Love Invents Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

jumped from the second-story window. I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep my face still and ran my tongue over the tiny grooved holes inside my mouth. Her notes got more elaborate, whole paragraphs describing my crimes, illustrated by drawings of my violent, Road Runner-like deaths. At the end of seventh grade she went to a private high school. Five years later, I saw her sitting across from me at the Aegean Diner, drinking coffee and poking at piles of change scattered over the tabletop. Her red hair was dyed black. She nodded vaguely, and I have to say I was a little hurt that she didn’t remember me.
    Eighth grade. Mr. O’Donnell discovered that I had the uncanny and otherwise useless gift of flawless sentence diagramming. If I was allowed to leave class and go to the lunchroom, I brought back twenty-eight perfectly corrected papers. I didn’t have to take a single English test that year, and got on good terms with the cafeteria ladies, who used to fold their arms in front of the baked goods when they saw me coming. Now we were all pals. I walked in three times a week with a quarter for the carton of milk for Mr. O’Donnell’s ulcer, a fat sheaf of papers under my arm, and my new Saint Christopher medal around my neck. I’d found it in the girls room and thought that if anyone should have one, it was me. It looked good down between my breasts, knocking against the pink bow on my bra.
    There were other, fatter girls in navy blue A-line skirts and loose sweaters, arranging and rearranging the Honor Society bake sale table, running their fingers along plate edges and cupcake overhangs, and other, braver girls in sloppy shirts and overalls, their long hair twisted up in barrettes they’d made at Bucks Rock leather shop, sitting on the back stairs passing cigarettes around. I clung to my own marginal, frightened identity and refused to be part of any group that would have me.
    My mother went to England for two weeks in October, and my father went to Oregon after Thanksgiving. She brought me a white cashmere cardigan and he brought me a malachite butterfly on a silver chain and I thought both were pretty in their way and I lost them. I don’t remember anything else about eighth grade because my body took over my life. The changes surprised me, even though I’d seen the Snow White and Her Menstrual Cycle filmstrip in sixth grade. Everything was moving, even while I slept, and when I woke up, flesh I had known my whole life had slid off or moved down or hidden itself under a blanket of thin dark hair. I wouldn’t have mentioned my period to my mother at all if I hadn’t had to apologize for the blood smeared across the top and bottom sheets, seeping down to cling to the ruffled edges of my lilac shorty pajamas. My mother stripped my bed herself and plunged everything into cold water in the tub as I stood behind her in my wet pajamas, pressing my legs together to keep blood from dripping onto the lilac bath mat. Right then, chin tucked down to steady the pile of clean linen, she was not my chill, familiar mother. She was the woman in overalls who attacked white fly in the greenhouse, who rubbed an ice cubeagainst a wad of bubblegum stuck in my hair down to the scalp, and took it out without a cross word. Her suddenly rough, competent hands snapped in the pleasure of the task, and her lips set in a cheerful can-do line. I longed for her the way lovers in movies longed for each other, across time and space, their eyes looking right past what was possible.
    She pushed me down on the toilet seat with one tiny hand. I waited for her to come back, afraid to move until she brought me what I knew would be the right thing; she came in with a small blue box of Tampax and a pair of dry underpants.
    “Don’t wear light colors when you have it, lovey,” she said, and left, and I pressed my face against the clean pajamas.
    My mother had rules and guidelines for life, and although none of them applied to the life I’d led so far,