She laughed and shoved his cell phone to me. “Amy.”
I read the messages on the screen and looked up at Jo and Laurie. Laurie looked a little uncomfortable, and Jo was smiling at me.
“Bad timing,” she joked.
“It’s not really funny, Jo.” I took the phone and erased the messages. I looked up at Laurie when Jo acted like she didn’t understand why it wasn’t comical to show Laurie what Amy had sent her.
“What?” Jo’s heart-shaped face tilted sideways and her lips pouted out.
Jo looked like a girl who would have been a model in the nineties, with full natural lips and thick eyebrows. Her legs were long and she walked like a pigeon on them, but had charm coming out of her ears. Understated beauty, a model for Calvin Klein or Guess.
“Laurie, cover your ears,” I said.
He looked at Jo and didn’t cover his ears.
“He can listen. It’s just her period. It’s not that big of a deal.” Jo leaned forward and crossed her legs under her body. She stuck her flip-flops under the balls of her ankle bones so they wouldn’t touch the ground.
“Just a period? Jo.” I lowered my voice when Beth turned her head to listen to us.
“Meg. Seriously? You’re censoring Laurie from hearing about menstruation? Half of the world are women, and they have periods. Including his mom. Plus, the boys in Europe aren’t as sensitive to such a natural thing. Right, Laurie?” Jo looked over at him.
He didn’t seem like this was a conversation that he minded having, but that wasn’t the point.
“It’s fine,” Laurie assured me.
“What’s fine?” Beth sat up and dusted the dry grass strands off her back.
I filled Beth in on what was happening and saw Jo roll her eyes. “Amy started her period while out with Dad and she’s mortified.”
“She didn’t say she was mortified,” Jo added.
I held the phone up and tried to read the deleted messages again. I bitterly wondered why Amy would text Jo about starting her period over me or Beth. Jo and Amy could barely stand each other, and I was the one who taught Amy how to curl her hair and put on eyeliner. I gave Amy her first bra when Meredith thought she was too young for one. But Jo was the sister Amy shared that moment with.
“She said”—I read off the screen—“ ‘I’m so embarrassed Jo. I bled through my pants had to tie dad’s shirt around my waist. Kill me please.’ ” I popped my eyes out at Jo.
“It’s just a period, Meg,” Jo said.
I groaned. I was all for Jo’s liberal, free-spirited mantras and everything, but sometimes she passed things off as too unimportant when they deserved more attention. I knew that Jo was writing off Amy getting her monthlies because Jo had that mind-set where if you ignore something or are careful not to overreact, society will join in your belief. But Jo was only sixteen, almost seventeen, and she had no idea how boys who weren’t like Laurie acted over a little blood. Not only the boys; the bitchy girls in school were much worse than the boys most of the time. Jo always sort of floated under the radar at school, whereas I was the beacon who couldn’t stay under the radar if I fucking tried. I always ended up in the middle of drama, always. Like in eighth grade, when I bled through my gray gym shorts and a group of girls in my class drew angry red scribbles on a pack of oversized pads and stuck them to my desk.
“It’s not just a period, Jo,” I told her again, and hoped she would be able to go through her life always thinking periods weren’t a big deal.
“Anyway, enough about periods.” Jo laughed, and Laurie still looked unfazed by our conversation.
Beth lay back down on the grass despite the crowd surrounding us, and Jo started talking about her writing and that she’d almost finished a piece she was sending to Vice. I listened to her and Laurie bouncing back and forth in conversation, and I pulled out my phone and checked my notifications. I had stopped looking for John’s name on the screen a day or two ago. He was in the field, which meant I wouldn’t hear from him for days. I swiped up and cleared out a text from Meredith and one from Reeder, along with a text from Mrs. King. She needed me to come to her house early to do her hair before some kind of meeting being held there.
