“Rose, go to bed. I’m in enough trouble with Mom already.”
“That’s okay. I just wanted to say goodnight,” she explained. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Why? Did Mom and Dad tell you I’m not?”
“No,” Rosemary answered. She was quiet for a minute, staring up at the vast collection of books and stuffed animals on bright blue bookshelf Gwen had painted years ago. It seemed most of the things that came into Gwen’s room never left. Finally, trying not to arouse suspicion, Rosemary asked, “Gwen, what are hormones?”
Gwen set her laptop aside on the nightstand. She smirked, but she resented the implication that all of her behavior and feelings had been dismissed as an inevitable, impersonal product of her adolescence. “They’re little things that get inside of you once you start growing up. They’re like tiny bugs that start changing how you feel about everything. They bite at every part of your insides, infecting you with grownupness before you even know you’ve caught them.”
Rosemary stared at her, almost as horror-stricken as she was curious. “How do they do that?”
“Very slowly,” Gwen told her. “They change everything inside of you, filling you up with seriousness, replacing all the parts of you that remember how to play with your toys and how to dress up. They make it so you hate when things don’t make sense. Then they make you so incredibly silly and irrational that you hate it when you realize nothing inside of you makes any sense. Finally, when you hate it enough, things start making sense again, and that’s when you’re an adult.”
Rosemary stoically took in her explanation. “So they’re like cooties?”
“Pretty much,” Gwen admitted. “Only you don’t realize you’ve caught them until it’s already too late.”
Tootles mewed, and then bounded onto the bed. Gwen welcomed him into her lap, and the orange cat purred as she petted him. The more she thought about it in Rosemary’s logical framework, the more her own life made sense. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with her—she was just trying to stave off a terrible case of cooties that left her nostalgia-prone and quick to fight with her mother. It made so much sense.
Rosemary pensively stared out the dark window. Finally, she asked, “Should I be scared?”
Tootles sashayed to Rosemary, but the younger girl was too engrossed in her concerns to pay attention to him. “No,” Gwen assured her. “It happens whether you’re scared or not… and everybody goes through it, so it can’t be that bad, right? And grown-up things are fun… right?”
Rosemary didn’t have an answer.
Gwen sighed and repositioned herself on her bed. “You should go to bed, Rose.”
“But you get to stay up! It’s not fair!”
Gwen smiled, remembering when that had been her view of the world as well. She wished she could break the vicious cycle for Rosemary, but the inevitability of adulthood hung before both of them. “I’ve got to stay up and write this paper.”
“But you have to wake up before I do! When do you sleep?”
“After the hormones, I think.” Gwen rubbed her eyes. “I’ve got to get back to work, and you’ve got to sleep.”
Reluctantly, Rosemary wandered back into the bathroom and toward her room, taking Tootles to her room as a consolation.
“Goodnight, Gwen.”
“Goodnight, Rosemary.”
The little girl hung back in the bathroom doorway, swaying as she held onto their tabby cat. Gwen pulled her computer back onto her lap, but looked up when she noticed Rosemary still at the door.
“Gwen?” she finally asked. “Is it worth it? To grow up, I mean?”
Gwen took a deep breath, remembering how often she had wondered the same thing when she was Rosemary’s age. She had reached all the wrong conclusions about it on her own. Everyone she knew had lied to her about it, and now halfway to adulthood herself, she knew why everyone always lied to children. She knew what she was supposed to tell Rosemary, but Gwen couldn’t bring herself to fill her little sister with all the same delusions she had grown into—that staying up late would be glamorous, and that dress shopping and homecoming were somehow better than raven trees.
“No,” she answered. “I don’t think it is.”
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Lady of Sherwood Page 27
