A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones Page A

which was fine in music class because he loved music class and got along famously with Mr. Flowers. After a moment I moved to the side in my chair and saw the beginnings of a brownish-red puddle on the shiny wooden seat, let out a tiny cry and whispered to Francis:
    “Shit, Francis, I just got my period. What am I supposed to do!”
    We’d talked about this eventuality. Francis had interesting insights on the question, which he’d gotten from his mother. For example, his mother told him I probably didn’t have to worry for a few more years. However, my mother had been eleven when she got hers, and believed these things ran in the family.
    “What should I do? What am I going to do!”
    “You get up and go to the infirmary,” Francis whispered. “And you say, ‘I am indisposed.’ That’s what my mother told me you’re supposed to do, anyway. I’ll go with you and wait outside.” Mr. Flowers came to the conclusion of “Let it Be” and Francis daintily raised his hand.
    “Mr. Flowers,” he said in a dead serious tone, “we must be excused.”
    Francis made the whole thing seem so normal that I’ll remain grateful to him for the rest of my life. On the way to the infirmary he told me he’d taken his dog to “be fixed” because she too had gotten her period and that all these things were just regular occurrences and that I shouldn’t be embarrassed.
    That night at home, my father gave me one hundred francs in celebration, and a lecture on birth control. I stared at him in silence and nodded when I sensed he expected me to. I could not figure out at all what he was trying to get at. My mother also sat there, silently watching and listening.
    My father then said the absolutely strangest thing I ever heard out of him:
    “In my hometown we were already having sex with girls when we were ten. They were girls from the poor side of town. So I’m just saying, I’m not going to turn my back on this fact; boys are going to be interested in you and they’re perfectly capable of going all the way already.”
    When I did not react, my mother said, “Your father isn’t urging you to have sex, he’s just warning you that you can get pregnant now.”

    Francis’s voice started to change a few months later, and the tiny white hairs on his chin and under his nose began to turn black. This was not happening to my brother yet, and I did not know how to react. It had seemed so easy for Francis to deal with my period—why couldn’t I deal with his? Saturday sleepovers became strange and awkward, and I had a difficult time falling asleep when Francis lay on the cot at the foot of my bed. After a while I stopped inviting him, and he did not mention the change.
    A tow-haired boy fresh from America called Kevin Westgate arrived at the school halfway through the year. He did not speak a word of French and was put in a special class called Adaptation, which was supposed to be equal academically to the other classes but had a bad reputation and for some reason was kept segregated. Probably the French administration worried about the new American students’ influence on the overprotected Europeanized students. At the time, people said that things in America were absolutely out of control; they said drugs were rampant as well as free sex and revolutionary attitudes.
    Sally and I did not know how old this Kevin was but figured he was probably our age, or maybe just a little older, because he was in the Adaptation group that corresponded to 5 ème , our grade, which would have been seventh back in America.
    Sally and I would follow Kevin Westgate around the halls and then, when he’d turn around and gaze at us with a blank expression, we’d freeze. Once he’d disappear into the crowd of heads, we’d scream in unison like girls at a rock ‘n’ roll concert, and run in the opposite direction. We heard from other Adaptation students that Kevin was as shy and stupid as he was good-looking and hip. We were told that he smoked