Chapter 1

On Madison's seventeenth birthday, her mother finally laid down the law. "Hon, don't you think it's time to see a doctor? I mean, you're seventeen years old. Where's your first period?"

Madison, who was thinking more about the sleepover she'd had (girls and boys!—and even though her parents had supervised, they'd been kind of lax in their oversight, enough that Maddie had managed to sneak some kissing in with her boyfriend) and the cool presents she'd gotten from all her friends, couldn't bring herself to muster any real concern about the topic. "Mom, I started everything else late too, remember?—I didn't start getting my breasts until I was twelve, and I've still barely got any pubic hair." Besides, not having a period seemed a blessing to her: no monthly bleeding, no cramps, no mood swings, no PMS, no bloating, no water retention. How was that a bad deal? Besides, everything else was developing—she had her hips and her breasts (big enough to be the envy of her friends), she had her long legs; in fact, she was one of the taller people in school at nearly 6 feet. She never had acne problems (another thing to envy). She was well-liked, she was popular, she was doing well in her classes, she had a great boyfriend (the inestimable Craig Rogers, one of the few boys at Mount Hill High to be taller than she), and actually—it was startling to think of this, but it was true—she was beautiful. She was one of the most attractive girls at Mount Hill. Madison Bechtel was seventeen, and life was good. How could she possibly be concerned about anything?

"I know, and that's worrying too," said her mother. "I talked to my grandma and to your Aunt Shayna, and none of them ever remember anybody having growth patterns like yours. All of us, everybody we knew, had our periods by the time we were twelve. Heck, Shayna had hers when she was nine. I remember her running in—your grandma was out at the time—I remember her running into my room screaming, thinking she was dying or something! I never thought I'd have to give 'the birds and the bees' talk to my younger sister, let me tell you!"

Madison nodded and laughed at the appropriate times. Her mother liked to reminisce this way, and Madison didn't see any harm in letting her. Connor, of course, had no patience for it—but then, he was 14 still, and not yet very kind to his parents, and destructive as only a fourteen-year-old can be.

"But that's another point," her mother went on. "Hon, what if ... Well, I don't mean to be negative, but there's no point in beating around the bush: what if something's wrong with you? The whole point of your period is to facilitate 'the birds and the bees.' Wouldn't you regret it if, one day, you found out that something ... I don't know, that something had gone wrong down there?—and that, when you were seventeen and your mother warned you, you ignored her, and now you were never going to be able to have children? Maddie, hon, this is your body. This is your future. Don't you think you should look into it?"

Madison sighed. "Yeah, I guess we could. What could it be, anyway?"

Her mother made a face. "Well, the only thing I've heard that matches the facts is the idea that your hymen is impermeable."

"Err," said Madison, with a nervous giggle. She had never expected the word 'hymen'—or 'impermeable'—from her mother's mouth, much less in the same sentence.

"Well, you do know that the hymen just naturally comes with holes, right? I mean, how else do you think the menstrual flow comes out?" Cassie Bechtel had always been pretty hip and liberal, sometimes more of a friend than a mother, but this... "Well, evidently, in a small number of girls, the hymen forms solid across the vaginal opening with no perforations, and the menstrual blood can just ... Pile up inside you. Obviously, that's not really healthy."

Madison imagined three or four years' worth of monthly flow and then made a concentrated fight against nausea. "Umm. How would we fix that?"

"It'd be just a simple operation," said her mother. "I doubt they'd even put you under. The doctor makes a slit or two with a scalpel, and there you go. It negates the health risks ... And besides, it makes things easier if—well. If you and Craig decide to, ah. Increase your intimacy."

Madison felt her face flame. Her mother was standing in the doorway, her hair cascading around her face in teased curls, and she didn't look embarrassed at all.

Mom smiled. "Oh, hon. Don't think I haven't seen the looks you give him. He is very handsome."

"Yes, but..." Wasn't there more to it than that? "That's doesn't mean I'm gonna do it with him."

"Of course not, honey," said her mother, crossing the room to her, "and I'm glad you see it that way. But ... While we're getting prepared. You know?" She touched Madison's hair gently. "I still can't get over having to look up at you. I'm tall, for a woman. You're tall for a man."

Madison rolled her eyes. "Thanks, Mom."

After her mother had left to phone the doctor, Madison lay back on her bed and contemplated her life. She had the strange, unshakeable feeling that things were about to change for her. The entire veil, it seemed, had been pulled away from her eyes, and a new world lay before her: adulthood, with all its cares and worries. Her mother considered her ready to have sex. Her mother considered her ready to begin contemplating babies. Madison felt no such inclination.