Mrs. King lived in a world from a television show where she held meetings and events for things I had never heard of. Either way, I needed the hours and always wanted to be a part of her kind of life. I sent her my reply and pulled up Facebook. I scrolled through pictures of my cousins on my dad’s side’s newest kids and pictures of my old neighbor’s dog and her newly born puppies, while Jo talked to Laurie. I heard bits of it between my scrolling and got the gist of how much it pissed her off that the majority of people associated the French Quarter with booze, beads, and boobs, when the unique culture of the city was so much more than that. Laurie made a joke that I didn’t hear, and Jo’s chin turned up and she smiled at him so brightly that I almost said something to her. Instead, I turned back to my phone.
How was I struggling to keep a relationship and Jo had a boyfriend? Even though Jo would never let me categorize Laurie as her boyfriend, that’s basically what he was. He was always sitting on the couch, and I always tripped over his long legs, stretched out all the way to the entertainment center. My dad started to get annoyed when he would try to roll his chair by. It was already a struggle to move the wheels over the rug, let alone with Laurie stretched out and asleep on the couch. The Laurence driver even took Jo to school most days.
I wondered how the next year of Jo’s life would go. The animated look in her eyes when she talked to him with her hands, and the way Laurie stared at her lips—maybe reading them, maybe thinking about fucking them—when she spoke to him made the romantic in me weep but the realist in me prepare for heartbreak. I didn’t have the best dating résumé, but it was extensive, so I did have experience.
I wondered if Jo would end up staying at Fort Cyprus if she and Laurie made it through the summer and her senior year. Long distance was hard; I knew that for sure. John and I jumped into a long-distance relationship, and look how that was ending up. It had only been a few months since I saw him last, but it felt much longer than that. I knew he was adjusting to his new duty station in North Carolina, but I had hoped my invitation to join him would have come by now. He was contacting me less and less, and I knew what was happening—I just wasn’t ready to admit it.
Seriously, with every disappointment I felt from the guys around me, from River to even John, I felt my bones wear a little more, I felt a little more seasoned by the world. I knew plenty of women in my life who bounced from one disappointing man to the next, finding their identity in them and wasting away while catering to their husbands. It was especially common in military communities. Mrs. King wasn’t like that; she married a law student when she was too young to know what marriage was and stayed with him, supporting him, helping Mr. King become the mogul that he became.
At nineteen, I would have been fine with that. I wanted that more than I wanted to become a makeup artist. I loved makeup, but I really wanted someone to go through life with me. Was that so bad? I knew Jo felt like I was abandoning my womanhood by dreaming of a family and a life full of family vacations, teaching little versi
ons of me and my husband to be decent humans, and spending my holidays in a warm house that would smell like cinnamon and honey and be packed wall to wall with laughter and conversation. I’d spent my life having awkward family events. Meredith and Aunt Hannah always fought, no matter if it was someone’s birthday party at a skating rink or Christmas dinner in my nana’s dining room.
Once, after Amy pushed Jo into a pool at our aunt Hannah’s apartment building in Texas, Meredith told me that she and Aunt Hannah never got along until they were both in their twenties. But even then, Meredith was always having to bail Aunt Hannah out of the trouble she got herself into, and lately there was this weird tension between them.
So, my sisters and I were different. Each of us was a completely different creature, and I couldn’t wait until the day my family would go visit Jo in New York City, and she could show me her big, fancy office with marble desks and the latest Apple computer. I was genuinely excited to see Jo grow up and try to conquer the world, and I would do the same, but my world would just be different from hers. I knew she would understand that someday and end her misjudgment of roles of women.
“Meg?” Jo’s voice broke through my thoughts.
I blinked at her as I came out of the little fog inside my head. “Huh?”
“Do you want a water? We’re going to get one.”
I lifted my hand to shade my eyes from the falling sun. “Yeah, please. Beth? Do you want a water?” I turned to my sister, who was possibly asleep on the dry grass.
Jo answered instead. “I already asked her. Man, you were out of it.” Jo laughed softly. “What were you dreaming about?”
I shook my head. Just about you and I being completely different people, you know? “Nothing.” I looked at Laurie. He was sitting behind her, running his fingers over the feathery tips of her long hair.
“Mhmm,” Jo joked, and stood, brushing off her butt and legs. “We’ll be right back. Don’t move, please.”
Laurie followed behind her and they disappeared into the crowd.