I was sitting on the edge of my bed on a September afternoon with my guitar on my lap. The Butterfly Manifesto sat open next to me, with a confirmation slip that arrived in the mail today tucked into the margin. It had been a productive summer of occasional photo shoots and a couple of profitable short sales. Last month I had completed my short on IBM, which netted a healthy return, and only today I had received confirmation that the Apple short I initialized in July paid off even better.
It was a tightrope I was walking when it came to my trades. About once a month I wrangled Dad into a phone call with the brokerage, and was able to relay my orders once Dad gave his consent. After the first call he attempted to follow what I was doing, and after a lengthy explanation that soared over his head, he stopped asking questions. I had also managed to convince him to keep our little hobby a secret from Mom, since stock sales likely wouldn’t be considered a lady-like activity for a twelve-year-old.
By the time seventh grade started in the fall, my account was worth four times what I started with. Once my first buy-ins to Microsoft and Intel executed in the next couple of months, I’d really be on track. And all I had to do was pose for the camera, smile, and wait.
Still, it wasn’t easy to navigate through all the trades, calculations, and balancing of my middle-school life. It’s why I found myself unwinding to my other favorite hobby: reverse transcribing songs from my memories of the future onto sheet music. Today I was working on a Green Day song from 2005, which felt appropriate since September was winding down. I was in the middle of notating the song’s shift from pianissimo to forte when I heard a knock on my door.
“Maya, honey, got a minute?” Mom asked through the door.
Quickly, I closed the Butterfly Manifesto with the financial slips inside and shoved it under my pillow. “Sure, come on in.”
Mom leaned into the door frame. “I just wanted to let you know, I just got off the phone with Mrs. Janski. Her and Mr. Janski have to go out of town for a funeral, and your friend Catherine will be coming over in about half an hour to spend the night while they’re out of town.”
“Here?” I said curtly. “Mom, Catherine can’t stay here!”
Mom was taken aback by my visceral response. “Maya, we’ve been through this…”
I had often been invited to sleepovers with my friends for the last year, but every time I politely made up excuses. I was perhaps the only twelve-year-old girl who refused to spend the night with her friends. I honestly felt bad; I was always out of the loop when they would talk about their slumber parties the following Monday at school, but with all of the memories of Matthew’s lodged in my brain, I just felt uncomfortable sharing a bed with girls. Even if I was one myself.
It was worse with Catherine. It was a point of pain that the woman I was married to for a decade was the young girl down the street. I liked being her friend, but I didn’t want to cross a line. I didn’t know how I would react to sleeping next to a girl that would never grow up to be the woman I had slept with years from now.
“Mom, look at my room! I can't have the girls seeing that my room doesn’t look like theirs!” It was perhaps a pitiful excuse, though my room was rather spartan. Just a few Nirvana posters and a stand for my guitar. I had meant to decorate it more like a girl’s room, but I never bothered. I just found it easier to not invite my friends over.
“Maya.” Mom’s voice was stern. “I know you don’t think it’s appropriate, but Catherine is…having a really hard time right now. It would be nice for her to be with her best friend right now.”
“What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said quickly, waving me off. “Look, sweetie, I know you want your privacy, but there’s something you need to understand. Having sleepovers is a thing girls have to do. It’s a rite of passage. I promise you are going to have so much fun!”
I grumbled, but I also knew I wouldn’t win this argument.
From behind Mom, Tim poked his head in. “Who’s coming over?”
“Catherine, from down the street,” Mom explained.
“Ugh, there’s going to be a girl in the house?”
I gave him an incredulous look and gestured at myself. “What am I, doofus?”
Tim grimaced, before ducking back into the hallway.
Mom sighed. “I ordered dinner, and Catherine will be here soon. It will be fine. Trust your mother.”
The Janskis’ car pulled up to our driveway about three minutes after the pizza guy did, and Catherine trudged to the front door after a quick goodbye hug from her mother. She looked like she had been crying as she set her pink suitcase in the entryway.
“Hey, Cat,” I greeted from the stairwell.
She smiled sadly at me, as Mom entered from the side door. She knelt in front of Catherine, gently taking her cheeks in her hands.
“We got your favorite pizza, dear,” Mom soothed. “Follow Maya upstairs and have something to eat.”
Catherine nodded, and we climbed the stairs to the dining room where dinner was waiting. I assumed whatever family emergency happened was really affecting her.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” I consoled lamely as we sat at the table.
Catherine shook her head. “It’s fine. It was one of my dad’s aunts, I think. She lived out in Illinois, but I never met her,” she sniffled.
I was now confused as to why she was taking it so hard, but before I could inquire further Tim came bounding up the stairs at the promise of pizza. He took one look at it and sneered.
“Sausage!? I wanted plain cheese!”
Catherine frowned as I snapped at him. “Tim, stop whining!”
Tim shot me a look as he began unhappily picking off pieces of meat from his slices. “You can’t have the TV downstairs. I called it.”
“We don’t even want the TV.”
“Good,” he replied, “just don’t bother me while you do your stuff tonight.”
Tim messily bit into a piece of ravaged pizza, as I saw Catherine’s lip quiver.
“Oh, we have lots of stuff we’re doing tonight,” I grinned wickedly. “We’re going to be dancing and doing makeup, and we’re going to be really loud tonight! And it will all be outside your room!”
Tim gulped. “Outside my room?”
I leaned in with an acid smile. “You know, we could paint your nails. Maybe we could even give you a makeover!”
Tim suddenly went wide-eyed. “Mo-o-o-m!” he wailed, running downstairs. Catherine and I giggled at each other. Our mirth was short-lived as Catherine returned to poking at her pizza absently. Eventually we grabbed her suitcase and headed down to my room.
