It wasn’t until her mother’s forehead suddenly creased that Ashley June began to genuinely worry. Her mother never frowned—it was a forbidden expression. Those lines looked so foreign on her mother’s forehead, they looked as if tiny sewing strings were pressed into her skin.
“What is it, Mama?”
She shook her head and didn’t say anything. She helped Ashley June pull down her shirt and put on her shoes. When Ashley June walked out the door, her mother didn’t even warn her to be careful as she always did. Her lips were pressed into a tight line, her eyes a thousand miles away.
It weighed on Ashley June’s mind the whole night at school. When she returned home, the first thing she wanted to do—even before taking off her shades—was give her mother a hug.
Except she was nowhere to be found.
“Mama?”
Ashley June stood very, very still in the foyer. Her mother was always home when she returned. She’d greet Ashley June in the foyer, help her out of her shoes, and when the door clicked shut run her hand over her cheek. “Don’t grow up,” she’d often say, squeezing Ashley June’s chubbiness a little.
But today, her mother wasn’t in the foyer. Confused, Ashley June took off her shades. And that is when she heard the voices, hushed and urgent, coming from her parents’ bedroom. She walked over. From behind the closed door, she heard her mother’s raised voice—high-pitched and panicky, a tone she’d never heard her speak in before. Then came another voice, and this caught Ashley June by complete surprise. It was her father’s voice.
He was never home so early.
She knocked on the door, but they must not have heard, because they began to speak again, over each other.
She turned the knob and pushed the door open.
Her mother was standing with her arms folded across her chest, her head bent. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed red, and her hair—usually pulled in a tight ponytail—was disheveled. Ashley June’s father was standing in front of her, listening, an arm outstretched, holding her shoulder. Despite the volume of their voices, his touch on her was tender and comforting. And it was this last fact that transformed Ashley June’s curiosity into something that bordered on fear.
“Mama?”
Her parents startled at the sound of her voice. They turned slowly until they stood side by side, their arms hanging awkwardly at their sides.
The front door opened. Her older brother was back early from school. The clump of shoes kicked off, the click of the front door closing and locking.
“I’m home!” he declared in his jovial voice. “Practice was canceled!” After a whole night of keeping his voice even-keeled and monotone at school, it was freedom to be back home. All the pent-up emotions finally released. Their parents allowed a short burst of emotion when they came home, as long as the door was locked and the shutters were down and they weren’t too loud. And after dinner—for ten minutes and only if they’d completed all their homework—they let Ashley June and her brother play. It was a wonderful time when they could smile and sing and frown and burp and fart. When they could let it all out.
Her father would not look at her. Then her mother began to do something she had expressly forbidden Ashley June to ever do. She started to cry. Tears rushed to her eyes, lined down her face.
And before too long, Ashley June was crying, too, for although she did not know why, she somehow knew enough.
A few days later, a man—whom Ashley June had never set eyes on before—arrived sometime between dawn and noon. She spent as much energy staring and trying to figure out the reason for his visit as she would later—for the rest of her life, in fact—spend trying to erase him from her memory. Through the opened front door, she saw the hot sun still rising in the hazy, stone-gray skies. The man—who carried his broad shoulders and muscled body with surprising grace—carried a large steel briefcase, which he set down carefully on the dining table.
He was accompanied by a woman with a little girl—his wife and daughter, Ashley June surmised. She stared at them. Ashley June’s family never received visitors. But she noted the beads of sweat glistening on their heads, the sweat stains banding around their armpits, and so she knew they were like her.
She walked over to the little girl. She was carrying an empty tote bag in her tiny hand as if on her way to pick fruit. Shyly, Ashley June reached out slowly and touched the younger girl’s hair. The girl flinched, gripped tighter her mother’s hand. The girl’s mother squeezed back to let her know it was okay. The girl’s eyes were big and innocent.
Ashley June let a small smile form on her lips. The tiniest expression.
The girl’s eyes widened with surprise. Then she began to smile in return, tentatively, the corners of her lips curling upward like the margins of burning paper.
