Something bad happens when you’re eight years old, maybe nine, and you don’t understand it, you don’t have the words, but you do know—with throbbing certainty—what it means. Your dolls will be your only kids, because now you will never have one. Your insides have gone all wrong.

I haven’t bled in five months. Each time this happens I wonder, am I done? Was that it? Have I finally crossed the threshold into after, whatever that means?

I filled a new Lisa Frank notebook with blank templates of MASH. Mansion, apartment, shack, house; ten kids, twenty, zero, one. I asked my mother to get me a case of Mountain Dew to share. I’d finally been invited to a sleepover with the older girls. I braced myself for something far different from the sleepovers I’d had thus far with my best friend, Courtney.