Am I Normal Yet?

by Holly Bourne

  Worried, I thumped him on the back until he stopped. Every time I touched him it sent little fireflies buzzing up my arm. Jane and Joel returned with their chips and surveyed the hubbub.

  “What’s going on?” Jane asked, looking at Guy’s bulging eyes and Amber’s smug grin.

  Lottie answered, not looking up from her agenda where she’d been colouring all the “o”s in with pencil. “Amber here has just been reminding Guy that his mother has periods.”

  “Gross,” Joel said, at the exact same time Jane said, “Eww.”

  Amber grabbed back her agendas, making Lottie accidentally scribble on hers as it was torn from her grasp, and stood to leave.

  “Your mums have periods too. All of ours do. One of the things we’re discussing tonight is society’s immature attitudes towards menstruation. Girls, I’ll see you at mine after school.”

  She walked off, leaving us stunned.

  Guy readjusted his chair so his leg touched my leg.

  Even through my jeans it felt damn good.

  Twenty-seven

  Lottie examined the plate of biscuits and took her time choosing one.

  “I know the theme of tonight’s meeting is periods, but did you really have to get themed biscuits?” she asked.

  Amber looked down at the plate of Jammie Dodgers, arranged thoughtfully in a circle.

  “Oh,” she said, looking dismayed. “I didn’t think of that.”

  Lottie and I creased up laughing.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Jammy Dodgers have now been ruined for the rest of my life.”

  And Amber joined in.

  Her room was a disgrace to all bedrooms everywhere. I literally had to pick a pathway to the bed through discarded clothes, dried-up palettes of oil paints, and crumpled-up bits of paper. How could someone so organized be so messy?

  BAD THOUGHT

  What sort of pig lives like this?

  BAD THOUGHT

  When was the carpet last hoovered?

  BAD THOUGHT

  You’re going to get sick, you’re going to get sick, you’re going to get sick.

  I stopped laughing, my heart already racing.

  Shut up, brain, I told myself, and I forced myself to rub my hands on the carpet as a private exposure. I didn’t eat anything after that though. I didn’t eat for the rest of the evening. Just in case.

  Amber pulled her duvet around us so we formed a big lump.

  BAD THOUGHT

  When was this duvet last washed? Do I really need to have it touching me?

  I wanted to jump out of it, but how would I do that without attracting attention? Amber had already divvied out the agendas and, sensing this really meant something to her, Lottie and I didn’t take the piss, and I did deep-breathing about the duvet.

  She cleared her throat. “So,” she said, a little nervous. “I’d like to declare this meeting of the Spinster Club officially open. Tonight’s topic for discussion is periods.” Lottie put down her Jammy Dodger. “Now, you may think it’s weird I’ve brought this topic up, but can you understand why?”

  Lottie and I looked at each other. “Are we supposed to answer?” I asked.

  Amber nodded. “Er…” I wracked my brains. “Because all women have them? I guess that’s what makes us girls?”

  She beamed at me. “Yes! Exactly right.”

  “Do I get a sticker?”

  “Shut up. No. As you said, periods are what make us girls. Half of the population have them. Our let’s-face-it incredible ability to menstruate and grow babies makes us responsible for every single person on this earth. And yet, the sole thing that makes us women, the sole thing that creates life, isn’t allowed to be talked about. What’s up with that? You saw Guy this lunchtime, he thought I was uber-gross for even talking about it. How screwed is that?”

  I rubbed my cheek. “It is a bit gross though, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head adamantly. “No, we’ve just been conditioned to think that.”

  “We have?”

  “Yes.”

  Lottie put her plastic plate down. “She’s got a point, you know. Take sanitary towel adverts. Like, why do they always use blue goo to represent period blood? If I found blue goo in my sanitary towel I’d ring the NHS helpline straight away.”

  “Ha,” I said. “I guess I never thought about it. Why don’t they use red goo? Or brown?”

  “The whole sanitary/tampon world is such a minefield of wrongness,” Lottie said. “Think about how they’re marketed. They’re all made to look like sweet wrappers advertising how ‘discreet’ they are.”