It wasn't that she wasn't curious about sex. Gossip with her friends, schoolyard whispers, the Internet—been there, done that; she knew it all. She even knew how to find her clitoris. And Craig was attractive. And, though she hadn't had much exposure to it—just a few brief sessions in the backseat of his car—she knew he was well-endowed, or at least so it seemed to her. When she described his size to her girlfriends, they all assured her that he must be ginormous; but she knew (her friends all seemed to ignore this part) that he seemed ginormous to her—broad of shoulder, well-muscled, one of the few people she knew who was taller than her—and that her perceptions might not be accurate. Nonetheless, her friends assured her, Craig would know how to show her a good time.

But none of them had been there the night Nancy had called. Madison hadn't been expected it herself. True, they'd been in school together for years, but she hadn't realized that there was any deep friendship between them. Later, she found out that Nancy didn't think so either—"But you were the first person I could think of whom I could tell this to. I mean, you knew me for years." And so Madison had agreed that, sure, Nancy could come over, despite it being really late at night, and that yes, she would cover it with her parents some how. And in tears and with many fits and starts Nancy had explained how painful it had been to lose her virginity, and how quickly she had realized that her boyfriend, who had professed his eternal love not fifteen minutes before, was done with her and never coming back, and that she had given him something priceless for nothing in return. And when Nancy got back in her car and drove home at three in the morning, they were suddenly best friends.

Madison had never asked Nancy's opinion of Craig; Nancy had never offered it. But the hints were there. She knew Nancy suspected that Craig was of the same mold; and, knowing this, Madison couldn't keep her own doubts quiet.

But he's so good for me in other ways. He is handsome. And he's well-endowed. And, I mean ... He's taller than me. And we're heading off to separate colleges anyway; wouldn't it be nice to give him something as a going-away present, something he would always cherish and remember me by? Madison was practical enough to recognize what a silly thought this was; but she was romantic enough to still hope for it anyway. It was an aspect of her even Nancy had never understood. Though, to be fair, Madison didn't understand it herself.

On Monday, she went to school like she always did. Craig gave her one last kiss outside the school premises—public displays of affection were restricted, after all—as he always did. She went to classes, and ate lunch with her friends, as she always did. There was nothing, on the surface, to suggest that anything was out of the ordinary.

But Nancy knew—she always did. She had round bottle-top glasses, just like Harry Potter, and scratchy brown hair, and braces that were taking their own sweet time to get things done, but the mind beneath it all was laser-beam bright. "So, what's going on that you aren't telling me about?"

Madison sighed. "We're finally getting this lack-of-periods thing checked out."

"What, the amenorrhea?"

"God, it has its own name? Yeah, that."

"And ... That bugs you?" said Nancy.

Madison grappled with the words for a little while—they had never been her strong point. "I ... Until my birthday, it was like ... It was safe to ignore, you know? It wasn't something I had to worry about. But now..."

"And that whole territory is so fraught with significance to begin with," Nancy said. "I mean, you know: Sex. Baby-making. Marriage. Family. Menopause. God's gift of creation." Nancy was a Christian, but unlike any Christian Madison had ever met. "It's not like having a problem with your pinkie finger."

"Yeah. I just feel like ... Like I'm older, you know?"

Nancy gave her a smile and said, "I know." That was one of Madison's favorite things about her, that—where anybody else would have babbled on for five minutes about how they'd been there, they understood, look at how much empathy they were showing—Nancy could just give her a smile and say, "I know," and Madison would believe her.

The other thing of any note or interest was an interesting little mishap just before lunch. Madison swung by Mr. Hodgson's room to pick up Craig like she always did—he never let his classes out on time, so it was faster than waiting for Craig to come find her. Once inside, she found Craig struggling with something in his hands, and Mr. Hodgson hovering nearby. "I think ... No, wait, if you..."

When Madison got closer, the thing was a hand-crank pencil sharpener.

"Oh, hi, Maddie," said Craig when he saw her. "Sorry to— Sorry to keep you waiting, but, Mr. Hodgson here asked me for a bit of help in— In fixing this thing, and I figured I should help him out..."

"It's been teetering on the edge of a breakdown for ages," said Mr. Hodgson, who taught English. Remedial English. But then, there were other qualities about Craig that more than compensated for little issues like that. "And, today, well..." He gave an apologetic little shrug at Craig, which Madison took to mean that her boyfriend had managed to tip it over the edge. That was one of the things about Craig: he had such a boyish innocence, a way of making it hard for anyone to stay annoyed at him. Even when he pushed Madison too far, she could never hold it against him.

"Here, let me see it," said Madison, reaching over for the pencil sharpener. These models were all over the school, mostly bracketed to the wall, but with the cylindrical shell detachable so that the wood shavings could be dumped out. These particular models had the grinding-drill-bit assembly attached to the inside of the shell, which (instead of featuring a crank) had to be rotated itself to achieve the requisite sharpening effect.

