You’re startled when a girl from your homeroom hugs you from behind. She wears more mature perfume than you’re allowed to buy, and you worry her makeup might rub off on the back of your black shirt. Her scent is sweet and gag-inducing in the narrow, yellow school hallway. As you both continue walking in this odd double-step, she pulls you slightly backwards toward the nurse’s office.

“I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she says, “but I wanted to let you know you’ve bled through your jeans.”

You nod slowly and thank her for letting you know before awkwardly shimmying ass-first through the door to the office where the school nurse calls your mom. You hear her say something about sending clean pants, but you just want to go home. The thought of all the eyes on you when you return to class late with that blue slip of paper from the nurse wearing different pants makes you want to curl up in a ball until you cry yourself to sleep.

***

You’re running to score a layup when you feel your pad shift inside your shorts. You miss the shot. Your coach’s lips move; he’s yelling something from the sidelines, but the only thing you hear is the sound of the glue strip between your legs ripping off, reminiscent of violent Velcro. When the referee blows his whistle, you stop and cross your legs; you feel a spreading warmth, a familiar leak, a dampness that you know isn’t sweat. The whistle blows again.

You keep running. Your eye is on the ball, but your mind is on the crowd—your parents and your neighbors all cheering for you to win. They don’t know it yet, but you lost the moment they decided to make the girls’ uniforms white.

***

Your mom buys your first tampons when you leave for a family vacation. You go somewhere warm, a place where swimming is inevitable. You had your period on the plane, the additional hormones have made you crabby, and the last thing you want to do is learn how to insert a deluxe cotton swab into your vagina. Your cheeks glow with embarrassment in front of the shimmering hotel toilet as your mom teaches you how to put this thing inside your body. You try and fail a lot before you are able to head down to the pool.

Uncomfortable, with a foreign object taking up space inside, you lie on a lounge chair in the sun with a white towel wrapped around your shoulders. You stay on the pool deck until your sunburned skin matches your menstrual blood.

***

Tampons continue to be a problem for you when your grandfather visits on Thanksgiving and says something to your mother about seeing them in the bathroom trashcan. You’ve been instructed to wrap them in toilet paper when in public, but you thought your own house was fair game. Your mother asks you to be more considerate and explains that “the men don’t want to see that.”

***

You miss at least two school days a month because the cramps you’re having feel like dull blades penetrating your insides, and the classic remedies of Midol and sweatpants aren’t enough. You were supposed to go to the mall with your friends after school. Instead, you lie doubled over in your bed clutching your stuffed owl that doubles as a heating pad, pushing it firmly against yourself, hoping you can out-stab your interior knives.

***

The next time you go to the doctor, you ask for birth control pills. Your doctor—in response—lectures you about the dangers of young sex and shows you disturbing cartoon images of deformed fetuses and pink-faced babies with ruptured spinal cords. You leave the office crying despite the fact that you are nowhere near your cycle.

***

You have a fight with your mother, or your boyfriend, or your aunt, or your dad, and in the midst of the argument, they ask if it’s your time of the month. You recognize in an instant that your response doesn’t matter.

***

You linger in the shower because it is a place of peace. You stand directly under the water as it sprinkles your face until you can no longer tell the difference between the shower and your tears. The heat is doing its best to melt away the pain on your left side, and the pitter-patter of water droplets drowns out your sobs. You open your eyes to see the pinkish-red swirls floating on top of some water that has pooled by your feet. You splash the puddle away with a fervent kick as pieces of you are washed down the drain.

***

A wave of nausea washes over you and your vision becomes blurry. Your head is spinning, an unfortunate result of the spike-fisted monster squeezing your organs. You remove a blue, ovular pill from its bottle and hold it between your front teeth before you tilt your head back and swallow. Relief—your temporary illusion—is on its way.

-Holly Hagman

Holly Hagman is a teacher and writer from a small town in New Jersey. She graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with her BA in creative writing and her MAT in secondary education. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Fairfield University where she has been an assistant editor for Brevity and the nonfiction section editor for Causeway Lit. She is currently a nonfiction editor for Variant Literature and a guest blog writer for Longleaf Review. Her work can be viewed in The Citron Review, Complete Sentence, The Nightingale, and elsewhere. She enjoys collecting coffee mugs and spending time with her cats.