  I nodded, thoughtfully. “You’re right. I always buy the compact ones, so I can hide them in my hand on the way to the loo so no one can see what I’m carrying.”

  Amber pointed at me aggressively. “Absolutely right.”

  “You almost poked me in the eye.”

  She ignored me. “Think about it. We all do it. Buy these flowery tiny things to hide the fact we’re on. But three days a month, nearly every woman in the world is on and we’re all hiding it. It’s weird. Something we all do, something that’s so natural, something that we’d freak out about if it stopped happening…is still seen as shameful.”

  Lottie giggled. “Have you seen that TV advert for tampons? The one where they call a period ‘Mother Nature’ and she’s this old prudish hag wearing a twinset and pearls that keeps ruining fun stuff like music festivals?”

  I smiled with her. “Well have you seen that new painkiller they’re advertising specifically for period cramps? I looked at the label and it’s just plain old ibuprofen, nothing else. It costs two quid more and the only difference is they’ve made the box pink.”

  Amber pointed again.

  “Seriously, Amber, I need protective goggles with you about.”

  She ignored me again, too excited. “It’s such a disconnect, isn’t it? They market periods themselves as this horrible frumpy awful thing, and then the stuff we buy to deal with it is all pink and girly and ‘hey, girl, it’s okay, you can still smell of roses and go kickboxing’.”

  Lottie nodded. “You’re right. Why not just go the whole hog? Periods suck, why make them scented and flowery? I’d much rather they put tampons in black boxes that came with a free chocolate bar.”

  “With little slogans on each one that says stuff like, ‘Blame Eve’ or ‘This is your burden’,” I added.

  The others laughed so hard that I didn’t stop feeling proud for ten minutes. Which was fortunate really because, punctual as ever, Amber called our break for cheesy snacks. I watched as they dipped their hands into the bowl of Wotsits, the neon yellow gunk sticking to their fingers. Lottie licked it off eagerly before delving back into the bowl. My stomach lurched. Bile rose up in my throat.

  “Do you not want any, Evie?” Amber asked, a smear of orange dust around her lips.

  I shook my head. “I’m stuffed, thanks.”

  “You sure?” She picked up the bowl and wafted it under my nose. My tummy lurched again, spiralling in on itself, twisting itself into tangles.

  “I…I…”

  I was saved by her brat of a younger brother bashing through her bedroom door. He was all wrapped up in a post-bath towel, his hair all wet and sticking up on end. He would’ve looked cute if it wasn’t for:

  “Amber is a big fat LESBIAN!”

  “CRAIG! GET OUT OF MY ROOM.” Amber was already on her feet.

  “Lesbian lesbian lesbian.”

  “OUT!”

  “Ginger lesbian! You never have boys in your room, do you?” he cackled. “Lezzer lezzer lezzer.”

  Lottie and I looked at each other hopelessly.

  “GET OUT, YOU LITTLE BRAT.”

  “At least I don’t have ginger pubes. She leaves them in the bath. GINGER PUBES GINGER PUBES.”

  That’s when the bowl flew through the air, sending the Wotsits cascading to the carpet. I ducked. So did Lottie. But Craig was hit right in the face with the bowl. His mouth hovered in an open “o” fro
m shock. Then the howling started.

  “MUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMY.”

  Amber’s stepmum was at the door in a second. When she saw him crying, and the tiny graze above his eyebrow, she went into overdrive. She dropped to her knees. “Oh my God, Craig. Are you okay? What happened?”

  He shakily pointed at Amber, who stood, staring at where the bowl had been in her hand. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. It’s a plastic bowl!”

  “AMBER. Out here now.”

  And she was half-dragged from her bedroom. The door swung shut heavily behind them. We heard yelling. We heard screaming.

  Lottie and I didn’t know where to look. We couldn’t even look at each other for a bit. We just stared at all of Amber’s oil paintings, pinned haphazardly to the walls. I didn’t know much about art but they were very good, very Vincent Van Goghy, all swirls and spirals, but a bit darker. There was one in the corner of what must be her mum, judging by the hair. Her face took up only the smallest corner of the canvas; the rest of it was painted black.

