The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club Read Online Free Page A

perils of becoming a woman by displaying on an easel a poem about the subject, which replaced her hand-drawn diagram of a bleeding flower that bore the title “You’re in Bloom!” She had apparently penned the poem herself, which she made us read together out loud.
    “Menstruation,
Fact of life;
Belts and pads
From girl to wife.
    Though cramps and spotting
May keep you down,
You’re now a queen
With Kotex as crown.
    Swimming’s out,
Just stay inside.
Sharks can tell,
So keep it dry!”
    The whole thing, frankly, was freaking me out.
    “But my mom doesn’t use a belt,” my best friend Jamie said from where she sat beside me. “Her maxi pads have a sticky strip.”
    Mrs. Shimmer whipped around, and her happy-poem face melted into one of sinister, thrashing contempt.
    “Practice using the belt!” she shot, her glare directed straight at the corner where Jamie and I sat on wooden benches in the PE dressing room. “Sticky strips are a fad! Nothing replaces the security of a belt! Nothing!”
    I got the feeling that Mrs. Shimmer didn’t really like being a girl. She didn’t really feel like a queen when she pinned that belt into place, I could tell. It wasn’t magic to her. Not even a card trick.
    None of the eleven-year-olds in that room had a look that said something magical or beautiful was about to happen to her. We wanted to ride horses, we wanted to go swimming, we wanted to use sticky strips when the time came. No one wanted to strap a slingshot around her private parts to keep the pistil restrained. Every single one of us had a look on her face that said we had all been duped.
    Like we were all suckers.

It Smells Like
Doody Here
    Every August, a couple of weeks before school started, my father would crank the handle on our pop-up trailer and air it out in our carport.
    It was the sole signal that it was time for another Notaro family vacation, and a sign that in the coming weeks ahead, our family would return from some spot up north, traumatized, most likely injured, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
    None of us, to this day, knows why my dad bought the trailer. I was ten when he came home one Saturday afternoon with it hitched to the bumper of the Country Squire station wagon, swaying and groaning as it pulled into the driveway.
    “We’re going camping!” my father said.
    My sisters and I nodded. Then we went back inside and fought with one another.
    At first, my father would chart our camping journey, studying maps and marking lakes and campsites. Well, they really weren’t campsites but KOAs, which are basically big paved parking lots off the sides of highways, with spigots and maybe a gift shop. There really wasn’t much for me and my sisters to do for an entire week except find rocks and try to sell them to one another, or bug my mom for a quarter so we could buy Jolly Rancher candies from the gift shop and then loiter. One gift shop lady got so aggravated with our frequent visits that she wanted to talk to our mom. When we explained that Mom was lying down with her hand on her head because she got a headache when we got there on Saturday, the gift shop lady just made us promise not to come back again. So we went back to the trailer and fought with one another for the next four days.
    When I was in eighth grade, my dad finally broke free from the safety of the KOAs and decided that we were experienced enough to try a real campsite, one with dirt. He had heard of a great spot in the White Mountains, near a lake. He aired out the trailer in the carport, and the next week we were on our way.
    When we got there, Dad found a great spot right by the lake and parked the trailer.
    “It smells like doody here,” my youngest sister said.
    “It does not,” my mother snapped. “That’s the way lakes smell.”
    We popped the trailer up and brought in our pillows and sleeping bags from the car. As soon as my mom brought over the last bag of food, the sky broke open, and it started to