Ketchup.

The one about menstruation.

The looks on our faces hadn’t been that confused, petrified, and solemn since 9/11. And I make that comparison after much thought and without an ounce of hyperbole. 

The entire 4th grade class shuffled out of the auditorium toward the cafeteria, each of us with a brown lunch bag in hand containing an info pamphlet and a few sanitary pads. Grilled cheese had never looked so unappetizing. Some girls were crying. 

“So essentially,” I began, attempting to provide some clarity to my friends just to make sure we’d all heard the same thing, “one day you’ll go to pee but instead of pee it’s going to be blood then you go to the nurse’s office and ask for a special diaper.”

“Yeah. Like…” Molly said, picking up the ketchup bottle at the center of the table and squeezing it out next to her grilled cheese. 

The group of us erupted in disgust. 

It sounded like pure fiction yet had been presented with the same tone of inevitability as losing your baby teeth or having to do taxes. The lesson completely avoided talk of the actual anatomical situation, just like the giant funnily dressed man who would slowly approach us in our month of self defense classes. We’d knee him in his well-padded crotch, poke him in his baseball-sized masked eyes, and run across the stage calling for help. No anatomy. Instead, the nurse had skipped ahead to what to do when “it” happens. I guess our parents were supposed to fill us in on the rest. And if they didn’t, like mine, there would be no formal continuation of that particular lesson until the 9th grade (sex ed) and 11th grade (childbirth video) respectively. 

That’s probably why I went to bed that night assuming that just because it happened to other girls didn’t necessarily mean it would happen to me. In fact, it wouldn’t happen to me because-

“I’m an alien,” I said with confidence sitting on the examination table during the next routine checkup. My mother sighed.

“My examination doesn’t agree,” the doctor said.

“It’s a disguise. I’ll turn back into my true form when the ship comes.” 

Not having sprayed out blood by the end of 4th grade was enough proof of my hypothesis for me. But that all came falling apart in 6th grade, a couple of days after turning twelve. 

Through an accidental exposure to pornographic writing, I developed a sudden association between the onset of one’s period and life imprisonment. The line between being a girl and being a woman - the woman being the object which is forcefully married and raped in a pool of her own blood. I cried in horror at the realization and I cried in horror again a couple weeks later when I got my period for the first time. 

Inconsolable, my mother assumed I had no idea what was happening to me. My sheets were taken away but there wasn’t much to be done about the mattress. I was given half of my sister’s supplies and ushered off to school where I pulled it together and pretended nothing had happened, that nothing had changed. I had never been a physically affectionate person, but I became very bothered by the thought of anyone touching me ever again. 

In discussion with other women, I realized that it might be a bit unusual that periods weren’t really spoken about throughout the duration of my middle school. I can’t explain why. It just never came up. I couldn’t even tell you when my closest friends got their periods but at the start of high school, an unspoken switch flipped where we went from behaving as if none of us had periods to behaving as if everyone had periods. It likely helped that the older girls would casually yell down the hallway asking if anyone had a tampon only for a tampon to be flung over several heads in response. We stopped excusing ourselves for “bathroom breaks” or “stomach aches” and just said, “I’m bleeding and I have to poop.” Such bluntness about it gave people a shock once I went to college where it was considered embarrassing to be walking around with a packaged pad peeking out of your pocket.   

As for my fear of imprisonment, it didn’t go away nor had I told anyone about what I had seen. My wariness of physical touch made its home in my bones.

It still felt inevitable, that dark tale following the well-rehearsed “happily ever after.” But that reality was far away. Perhaps even further away than having to do taxes. And there was still the lingering hope, however small, that my spaceship would arrive just in time.