  “Should we leave?” I whispered as the yelling got louder.

  “YOU ALWAYS TAKE HIS SIDE.”

  Lottie looked around for means of escape.

  “How? We have to get past…them. God, her brother is a brat.”

  “Stepbrother,” I corrected.

  “EMBARRASSED ME IN FRONT OF MY FRIENDS.”

  “Let’s just sit here quietly and hope it goes away,” I said.

  We both started playing with our phones.

  “YOU CAN’T GROUND ME, I’M SIXTEEN.”

  “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UUUUUP.”

  “I HATE YOU. NO I WON’T SAY SORRY. I HATE HIM. YOU HEAR THAT? I HATE YOU, YOU LITTLE GIT.”

  My phone beeped and I tapped it quickly, not wanting Amber’s family to hear it.

  It was a message. From Lottie.

  This is so awkward, I could die.

  We both dissolved into hushed laughter.

  The argument died down and Craig’s howling quietened. We heard resentful apologies muttered through the wood of the door. When Amber re-entered, her face was pink and her cheeks were all splotchy. The front bit of her hair was matted from tears.

  “So, guys,” she said, all breezy, like nothing extraordinary had ever happened in the history of her life. “I was thinking we should each write letters to our local MP, and ask him to cut tax on tampons.”

  Lottie and I shared another meaningful look over Amber’s curls and nodded in unison.

  “Great idea.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Why should we pay tax on tampons anyway?” Lottie said. “It’s a tax on women. It’s not like we want to buy them.”

  Amber picked her way through the clothes piles to her laptop, which was hidden by a heap of rubbish.

  “Great, I’ll just pull up his address. You guys got pens and paper, right?”

  We sat and wrote in semi-contented silence. Amber scribbled eagerly, her biro almost ripping through the page. I felt sorry for the assistant who read her letter. I reckoned a lot of misplaced anger was heading in their direction. She stopped for a moment, and Lottie and I looked up at her, waiting for her to talk about it.

  “I’m not a lesbian,” she said, sadly. “If you thought what Craig was saying was true. There’s nothing wrong with being gay of course, but I’m not one. It pisses me off that just because I get angry about women’s rights, and I don’t want to date all the porn-obsessed runts at college, people automatically put me in that box. It’s messed up on so many levels, like it’s not even a bad box to be in…”

  “I don’t think you should listen too much to your brat of a brother,” I said, though I felt guilty, because I had wondered a bit about Amber myself.

  “Guy thinks it too. He calls this the lezzer club.”

  Lottie made an angry sound with her tongue. “But Guy is a moron. Isn’t he, Evie?”

  “Umm,” I stuttered.

  Amber blew out her breath. “Let’s not get into this. Come on, back to our letters.”

  I wasn’t sure what to write. I’d never written a letter to an MP before.

  My letter to the MP about periods

  Dear Chris Briggs MP,

  I know you’re probably very busy, fielding angry letters about bin collections and such – our town is a bit like that. Everyone’s always whinging to each other about the green belt.

  I know all this stuff is important and that you have to listen to them to get re-voted in, but I was just wondering if you could put all that aside for one moment? And think about how difficult it would be to make decisions and keep everybody happy whilst your penis was bleeding for four days a month…

  My phone beeped and I accidentally scribbled in the margin. It was a message from Guy.

  How’s your blob meeting going?

  The girls looked up from their letters. “Who is it?” Lottie asked.

  I pulled a face, pretending I wasn’t delighted. “Just a message from Guy.”

  Amber rolled her eyes. “Message him back saying you’re too busy fighting The Man right now to deal with his shite.”

  I read the message again, suppressing a smile.

  “You know what?” I said. “I reckon I’d have a lot more time and energy to fight The Man if I wasn’t dealing with Guy’s shite.”

  “So don’t deal with it then.”

  I shrugged. “I can’t help it. It’s hormones or whatever.”

  Lottie gave me an all-knowing smile. “Pheromones more like.”

