Am I Normal Yet? (22 page)

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…

… 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.”

“It was interesting though.”

“Yeah.”

“God I hate my period,” she said. “I'm due this week. Don't you just hate it too?”

I looked down at my red buckled shoes – they'd also turned orange in the artificial light – and nodded.

“You going to message Guy back?”

I looked up. Her face didn't go as automatically judgy as Amber's whenever his name cropped up.

“I guess. I'll wait a while first.”

Lottie cocked her head. “It shouldn't be hard, you know? Love? It shouldn't be games and unknowing and waiting for calls.”

“I know.”

I messaged Guy before bed.

Meeting great. What you get up to this eve?

I'd checked my phone twenty times before I turned off my light to go to sleep.

He didn't reply.

If I was one of those people I hate, I would've called Guy's behaviour in the week leading up to Battle of the Bands “bipolar”. Messages then no replies. Prolonged eye contact followed by an afternoon of completely ignoring me. He was more up and down than a kangaroo on a spacehopper. And much less fun.

On Monday after college he ran down half a street to catch up with me as I walked home since I had no appointment with Sarah. He skidded to a halt by my side, his face bright red and hair all sweaty.

“Hey, Evie,” he wheezed. “You walking home?” He bent over on himself and coughed violently.

“You should give up smoking,” I replied, still angry he'd not replied to my last message. “You sound like an old man.” I looked him up and down, in my best attempt to look all hoity-toity. “You look like one too. Are you balding already?” Guy's hands shot frantically to his hair. “Ha, made you stress.”

“That's not funny, Evie.” But he was smiling and we fell into step towards our homes. He was all childlike, kicking up big piles of leaves, grabbing handfuls to chuck them at me. I squealed, not even worrying about the dirt on them.

“Did you ever used to play conkers?” I asked, as we passed a group of schoolkids chasing each other.

His face got even more childlike. “Oh my God, CONKERS! I was the conker champion at my school. Nobody could beat me.”

“How can you manage to be up-yourself about conkers?”

He shrugged. “I hate fake modesty. If you know you're great, say you're great.”

“I don't think you got bullied enough at school.”

“You're supposed to get bullied at school?”

I nodded. “Just a little bit, to cut you down to size.”

“Were you?”

I thought of the rumours about me when I came back to school after the time on the ward. I remembered the whispers, the names they deliberately said too loudly. “Psycho girl”. “Weirdo”. Jane comforting me in the toilets after someone called me “Bertha” when we were studying Jane Eyre in English.

“Not really,” I lied. “Maybe it's because, I too, was a conker champion.”

Guy did his should-be-illegal grin. “You couldn't beat me.”

“Wanna bet?”

His smile reached right up into his eyes, making them all slitty, like a Cheshire cat's. “I hereby challenge you, Evelyn, to a duel. Weapon of choice: conkers.”

I put my tongue in the side of my cheek. “I don't want you to get upset when you lose.”

“Oh, trust me, I never lose.”

And his hand was in mine, tugging me down the road. His fingers felt earthy, worn from years of guitar, rough, like a boy's fingers should be.

I giggled. “Where are we going?”

“To my house, to get supplies for the duel.”

We were going to his house? Guy's house? Like where he lived? His home? My heart kick-started its adrenalin-fuelled dance. He was taking me to his house!

He only lived two roads away, on a street that looked just like mine, with lines of sausage-factory townhouses, all identical, apart from when people showed off their identity by painting the door an unusual colour. Like neon green!

Guy's front door was just a normal red. Was he going to take me to his room? Would I have to meet his parents?

BAD THOUGHT

His parents will hate me.

BAD THOUGHT

His room will be an atrocious mess and I'll go off him.

BAD THOUGHT

What if I go to his room and he thinks that means we're going to have sex?

He let go of my hand. “Wait here, I'll be five minutes.” He disappeared through the Average Joe door.

“Oh okay,” I said, basically to myself.

WORSE THOUGHT

He didn't invite you in. He's ashamed of you and he hates you.

“Shut up,” I told myself out loud.

I pulled out my phone to waste time re-reading our messages. I counted the amount he'd sent me versus the amount I'd sent him. I'd sent exactly two more, which meant I needed to not reply to two in order for him to think I wasn't too keen. I rubbed my toe in his gravel, drawing little swirls, covering them, and redrawing them.

Guy had changed clothes, into a navy-blue hoody that made his eyes jump out of his head and do a dance. Not literally of course. He held up string, a screwdriver and some scissors.

“To the nearest park.”

I giggled again, and covered up the heart I'd drawn with a swoosh of my Converse.

We discussed rules on the walk there. We were each to pick one conker and one conker only. “This is Sudden Death Conkers,” Guy said seriously. “You have to pick your soldier wisely. He will triumph or he will die.”

“My conker's going to be female not male.”

He burst out laughing. “That cat lady club is rubbing off on you.”

I kicked him.

“I probably deserved that,” he said.

There are days in early winter when the sun forgets it's supposed to be tucking itself up with a good book and hibernating until April. Though the ever-reliant earth obligingly turns leaves yellow and orange, the sun is occasionally a floozy. And when this happens, you're rewarded with the most beautiful day of days – with the sun hitting all the different colours, giving everything a silver lining, even crappy parks in suburban towns like ours.