SHORT FICTION The Rules of the Game Kristin Berkey-Abbott I’ve had girlfriends tell me that the first time they realized they had entered adolescence was when cruel brothers made endless comments about their nubile breasts – body parts that they hadn’t even realized they’d started developing until that point. Imagine. Most start-of-puberty stories revolve around secondary sex characteristics of some kind. Not mine. I first realized that puberty had hit me when my hair started to curl. Not those sexy ringlets that women pay so much for when they get a perm. No, my hair started curling in unnatural ways, right off the top of my head, in all different directions. Many days, I looked like a lightning strike victim. I still don’t know why my hair would behave that way. Do extra hormones affect the scalp? My mother acted as if my hair had always done this. Each morning, she braided it all into a tight French braid. But by lunch time, springy curls would escape, and I looked even freakier. I waited for Mom to figure out what to do, but she acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary, like every girl who hits puberty develops problem hair. Nothing could have prepared me for that. Nothing I’d read mentioned hair-on-the-head changes, and my mother had always presented puberty as a stage we’d get through together. Mom had shoved all kinds of books at me so I’d know what to expect. “No daughter of mine will go through the ordeal I went through,” she said as she gave me my very own copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Updated for the 1980s. “I tell you, Bri, I thought I had some horrible disease when I got my first period. That I’d slowly bleed to death. How could my mother have not known what was going on? She did the laundry, after all.” “What’d you do?” “My best friend’s mother showed me how to handle it. I had to use my allowance to buy napkins. And we didn’t have those self-adhesive strips or wings–“ “Mo-om.” I put my hands over my ears. “Such a modest little girl. I know you don’t want to discuss these things– “ “Then why do you keep bringing it up?” “I don’t want you caught by surprise. If I’m not around, I want you to know what’s happening. For instance, when you go to camp this summer, I think you
Volume 13, Number 1
SPRING 2001
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