“Just so you know, my room isn’t exactly cool,” I warned her as I led her to my bedroom.
“It’s fine,” she murmured distantly as I opened the door for her. She glanced around my utilitarian room, before setting her bag down on the floor. She sat on my bed, absently picking up the Butterfly Manifesto, which was sticking out from under my pillow. Panicked, I quickly snatched it from her hands before she could open it.
“I’m…sorry,” Catherine apologized as I held it protectively against my chest.
“It’s fine, it’s just…private, is all,” I explained, angry at myself that I didn’t hide it before she arrived. I shoved it in my bookcase, as Catherine’s eyes were already wandering around my room.
“That’s your guitar?” she asked. “You’ve mentioned it, but I’ve never gotten to see it before.”
I gave a reserved smile. When Catherine and I started dating in my previous life, music was the first thing we bonded over. At the time, I had just started teaching myself the guitar, and for months she begged to hear me play. Self-consciously I had always refused, but eventually she wore me down and was the first person I ever played for. The only person, really.
“Yeah, my grandma gave it to me.”
“Could I hear you play?” she asked, softly. It was just like how she had asked Matthew on our third date. I choked back on the memory.
“Sure,” was all I could muster. I could never say no to Cat.
She sat raptly on the edge of my bed, while I pulled the strap over my shoulder. I remembered the first time I fumbled through this song for Catherine, a lifetime ago. With a decade of practice under my belt, I was certain that “November Rain” would come out much cleaner this time. So I played it.
It was a tricky song to pull off on an acoustic guitar, but it was one that I knew by heart. I closed my eyes, feeling my way through the fingering and pushing through the déjà vu. I found myself gradually increasing the tempo as I lost myself in the song, but by the time I got to the famous riff, I heard Catherine quietly sniffling, and when I looked up I saw her hugging herself with tears running down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Catherine,” I said in a rush as I halted immediately.
She shook her head briskly. “No, Maya, you’re really good. It’s me. I’m just having a really hard time right now.” Another set of tears flowed out of her eyes.
I set the guitar aside, as I sat next to her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“It can’t be that bad,” I assured her. “You can tell me.”
Catherine turned away from me, hugging herself tighter. “It’s…it’s my…thing.”
“Your thing? What do you mean?”
“You know what.”
I was about to open my mouth, when the realization dawned on me.
“Oh. Oh! That!”
Puberty was something that lived in the back of my head, and something I very happily filed away whenever it came up. I remembered going through it when I was Matthew, but I only had a clinical perspective on what it was like for girls. There were always reminders that it was coming for me; tenderness here, soreness there, but as for the full ramifications of it I had only a vague notion that it was inevitable. It was easier to drown out the anxiety or ignore it.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” I half-hoped she didn’t.
“It happened yesterday,” she murmured. “I told my mom, but then she got the call about her aunt.”
“Does…it hurt?” I asked half out of concern, and half out of curiosity.
“It's kind of uncomfortable, like a stomachache, but lower. It hurts more today than yesterday.”
“Did it bleed?”
“It did yesterday, but I put a pad over it.”
“Ah, the sanitary pads,” I nodded. It was one thing I sort of knew about.
Catherine looked at me. “You know about the pads? Did you have your period too?”
I cleared my throat. “N-n…not yet. My mom told me about them a few months ago.” And I promptly disregarded her when she tried to explain how they work.
“I have to change mine when I go to the bathroom.” Catherine reached over to her bag and pulled out a flat, white packet. I leaned in closer to take a look.
She opened it up for my benefit, and despite having already seen one before I studied it, transfixed. Catherine explained that the soft part takes in the liquid, and the little wings folded down to hold it in place. I poked it, suddenly wondering aloud about how much it could absorb.
“What happens if it goes underwater?” I asked out of genuine interest.
Less than a minute later the two of us were huddled around the bathroom sink, watching it fill with water. After dunking it in, we discovered that it could hold a surprising amount. After the soggy mess started dripping all over the floor, we ran to the garage to throw it away in the outside trash can before either of my parents could see what we had been doing.
By the time we dashed back into my room, we were giggling madly and Catherine looked a lot better, even if she was a little tender. I felt like I was of no use to her when it came to biology, but at the very least I could take a song request.
“Can you play ‘Cherub Rock?’” she asked.
I was a little surprised. “How do you know Smashing Pumpkins? I didn’t think anyone did yet,” I said, trying to remember the year they debuted.
Catherine chuckled. “Maya, you told me about them months ago! I’ve been listening to them all summer!”
I laughed inwardly. It was funny; when I was Matthew I had completely missed Smashing Pumpkins growing up, and it was Catherine who introduced me to them when I was in my thirties. This time around, it was Maya who introduced them to her.
“I completely forgot about that! ‘Cherub Rock’ it is,” I smiled.
The rest of the evening was just as enjoyable as any other time we spent together in this new girlhood of mine. Eventually we turned on the radio, with Catherine showing me how to braid her hair as we gossiped about other seven-graders that we knew. Mom checked in with us as I was painting her nails a violent purple, and quietly smiled at me as she left us to our devices. All in all, it was no different than any other time we played together.
That night, Catherine slept next to me in my bed while I lay awake pondering my circumstances for the thousandth time. She slept on the right side of the bed, just like she had every night that she and Matthew had been married. I listened to her gently snoring, not able to decide whether it was rightness or wrongness that I felt with her next to me.
All I knew for certain was that my life was on a different trajectory now, and it was coming for me whether I wanted it or not.