“Stop it,” the man barked. He was stricter than Ashley June’s parents. Instantly the young girl’s mouth straightened into a tense line. The man didn’t say anything more. He went to the table, opened the briefcase.
And that is when Ashley June’s mother quickly took the young girl and her mother into the bedroom. The bedroom Ashley June shared with her brother, where he’d been the whole morning. This was odd, Ashley June realized. Why hadn’t her brother come out?
But not as odd as what happened next. It was only her father and the other man in the dining room now.
They laid out strange objects on the table, carefully, as if setting the table for a meal. But these weren’t forks and knives and spoons. These were scalpels and needles and other things she didn’t recognize. They were small things with sharp edges. They frightened her.
Ashley June moved to the corner of the room and stood there.
The men murmured to each other in low voices. Ashley June strained to hear and she caught the sounds of foreign, odd words like anesthesia and bilateral and ovaries. The strange man picked up a glass cylinder with a long needle and dipped it into a clear liquid. He pulled back a syringe, drawing liquid into the needle. He nodded at her father.
And her father turned to her.
“Come here, honey,” he said to her.
She took a step forward, stopped.
“I need to tell you something. Come here.” He sat down on the sofa, patted the empty spot next to him.
She thought about sitting in his lap. Sometimes, when he was in a good enough mood and had drunk too much, he let her sit in his lap. He’d bounce her up and down, letting her giggle and laugh for three seconds. For Ashley June in those moments, his lap became the funnest and safest place to be in the whole world. But she did not sit there that day. She sat next to him. And for weeks afterward she wondered if things may have turned out differently if only she’d sat in his lap instead.
“Honey, there’s something we have to do,” he said. His hand on her shoulder, usually warm and comforting, was clammy and shaky.
“What, Daddy?”
“You’ll hardly feel a thing,” he said.
“What, Daddy?”
He was quiet and turned his head to the side. Away from her, as if he didn’t want her to see his face.
“You’re getting older,” he said, still looking away.
Ashley June didn’t say anything.
“And when you get older, your body . . . changes. Things start happening beyond your control.”
Ashley June felt her cheeks turn hot. “I get boobs,” she said timidly, quickly, hoping for this moment to disappear. “Mama already told me. She said it won’t happen for a few more years. And not to worry when it does. It’s natural.”
The strange man tapped on the dining table. It was to get her father’s attention. The man’s broad shoulders hummed with impatience. He flicked his chin at the clock on the wall.
“There’s something Mama never told you, though,” Ashley June’s father said. “She never told you about another change that’s going to come upon your body. Soon. Maybe. We don’t know when exactly, it might not happen for another two, three, five years. But because your diet is almost all meat, it might happen soon. A month, a week. Tomorrow.” There was a hardness in his voice and a foreign quality to his taut body that made him seem like a different person. “And we can’t chance being caught off guard, having this . . . change suddenly arrive at school, in the classroom, on the bus, on the streets. In the midst of a crowd, in the middle of the night.”
“What kind of change?”
“Better to do it now rather than later, it’d have to be done anyway. Might as well be now before the change comes.” He was rambling. As if trying to convince himself.
“What kind of change, Daddy?”
He jolted as if surprised by her presence next to him. “You’ll start to bleed.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. “I’m always careful. Just like you and Mama always tell me, Be careful not to get any scratches, any cuts, I—”
“You can’t stop this one. It’s not from a cut.”
“A nosebleed? I know what to do if—”
“No.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to. Not after . . . we do this.”
“Now, Tobias,” the strange man said from the dining room. He had moved all the utensils to the side and placed a large plastic sheet over the table.
“Who is that man, Daddy?” Ashley June asked. It was odd to hear the man address her father by his designation.
Her father paused. “He’s one of us, dear. He works at the Domain Building and he’s very, very smart. He knows a lot about the body and today he’s going to be your doctor, okay? He’s going to help you be safe. He’s brought his wife. She’ll help him later, if necessary.”
Ashley June stood up. “What’s happening?” She glanced at the closed bedroom door. “Mama? Mama!” she cried out, fear suddenly surging in her. “I’m scared!” But the door did not open. Her brother, her mother, the little girl, none of them came out. It was silent behind those doors.