  I began to blush but my cheeks were humbled by Amber’s death stare. “I swear we can’t go an hour without you two talking about boys. I thought my agenda would boy-proof the evening.”

  “Hey, we’re trying,” Lottie said. “But I thought spinsters didn’t judge each other?”

  “I know. It just makes me angry.”

  “We can tell,” I said, and Amber laughed at herself.

  “So,” she said, standing up again. “What have we got in our letters?”

  We talked about periods for another half-hour – the other two reminiscing about their first ones. I stayed silent, just laughing at their stories. We then discussed the rules of the Spinster Club and decided to take it in turns to chair each meeting with a feminism-related discussion topic that interested us. Amber went off to sneak some stamps from her dad’s office to post the letters.

  Lottie yawned and lay back on the bed.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever thought that much about my period before,” she said.

  “Me neither,” I lied.

  My first period and what I didn’t tell them

  I got it pretty late. I hadn’t eaten properly in so long that my body delayed it. It still came though, while I was sleeping. I woke up to find my sheets smeared with a brownish-reddish stain. I’d been lying in the blood all night.

  Mum was woken by my screaming.

  “It’s natural,” she said. “Come on, Evie, it’s womanhood. You should be proud. You’re a woman now.”

  I could control the germs from outside. I’d learned how. Hiding how often I was washing my hands, using my pocket money to buy antibacterial spray to stockpile under the bed. But how could I control these new germs inside me?

  I dreaded it each month. The blood. What was I supposed to do with the blood? The packet said you could leave tampons in for eight hours? Eight? Leave blood congealing inside you for eight hours? I used towels. I changed them the moment they were stained. On heavy days I set my alarm clock to go off every hour during the night so I could get up and change them. I had to allocate more pocket money to buying sanitary towels. I didn’t have much cash left each month. It didn’t matter really. It wasn’t like I was leaving the house that often.

  After each period was over, I cleaned myself inside out – to ensure I’d gotten rid of the blood. I sprayed the showerhead up there. I used spare change to buy feminine hygiene wash. I didn’t trust that to do the job, so I used soap too. I once even used fairy liquid in the bath…

&nbs
p; … One day it started to smell down there. I washed it more. By the end of the day, it stank. And it hurt. Just pulling down my knickers was agony.

  Mum overheard me whimpering in the bathroom. “Evie, let me in,” she’d yelled through the bathroom door. After an hour of her begging, I scuttled over and unlocked it, crying with shame, sobbing in pain. She took me to the doctor and I got diagnosed with Bacterial Vaginosis.

  “What were you doing, Evie?” the GP asked, all stern, looking over her half-moon spectacles. “Putting all that stuff up there?”

  “I just wanted to be clean.”

  “Well there’s no need.”

  I looked up from my balled-up tissue. “What do you mean?”

  “To clean yourself, up there I mean,” the doctor said. “Your vagina is the most sophisticated self-cleaning organism there is. It cleans itself, beautifully, like a team full of housewife ninjas are up there all the time.”

  I was too upset to smile at the word “ninja”. “Tell me more, please.”

  She smiled sadly and explained words that make people – especially men – wince. Words like pH balance, and discharge. “All you’re doing when you shove soap up there is mucking the cleaners up,” she said. “Making it worse. They start attacking all the weird new chemicals.”

  “So, how should I clean it? How often?”

  If my intensity concerned her, it didn’t concern her enough to do anything other than write a prescription for antibiotics. She got in trouble for it a few months later. When I was sectioned and diagnosed with OCD.

  I carefully wrote down her instructions on how to clean myself – just the outside, with a damp flannel every day.

  I had a new problem.

  I was on antibiotics.

  Everyone knows they destroy your immune system.

  I hardly left the house for weeks.

  I ate so little, my periods stopped completely. I didn’t have to worry about them any more.

  Lottie and I said goodbye at the end of Amber’s road. Lottie’s whole face looked orange under the street light. With all her eyeliner, she looked like a jack-o-lantern.

  “So it’s your turn next then,” I said. “To pick a topic for the meeting?”

  “I think I’ll pick something less…graphic.”

  “That’s a good idea.”