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have plenty of aspirin at home,” Daddy said, putting the pills back on the shelf, but the woman grabbed them and gave them back.
    â€œI’m telling you,” she said, “she’s going to need these. Aspirin won’t work.” Then she took the box of thick pads out of Daddy’s arms and put that back on the shelf, too.
    I could see he was mad at her, only there was nothing he could really do about it. In the car on the way home, though, he told me that from now on, I could pay for my own feminine hygiene. He said he hadn’t realized how expensive this stuff was going to be, and anyway, now that I was working for the army, I could afford it. That was how he referred to my job at the Vuosos’. It still bothered him that Mr. Vuoso thought he loved Saddam. If there was anything he didn’t appreciate, Daddy said, it was people making assumptions about him.
    That night in bed, I fantasized again that Barry would come and save me. I figured he probably wouldn’t, but still, thinking about him always made me feel better. He was someone I knew for sure liked me. Even more than he liked my mother. He liked me so much that she had to send me away, since she was jealous. This was my favorite part. The part where no matter what happened, I was better than my mother. Boys liked me better than they liked her.
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    In art class the next day, when I pulled my drawing tablet out of my backpack, a maxi-pad fell out with it. I tried to hide it, but it was too late. The three boys at my worktable had already seen it. They grabbed it and started tossing it around, while I tried to get it back. Then one of them opened the packet, pulled off the adhesive strip, and started wearing it on his forehead. Mrs. Ridgeway told him to take it off, and he did, but then he put red watercolor on it. A rumor started going around that it was real blood, and that I was such a dirtball that I carried around used sanitary napkins.
    I didn’t have any pads left then, so I went in the bathroom and put a bunch of toilet paper in my underwear. I cried a little, and one of the lady janitors heard me. “You okay in there?” she asked. I told her the problem, and she said for me to wait. A couple of minutes later, she came back and passed a tampon under my door. “I don’t think I can wear that,” I said.
    â€œSure you can,” she said. “It’s very small.”
    Then she stood outside the stall, asking a million times whether I’d gotten it in yet. “Just relax,” she told me, and finally it slipped inside.
    When I came out and she saw it was me, she started talking in Spanish, and I had to tell her that I couldn’t understand. “Your parents don’t speak Spanish at home?” she asked, and I said no, and she shook her head like it was the saddest thing in the world.
    For the rest of the day, I thought a lot about what Daddy had said—that you had to be married to wear tampons. I guessed he meant that when you got married, you had sex, and when you had sex, it made more room for a tampon. Only there was already some room now. The lady janitor had said there would be, and she had been right. I started to wonder what other wrong things he had told me.
    After school, Zack asked if I wanted to look at magazines, and I said okay. He sat with his back to me on the edge of the bed, and I sat in the wicker chair. I read all the interviews with the women very closely, hoping they’d talk about something important, like getting your period. But it was more of the same—descriptions of how they liked to have sex with their boyfriends, or how many times a week they liked to do it, or what color hair their boyfriends should have. I didn’t realize I was pressing my legs together until Zack turned around and said, “Stop creaking the chair.”
    The women also talked about having orgasms, which I didn’t understand. I assumed it was the feeling I got when I