It took Madison only a moment to see what had happened. The drill-bit thingies were mounted to the shell in such a way that they could be twisted off, using a tab-and-slot system like she remembered seeing from her mother's blender. Had the manufacturer not wanted to waste money on screws, or was it to facilitate maintenance? Either way, the last time the whole assembly had been inserted, one of the tabs had missed, going over the covered slot instead of under, and the other tab wasn't sufficient to hold the whole thing in place. The drill-bits had been sliding downward, away from the hole in the casing, until they were gone entirely and only a gaping black hole greeted any sort of pencil penetration. In short, there were really two problems afoot here: one was to realize how to insert the grinders correctly, and the other to fix how they'd been inserted wrong.

"Thank goodness, Madison," said Mr. Hodgson. "You're a lifesaver."

"Oh, see, I would've figured that out in a second," Craig said. "I'm not a pussy."

"It's always nice to have Craig's expertise around," Mr. Hodgson agreed. "It's like two for the price of one." He gave Madison a look that made his meaning clear. And he thanked them again and sent them on their way, and they got their lunches and met their friends, and now, while Craig explained where he had gone and why he'd gone there (with Wanda and Jessica and Hazel hanging off his every word, and their boyfriends not much better) Madison talked to Nancy.

"How come it's me that always figures those things out," she was saying now. She was glad everybody else was talking with Craig, or else she wouldn't dare bring this out in public. "I mean, isn't it supposed to be a guy thing, to be able to work out how things are put together?"

"Why, is it so wrong for you to have guy things?" Nancy said.

"Well..." said Madison. "I'm a girl."

Nancy shot her a look. "Hon, there's Disney princess, and then there's having to lie back and think of England. You can draw a line between them."

Madison tried to ignore that she was wearing her favorite The-Little-Mermaid pink T-shirt. "Well ... Yeah, but ... I mean..."

"It's 'cause you're a girly-girl," said Nancy without heat. "You feel like it's out-of-place because the rest of you wears pink all the time."

This was true; Nancy normally was. "I mean ... What's it gonna do to my image if ... If people find this out about me? What would that make me?"

"It makes you Madison Bechtel," said Nancy. "Trust me, we all have nuances that belong to the opposite sex. You know Craig likes singing in the shower."

" ... No, I don't," said Madison. "How do you know that?"

Nancy snorted. "Do you know anybody who doesn't?"

"I don't," said Madison. "I can't sing."

"Does that stop you?" Nancy said.

" ... Well," said Madison, who indeed not that let that stop her.

"Besides, it's not like that's the only 'guy thing' you have," said Nancy. "Girls are supposed to be good with words. Girls are supposed to be bad at driving and spatial navigation. Girls are supposed to be short."

"I'm not that tall," said Madison.

"You're like 5'11," said Nancy, who was proud to have achieved 5'3. "You're a giant."

"Yeah, and that's bad enough," said Madison. "Which is why I hide the other things."

"Why?" said Nancy. "What are you scared of?"

People would think I was a freak, Madison thought, but she said "weird" when she said it aloud.

"Why?" Nancy said again. "It's not the 1300s anymore. It's okay for women to have beards."

"No it's not," said Madison. "Remember how Lacey Warmenhoven was treated in fifth grade?"

"Okay, maybe not," said Nancy, "but it's okay for women to be men now. We wear pants. We have jobs. We get business degrees and become CEOs. If we wear our boyfriend's shirt, people think it's cute." She gave Madison a wry look. "Or, in your case, Craig's hoodie sweater."

"Yeah, but it's such a nice sweater," Madison said. "And it fits, because I'm so tall." And it smells like Craig.

"Of course," said Nancy. When it came to boyfriends and sweaters, almost all of her knowledge was theoretical, and sometimes she couldn't keep the bitterness from her voice. Madison supposed it had something to do with the bottle-top glasses and the braces.

"So, what are you eggheads talking about now," Craig asked. His arm went firmly around Madison's shoulders, drawing her close; for a moment she felt like a piece of furniture.

"Oh, just jabbering about how women don't have to be barefoot and pregnant anymore," Nancy said.

"We can wear pants now," Madison offered.

"Ha, yeah," said Craig. "Dunno whose bright idea that was, though. Women belong in skirts."

Madison gave him her best haughty glance. "Oh? And what makes you say that?"

Craig gave her a leer. "Well, in case her boyfriend wants to come up from behind for a quickie."

"Gag," said Nancy in a flat voice. Madison wasn't sure she felt much better. "Shouldn't men wear skirts too, then," Nancy continued, "to facilitate this illicit copulation?"

"To what?" said Craig, and Madison knew Nancy had deliberately used those words to confuse him. Craig topped out at two syllables per word.

"Secret fucking," sand Nancy.

"What, wear skirts?" Craig said. "No! Heck no! I'm not a pussy!"

"So you can't wear girls' clothing without being one of those," Nancy said.