another day she would have said something, and Lloyd would probably have let her go ahead of him, but today it seemed unimportant, a child’s matter.
    She walked up the two flights of stairs to the classroom in a daze. The joke about the candy was still not the bald information she craved, but it was more vivid and felt more genuine than any of the facts she’d had laid carefully before her over the past few days. She didn’t have to puzzle it out. It made sense to her so quickly, she realized she must have possessed the answer somehow all along. She