The Education of Bet by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

nights and, in the case of younger or new students such as myself, remaining in the corridors for long hours on alternating nights in case a more senior boy wanted something—didn't apply to James.
    ***
    Two weeks into my stay at the Betterman Academy, disaster struck.
    I should have anticipated it, and yet I had not: there was blood on my sheets.
    After my first night at school, when I'd realized that boys commonly dressed and undressed in front of one another, I'd trained myself to rise early enough so that James was still asleep, moving about the room as noiselessly as possible while hurrying into my clothes so he'd never catch a glimpse of what I looked like without them.
    But on that morning I realized that my usual strategy was futile. One look at my sheets—and he would surely see them, for it would be supremely odd for any Betterman boy to make his own bed, a task always left for the housekeeper—and I'd be exposed. It was challenge enough getting dressed before he arose, especially having to bind my breasts, which I let spring free at night once I was sure he was asleep; the morning's added challenge of having to find suitable cloths with which to stanch the flow made the whole an impossibility.
    As I lay there, feeling the familiar dull ache in my lower abdomen and cursing myself—how could I not have foreseen
this?
—I heard him stir.
    I looked over to see him propping himself up on his elbows and emitting a large early-morning yawn.
    "Well, here's a novelty," he observed. "You usually get up so much before me that I'd grown to believe either you sleep in your clothes or you never sleep at all. Is something wrong?"
    Oh, the understatement!
    "I'm not feeling well today," I said, sheets and blankets pulled up tight under my chin so he could see nothing. "I think I may need to skip first lesson."
    "Skip first lesson?" he echoed. "Almost no one ever does that. Old Man Peters won't be happy."
    "Old Man Peters is so old, I doubt he'll even notice one less student," I quipped.
    "I suppose," he conceded, rising and stripping off his nightshirt as he did so.
    Every time he did that, it was as though he were doing it for the first time, and I had to force my eyes away from the sight of him naked.
    "What do you think it is," he said as he stood before a basin, still maddeningly naked, washing his face, "this thing that has you feeling not well?"
    "Did you eat the meat at dinner?" was my rejoinder.
    "It is sometimes best avoided," he admitted ruefully, pulling out fresh clothes.
    He proceeded to don them at such a leisurely rate, I was tempted to scream,
Oh, will you just get on with it and get out of here?
But of course I couldn't do that.
    "Can I get you something before I go?" he asked, at last tying his tie. Thank
God!
"Perhaps some plain toast or a cup of tea? I could ask Mrs. Smithers—"
    "I'll be fine," I snapped, cutting him off. "Really, by second lesson, I'll be right as rain."
    He studied me for a moment, as though I were a curiosity.
    "Huh," he said finally. "It must be a wonderful thing, knowing the exact moment one will be well again."
    As soon as the door shut behind him and I heard his booted feet head down the corridor, I sprang out of bed and immediately locked the door.
    Turning around, I saw the damning red stains on my sheets, but I couldn't do anything about that just yet. First, I needed to stanch the bleeding.
    My nightshirt was a dead loss, I saw as I whipped it off; I rolled it into a ball and tossed it to one side. Then I sought out the stack of washing cloths that Mrs. Smithers left along with our fresh linens every day. I selected one that looked to be about the right size and thickness.
    Back at Grangefield Hall a year ago, when I'd experienced my first bleeding, it was one of the maids, Sara, who'd done what my mother would have done had she still been alive: explained to me the regularity of the monthly flow, how it related to the making of babies, and what to do about the bleeding. She'd