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I wondered daily how I could catch up, what real transformation would take for me. According to Yolanda, our old baby-sitter,
it was all about boys: first kisses, feel-ups, couple skates at Rollertown. After she told us the infamous Truth or Dare story,
I thought about it at least once a week for years, and then it was my turn to move up,
grow up.
During my first week at Clark Middle School, I walked around feeling like I was going to vomit. There was also a pressure
in my lower back, way down where the fused bones, when you look at a skeleton, are like a hook or the curved tip of a monkey’s
tail. I thought the sensation might be a cramp that would sooner or later shift around to my front side and bring on my period,
but it didn’t. It stayed there, pressing and slightly warm, like the hand of someone steering me toward a dance floor or a
lawn or a circle of scared and jeering kids to whom I would be forced to spill my guts.

The Truth or Dare thing never happened though. I didn’t get grabbed or dragged or led. In fact, I never even saw a game the
whole time I was at Clark. Occasionally I heard stories at great remove about how
this
girl let
that
boy get under her bra on the wrestling mats behind the bleachers at a dance. Sex was
happening,
surely, but not to me. At assemblies, I could hear the words tossed around —
wet, tongue, open, finger, pussy
— like volleyballs careening over my head, smacked hard by someone else on the way to
somewhere
else.

The closest I had come to having a boyfriend was in fifth grade when Ruben Estrada kicked a soccer ball into my face, breaking
my glasses, and felt so bad about it he let me wear his blue-satin Dodgers jacket for the rest of the day. Although Ruben
never had more than five words for me, I always knew, after that day, where he was in any cafeteria, assembly hall, soccer
field. I knew his clothes in every combination, his haircuts, his good and bad skin days.

Ruben’s longtime steady, Angel Lopez, was very “developed,” and featured this by wearing T-shirts two sizes too small. My
breasts were subversive. Although I wore a training bra, from a three-pack selected furtively at Sears, there was no sign
I would ever have anything to fill it except cotton balls and ankle socks. It was desperately unfair that some of my friends
had needed a bra since fifth grade, even before they called all the boys into the gymnasium and all the girls into the cafeteria
and showed us separate but equal films about the wonderful changes ahead for our bodies. After the lights were cut and the
big floor-to-ceiling curtains drawn, the school nurse stood at the front of the room and used her pointer to outline the plastic
model’s funnel-shaped bazooms while we snickered. Then there was a film following the journey of a single egg, which looked
like a Tic Tac, from the ovary into the uterus. On the way out, we were each handed a pamphlet called
Your Body in Bloom,
which was full of diagrams and featured a full-page vagina that looked cottony and girl-pink. (Is pink a girl color because
we wear it on the inside? Are boys blue because of faded jeans that feel nothing like our own?)

Teresa had started her period eons before me. The day after she got it, we were at Aunt Gloria’s house, swimming. Gloria had
recently remarried, this time (her third) to a tall, bearded and almost entirely silent man named Steven. As far as I could
tell, Steven did nothing but sulk and read magazines in a red leather chair in the living room. If he had a job, I didn’t
know what it was, but Gloria was doing well enough for both of them. She’d gone to night school to get her real estate license
(unlike Bub, Gloria actually
finished
the course) and seemed to have a real knack for it. She was able to buy a four-bedroom Spanish-style house in Fresno’s toniest
neighborhood, on the northeast side, and a cute little Toyota truck that suited her size and spunkiness.

Along with Steven and his moods, the marriage had also brought Gloria a seventeen-year-old stepson named Kenny, who had Shawn
Cassidy hair and wore only perfectly faded and fringed Levi cutoffs. Kenny would have been a fox if he weren’t an asshole.
Luckily, he lived with his mother, the ex–Mrs. Steven-the-slug, so we didn’t see Kenny that often, but he was over the day
we swam, hanging out under the diving board like the Billy Goats Gruff troll. Everyone was in the pool playing Sharks and
Minnows except for Teresa, who sat in a lounge chair slathered in baby oil.

“Why aren’t you coming in, Teresa?” Kenny crooned, even though he knew. Everyone knew.

Teresa didn’t answer. She sat with her legs crossed on the reclining lawn chair and picked at something on the bottom of her
foot. She wore her yellow string bikini with the palm trees and looked good in it. Like me, she was small on top, but she
had great legs, runner’s legs, and a small waist, her belly concave and lightly fuzzed like a peach. Her hair was growing
out that year, the shoulder-length waves acting to soften her sharp nose (Bub called it her “hatchet“) and still-broken tooth.
I was just thinking that Kenny might think Teresa was pretty, when I heard him call out, “Hey, Teresa, are you on the rag?”

Teresa’s chair sat under a kumquat tree that was dropping fruit.
Thup
went a kumquat, soft, overripe.

“Are you afraid you’re gonna bleed in the water and get eaten by the shark?” Kenny needled.

Teresa still didn’t answer him, but she got up then and walked into the house. The back of her legs were shiny and striped
pink from the chair. I couldn’t see her face.

T
HAT
SUMMER, WHEN
I’
D
ride Queenie through the long grasses in the ditch, I often felt someone watching me, a murmuring in the reeds, a play of
light that might have been a body, shifting, trailing slightly behind, like an echo. Sometimes I stopped the horse and held
myself absolutely still, listening. Sometimes I’d look back over my shoulder, thinking loudly:
I’m ready. Find me soon.

That summer, the heat was Godzilla, its monster breath visible in flushed waves above any flat surface, the sidewalk or hood
of our car, the asphalt that had softened into pudding. Our dogs dug holes along the stucco wall of the house and tried not
to move anything but their long eyelashes when the flies settled. Their bellies moved in and out in small hiccups. In the
field, the horses rested their thick heads on one another’s backs and slept standing up.

