Blue Smoke

inside the room with its pink tub and tiles and pulled up her Ghostbusters T-shirt.
    Hot waves of fear rolled through her as she stared at the blood on her thighs. She was dying. Her ears began to ring. When the next cramp seized her belly, she opened her mouth to scream.
    And understood.
    Not dying, she thought. Not suffering from internal injuries. She had her period. She was having her first period.
    Her mother had explained it all, about the eggs, and cycles and about becoming a woman. Both her sisters had periods every month, and so did her mother.
    There was Kotex in the cabinet under the sink. Mama had shown her how to use it, and she’d locked herself in one day to practice. She cleanedherself up and tried not to be a sissy about it. It wasn’t the blood that bothered her so much, but where it came from was pretty gross.
    But she was grown-up now, grown-up enough to take care of what her mama told her was a natural thing, a female thing.
    Because she was no longer sleepy, and she was now a woman, she decided to go down to the kitchen and have some ginger ale. It was so hot in the house—dog days, Dad called them. And she had so much to think about now that she’d become. She took her glass outside, to sit and sip and think on the white marble steps.
    It was quiet enough that she heard the Pastorellis’ dog bark in that hard, coughing way he had. And the streetlights were glowing. It made her feel like she was the only one in the world who was awake. For right now, she was the only one in the world who knew what had happened inside her body.
    She sipped her drink and thought about what it would be like going back to school next month. How many of the girls had gotten their period over the summer.
    She would start to get breasts now. She looked down at her chest and wondered what that would be like. What it would feel like. You didn’t feel your hair grow, or your fingernails, but maybe you could feel breasts growing.
    Weird, but interesting.
    If they’d start to grow now, she’d have them by the time she was finally a teenager.
    She sat on the marble steps, a still flat-chested girl with a tender tummy. Her crop of honey-blond hair going frizzy in the humidity, her long-lidded tawny eyes getting heavy. There was a little mole just above the right corner of her top lip, and braces on her teeth.
    On that sultry night the present seemed absolutely safe, the future a misty dream.
    She yawned once, blinked sleepily. As she rose to go back in, her gaze swept down the street toward Sirico’s, where it had stood since even before her father was born. At first she thought the flickering light she saw in the big front window was some kind of reflection, and she thought, Pretty.

    Her lips curved as she continued to study it, then her head cocked in puzzlement. It didn’t really look like a reflection, or like someone had forgotten to turn off all the lights at closing.
    Curious, she stepped down to the sidewalk, the glass still in her hand.
    Too intrigued to consider just how her mother would skin her for walking out alone in the middle of the night, even on her own block, Reena wandered down the sidewalk.
    And her heart began to thud when what she saw began to filter through the dreamy sleepiness. Smoke poured out the front door, a door that wasn’t closed. The lights she saw were flames.
    “Fire.” She whispered it first, then screamed it as she ran back to the house and flew through the front door.
    S he would never forget it, not for all of her life, standing with her family while Sirico’s burned. The roar of the fire as it stabbed through broken windows, shot up in quick gold towers, was a constant thrum in her ears. There were sirens screaming, whooshing gusts of water pumping out of the big hoses, weeping and shouting. But the sound of the fire, the voice of it, overpowered everything else.
    She could feel it inside her belly, the fire, like the cramping. The wonder and horror, the awful beauty of it, pulsed there.
    What was it like inside the fire, inside where the firemen went? Hot and dark? Thick and bright? Some of the flames looked like big tongues, lapping out, curling back like they could taste what they burned.
    Smoke rolled, pluming out, rising. It stung her eyes, her nose, even as the whirling dance of flame dazzled her eyes. Her feet were still bare, and the asphalt felt like heated coals. But she couldn’t step away, couldn’t take her eyes off the spectacle, like some mad and