“They don’t, Mother,” Haylee said, with more of a confident grin than a smile of relief. “If anything, Melanie Rosen and Toby Sue Daniels do what we tell them, not vice versa. We never forgot what you told us about keeping our standards higher and making them become more like us.”
She’s talking too much, I thought. Mother’s not stupid. I waited, expecting her to really cross-examine us now, but she surprised me. She rose, smiled at us, and went off to prepare dinner. I didn’t move, half-expecting Mother to return now that she had thought about it a little more.
Haylee was watching me. “That was close,” she said. “You did well, Kaylee.”
“I don’t like lying to Mother,” I said.
“Sometimes she makes us lie.”
“What? Why?”
“She’s too strict with us, so it’s her fault if we lie,” she replied. It was another example of how Haylee was going to lay blame for everything at Mother’s feet.
“That doesn’t give us the right to lie,” I insisted.
She rolled her eyes. “You know, I have a hard time getting the girls in our class to like you because you act like such a goody-goody, Kaylee,” she said. “All right. From now on, if Melanie and Toby Sue want us to smoke in their rooms or anywhere else, they’ll have to loan us clothes to wear.”
“It will get into our hair, too, Haylee. Mother will smell it on us.”
“Then we’ll just shampoo and blow-dry before we come home.”
“Just to smoke? That’s stupid.”
“If I do it, you’ll do it,” she ordered. “Or we won’t have any friends at all, ever.”
“I don’t like your friends.”
“They’re our friends, Kaylee, don’t you remember?” She lost her smile. “Don’t ruin it for me. Just . . . grow up.” She rose to go to our room and paused in the doorway. “Don’t think I’ll be a baby like you just to please Mother,” she warned.
“I’m not a baby, Haylee.”
She smiled again. It was almost as if she knew what was coming next and was preparing me to do things I would not even have thought of doing.
She couldn’t beat me in a race, and she couldn’t get a better grade in any subject, but she would be in charge of us, or else.
It was the or else I never saw coming that really put her in charge.
5
Haylee would never let me forget that she had her first period almost a month before I did. In her mind, it was like finally beating me in a race. We were just finishing our sixth-grade year at Betsy Ross. Although most of the sixth-graders were eleven and some very close to twelve, we knew that a period could come as early as eight and as late as eighteen and still be considered normal. Our school nurse had told us that. Two other girls in our class, one of them Haylee’s friend Melanie Rosen, had also had their first periods, or what Mother called “the stork’s first visit.” She was still treating us like little girls, and although we were learning a lot about sex from our girlfriends, or I should say Haylee’s friends, Mother had yet to have a real mother-daughter talk with us, a talk that wasn’t scientific and delivered with anatomical illustrations.
Mother was prepared for our first periods, however. Despite what we were taught to expect, more girls were getting it at earlier ages these days. The nurse told us that there were some theories involving hormones in our foods. It was all scientific gobbledygook and quite boring. It seemed to take the X out of sex. Who wanted to be able to identify fallopian tubes on a chart? What did that have to do with boyfriends and parties and romance? A first period was more than some
historical biological event.
All of us girls both feared and looked forward to it. It was impossible not to anticipate the pain and discomfort but at the same time look forward to feeling mature, almost escaping from childhood, where you were seen as a little girl, innocent and protected, then stepping into adolescence with all the excitement that awaited us.
Sometime during the night before Haylee’s happened, she was having cramps. She complained and moaned, refused to eat, and wanted only to curl up in the fetal position. Mother kept asking me how I was, but I had nothing to say, no complaints. She seemed concerned, but more like disappointed, and kept asking me if I was sure.
“No cramps at all?”
“Maybe a little,” I said, more to make her happy than anything.
“Then it’s probably just an upset stomach,” Mother concluded, going by her belief that if something like a period wasn’t happening to us both simultaneously, it wasn’t happening. She gave us each a tablespoon of castor oil.
However, Haylee had trouble sleeping that night, and almost as soon as she got out of bed in the morning, she shouted for Mother, who came running to our room. Haylee was crying now. Mother looked at me. I shook my head. She grimaced, took Haylee’s hand, and led her into the bathroom. Daddy, who was getting ready for work, stepped into our room. I was staring in awe at the red spots on Haylee’s bedsheet.
“What’s happening?” he asked me. Mother was still with Haylee in the bathroom.