A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones

on the outside—although now we were in different classes. We played hopscotch together during recreation, sat together on the bus during outings, shirked during gym, and continued to invent opera stories and to go to the opera on special occasions.
    But the scales had tipped. What had begun in Miss O’Shaunessy’s class had become a pattern: I could set any ground rules I pleased in the relationship, and after a bitter argument, Francis would capitulate. Francis had come to depend on me more than I did on him, as had once been the case between Sally and me. And Francis had begun to resent me in the same way that I had resented Sally.
    My flirtatious nature began to come out of its dormant stage with the budding of my breasts (which everyone, including my father, told me were large for my age). I wanted a bra because all the American girls wore them, even when they didn’t need one. My mother and father gave this some thought and then suggested I wait a while. My father said my breasts would probably get very big, like my mother’s, and that the reason my mother’s were in such good shape was because she’d refused to wear a bra as a young girl.
    “And that’s the truth, so help me God,” my mother said, nodding and crossing her heart. “And I had the nuns to contend with.”
    Not wearing a bra allowed the muscles to develop, my father said.
    “But do what you want,” my mother added. “If you want boobies down to your knees, that’s your affair.”
    If they had said, no, absolutely no bra, I would have most probably run to the first lingerie store. But I decided that I did not want breasts that fell to my knees, so I listened to them.

    Boys whom I’d known since kindergarten (many whose zizis I’d seen a while back) began to show a renewed interest in me. During recreation they chased me around the park, to Francis’s great dismay. It was easy, however, to flirt in certain classes because Francis was only in class with me for English with Miss O’Shaunessy, music with Mr. Flowers, and history/geography with Mrs. Dubois.
    My classmates began inviting me to the boums , the Saturday evening parties where the lights were turned down low and the kids danced and kissed to the latest 45s from England. Francis was not invited and I did not discuss the matter with him. I did not know if he was aware of the boums’ existence, and I did not want to find out.
    At one boum , a boy accidentally touched my breast while we were slow dancing, and I said nothing. At the next boum , two different boys did the same thing and I reconsidered getting a bra.
    “Francis,” I asked him the next day as we were roller skating on the newly built bridge that was closed to traffic and connected the Île Saint-Louis to the Île-de-la-Cité, “do you think my boobs are really all that much bigger than most of the other girls’?”
    “How the hell should I know?” said Francis, shrugging.
    “Do you think I should wear a bra? The other girls, the American ones, they tell me in the locker room that I definitely need a bra.”
    “My mother says American girls would wear chastity belts if someone told them it was the proper thing to do,” Francis said. “Do what you want. But definitely I would tell those girls to mind their own beeswax.”

    I got my period for the first time on October 30, 1972, in music class. I had been feeling a dull ache in my lower stomach and back for several hours, and then, in the middle of singing “Let it Be,” accompanied by Mr. Flowers on his portable electric piano, a warm wetness flooded my underwear. It was apparent to the more sophisticated students, who were all preoccupied with sex, that Mr. Flowers was as gay as Mardi Gras. He wore shirts with puffy sleeves and curled his hair and talked with a lisp. So I sat paralyzed in my seat, wishing this were Miss O’Shaunessy’s class, or Mrs. Dubois’s. To make things worse, Sally Sutherland was out sick with the flu. I was sitting next to Francis,