Periods

character.ai (1)

. 

Decided to do a series of character.ais because it streamlines the writing process. This one is Lexi, a twelve year old who just got her first period. I was her older sister. Also, ignore the pronouns switching I underestimated how annoying switching them to agree was with copy and paste and then started paraphrasing messages.

she stands in the doorway with tears in her eyes, a hoodie wrapped around her waist. She's just come home from middle school. You know what this means

Are you okay? I ask

she nods, wiping the tears from her eyes. She looks so small and so young. Twelve, middle school, her first period, it's not a fair circumstance for her to be dealing with but it's what life gave her

It's okay you can tell me how you really feel

*She bites her lip, holding in the tears that are threatening to fall. She looks tiny, vulnerable, in so much pain both physically and mentally*

"What is it?" I ask

"It's just, it's painful, and I'm...embarrassed, and, it just—"*She breaks down, the tears falling freely down her face now*

"Did something happen at school?"

"I was wearing a new pair of shorts—"*she sniffles*"—and I hadn't even noticed that I had started bleeding until I got to gym class." *Her face is red with embarrassment. She's always been introverted and private.*

"The white ones?" She nods, they had been her only clean pair that day. "I'm so sorry Lexi" 

*She's so embarrassed, can barely hold eye contact with you. There's a look of such pain on her face as she holds back the tears. She's far too young to be dealing with this*

I lead her to the bathroom. "Come on" 

*she lets you lead her to the bathroom, keeping quiet. She steps up to the sink, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. Her bottom lip trembles as she looks down at her bloody shorts and her eyes start welling up with fresh tears again* I untie the hoodie from her waist. *she stands there, looking anywhere but your eyes, completely embarrassed. She can tell that you're looking at the small pool of blood in her shorts, which makes her feel so much shame.* I give her clean underwear and pajamas as well as a pad. She takes them with a scarlet face and changes into them where I can't see. She emerges a few minutes later and sits on the edge of the bathtub. I throw her bloody clothes in. She watches, still embarrassed because she had gone through it at school, arguably one of the worst places to get it.

"Cheer up, I'm teaching you how to clean a crime scene" I say. She smiles at my attempt to lighten the mood, but I can still tell she's embarrassed. I try to get her to tell me what happened at school, thinking I can make her feel better if I just knew exactly why she was feeling this way. She didn't want to talk though, she didn't really know what she wanted to do.

I turn to leave, but as I'm walking away she asks for a hug. So I wrap my arms around her and then try to leave again, but she just keeps hanging on. That's when I knew I had to press her for details. "I know you don't want to talk about it, but seriously Lexi, are you okay?" I ask. 

She mumbles something into my chest and when I ask her to repeat it, she says "some boys saw." Afraid they were making fun of her, I ask about it. Luckily, she says they just saw, but I'm still skeptical, because I didn't teach her to be this embarrassed simply because she existed as a girl.

"Are you mad?" She asks, and I am shocked she thought I would be. I ask why she thought I would be. "It's embarrassing" she tells me, her eyes still wet with tears. I guide her to her bed as we talk. I make sure she understands that it's not embarrassing, that every girl will get it at some point. She insists that it's embarrassing because it happened at school. I guess I can agree with her on that, but to make her feel better I decide to tell her about my first, which also happened at school.

"I had a really mean old English teacher in sixth grade, I must have been about your age when this happened. I bled through onto her chairs, and I was so sure she was going to yell at me for making a mess, but you know what she did?" I say, "she told me not to worry about it as she cleaned my seat and gave me her sweater to wrap around my waist. I gave that sweater back the next day, and she'd give it to other girls when they got their first periods. I don't think she ever wore that sweater herself, and that was the only time I saw her smile." 

Telling my story helped relax Lexi and she started to tell me about what happened to her at school today. She was in gym, and when she went to the locker room there were girls who made fun of her for it. My heart sank at that, because it was the girls. They know they'll get their periods one day, but they still made fun of my little sister for having hers. Lexi changed her shorts but she didn't have a pad with her. So the boys in her science class made fun of her, after she bled through again. I interrupt the story to make Lexi go get her gym shorts out of her bag and soak them with the other clothes. She whines about how everyone is talking about it, and I tell her that I think the drama will die down by the end of the week. Yet Lexi insists it will be never ending. 

"Middle school drama is not forever" I tell her

"I just want it to be over with, but it will keep happening forever." Lexi says

"Only forty or fifty years," I say, "not forever." That makes Lexi laugh. It doesn't distract from the fact that she had to go through the entire day with bloody shorts because mom wouldn't pick her up (to be fair, Lexi didn't even tell mom why she needed to be picked up. Of course mom chose to stay at work.) I tell her I would've picked her up if she'd called, but Lexi says I wouldn't because I was in class. "Who cares if I miss one or two classes, you're my little sister." I assure her.

We sit in silence for a few minutes before Lexi says "I heard the girls in science giggle about it too." Those words felt like a dagger to the heart. Why is everyone who shouldn't be laughing, laughing? Lexi starts telling me about how girls in middle school are bean just because they can be mean, as if I wasn't bullied relentlessly in middle school for being a lesbian. Yet this shocks Lexi, and I wind up telling her the horrors of middle school four years ago.