Tina, long since resigned to her separateness from my sisters and me, spent her days with Hilde at Noreen’s, eating tuna-fish
sandwiches and working on a blanket that required you to use a broomstick to hold the crochet stitches. She was also fine-tuning
the art of bitching, which was her inheritance after all. I saw her as a mini-Hilde, a paper doll around which Hilde and Noreen
would fasten the Butterick blouses and polyester slacks. She was even beginning to look like her mother, her hair cut just
below the ears and over permed into a poodlish explosion, her face rounder and plumper by the day.

Penny played a lot with our neighbor, Jeff Gerber. His parents had a pool and a basement playroom they kept air-conditioned
and stocked with Oreo cookies and board games. Jeff had a crush on Penny, which was funny since they looked like they could
be brother and sister. They were both small-boned and auburn-haired and freckled, with the same sharply bridged nose. Other
than the incest aspect of the crush, I knew why Jeff liked Penny. She had become a pretty adorable teenager with long feathered
hair, shiny silver braces and a perky little body. Although she was still skinny, she was also short; that made her
petite. I
was skinny and tall; that made me
gangly.
That made me Olive Oyl. When I stood next to Penny at the bathroom mirror, trying to get my hair to do anything but levitate,
I was often struck by the unfairness of it all: she was my younger sister — younger by a whole eleven months, mind you — and
she was skunking me.

When Penny wasn’t at the Gerbers’, she shut herself in her room with Bryan Adams on the boom box and scribbled in the black-and-white-speckled
composition pad she used as a diary (in that summer of diaries, of discontented diaries and the discontented reading of diaries).
She was in love with a tall, lanky boy named Drew. He had a big haystack of hair he wore right in front, like a retro pompadour,
and he made her mixed tapes of the Cars, Duran Duran, Foreigner. In her diary, Penny called Drew her “White Rose” and wrote
things like,
If I hear “Cuts Like a Knife” two times before midnight, it means Drew and I will be together for all time.
She would have murdered me if she knew I was reading her diary, but I
wouldn’t
have read it if she’d hidden it someplace better than between the squishy mattress and the frame of her waterbed. Dub.

Teresa was sixteen that summer and forever off with her friend Stephanie at someone’s pool party or in her room with Rod Stewart
throbbing from the turntable. I missed her, though I knew we were all better off when she was gone. Once through the front
door, she was Instant Beast — just add water! — pointedly ignoring everyone, slamming doors, thumping against the walls of
her bedroom as if she was saying, had always been saying,
This house can’t hold me for long!

And me, I felt itchy in my fingers and way down under the skin of my summer feet. None of the things that usually made me
happy felt right, not playing in the Swensons’ big pond, riding my bike, or reading the Harlequin novels that Rhonda Snelling’s
mother passed along by the bagful. I looked at myself in the long bathroom mirror: glasses on, glasses off. Hair forward,
back, straight up like a scarecrow. Had I always had this face?

If a big change was coming for me, it was sure taking its sweet time. All I could do was wait. Walk down to the end of the
driveway, touch the peeling fence, turn around. Make ice cream floats, then watch them melt to goo in the glass. September
glowed in the distance like a firefly, like the only thing worth watching. In September, I would be a sophomore, no longer
the bottom of the bottom, the new kid who couldn’t find Portable Five or her locker combination. In preparation, I experimented
with blusher and tinted lip gloss. I flipped through the phone book for the names of boys in my classes the year before —
even the ones I hadn’t liked — and wrote them all down on spiral notebook paper, then wadded up the pages and fed them to
the trash compactor. At dusk, I sat on the lawn and let myself become a mosquito buffet, feeling, all the while, the house
at my back. The brown hulk of it like a rhinoceros, dusty and heavy, huffing like a train.

W
HEN
I
TURNED FIFTEEN
and my period was still nowhere in sight, I began to think I was missing parts. I went back to the diagram. There was the
vagina, angled toward the spine like a spongy mine shaft, stalks of fallopian tubes arcing away and then toward each other,
the ovaries perched like the heads of twin Venus’s-flytraps.

A friend of Noreen’s had edema. When she visited, she had to sit with her feet on an ottoman as they watched The Show and
crocheted afghans that threatened to swallow the furniture. Even up, her legs were like squishy tree trunks, and her feet
bulged from the mouths of her brown orthopedic shoes. Once, I watched as she pressed her thumb into the mottled skin near
her knee. The print held in a pocket that took an hour to fill in. When I saw pictures of the vagina after that, I thought
of edema — the kind of skin that could save the shape of what was pressed into it. Skin with a memory.

I kept waiting for there to be a thing that happened to me first, a thing I could know first and then hand down to Teresa,
but this seemed less likely with each passing day. I remember the first time I saw her pubic hair. She must have been thirteen
or fourteen then. We were at Noreen’s for the day, and Teresa was in the bathtub for some reason, maybe she was just hot.
The lights were out because Krista and Penny were taking turns trying to call Bloody Mary from the bathroom mirror. I was
sitting on the toilet with the lid down, playing with Noreen’s toilet-paper-roll holder. It was a ridiculous thing, wooden
with a picture of an old outhouse, a crudely formed change receptacle attached to the bottom and a poem scrawled with every
fifth letter backward or fake-scratched out:
Moving this inside took most of our dough, pleeze drop in a nickel before you go.
Teresa was chattering on about something to no one in particular and soaping her pubic hair.
Wait a minute. Hold the phones.
She had
hair
there? Had it just sprouted up overnight, like something vegetable? No, she was way too nonchalant about it, not even looking
down there as she moved the soap around, pulling her fingers up and through so the hair stood pointy, like a witch’s hat.