brought to you by anon's own girl angst

Mama sobs to the neighbors with an Old-Fashioned in her hand about her husband’s cruelty, but it’s not so. He happens to reserve his special kindnesses for his daughter. He only has one child (and whose fault is that? whose battered body had such difficulty surrendering children) and she’s growing up so fine, so well. And the older Mama gets, the better her daughter starts to look. She’s going to be thirteen next year, you know.

–

Fourteen-year-old Adi is introduced in the classroom to curiously inspecific taglines like Modess… because and Growing up… and liking it! The more she’s reassured that it’s all perfectly normal, harmless, healthy, the more wary she becomes of it. It’s not the thought of bleeding that distresses her, but the complications, sanitary belts and vitamin deficiencies and cramps. She resolves that she simply won’t have her period. If she wants to be a gymnast, it might even disappear entirely.

Her classmates anxiously keep track of their figures, casting her pitying looks since all she seems to be gaining is in height. But she smiles to herself.

When her monthlies do arrive, it’s hardly an event, only a disappointment. (Though Adi has already learned the knack with bloodstains, which will serve her well as a masked adventurer.) Mother’s more flustered than she is when Adrienne reports the news, and far more red-faced that her daughter’s already learned all of this in school. (Some of it, the vaguest outlines; Adi is a diligent researcher, but she’ll not tell her that.) Whatever might pass between them, as she’s standing in the parlor in her ruined dress, is nothing more than embarrassment.

–

Adi is sixteen and cuts her hair the way she wanted to, a loose cast of blonde tangles that needs no hair pins to hold a proper curl. It is with a pair of heavy stationery scissors in front of a friend’s vanity and she leaves the fallen strands behind, call it a funeral offering. Such a shame to cast away something so precious, like plucking off an angel’s wings. And now she’s a young woman, practically minded. Boys have always liked her, anyway, even with small breasts and strange eyes.

The confrontation when she returns home is not entirely unexpected; Mother doesn’t give a damn and if it deprives Mr. Veidt some of the pleasure of looking at her, very well.