On the hill at the back of the schoolhouse, Lucia Tate had her very first kiss with her tall, freckled classmate Paul Holder. 

Her dear friend Joanne French had five older sisters (and one older brother, but he’s irrelevant right now) and used her knowledge of kissing to teach Lucia, who was the oldest of three girls and wasn’t educated on kissing or intimacy of any kind, how to do it.

“How was it?” giggled Joanne on their way home after the kiss. She looked over her shoulder to Paul as he walked home with his brother in the opposite direction, and Lucia hit her arm to turn her back around.

Lucia frowned. “Not good.”

“Don’t worry. When you get older you’ll get better at kissing so you’ll know how to do it better.”

“I don’t know if I want to do it ever again.”

“But you have to in order to have babies.”

“Babies?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Louise has had four babies already. Mabel has had two and Abigail is expecting one in a few months.”

“Are you going to have babies when you get to their age?”

“I don’t think I have a choice. Motherhood is our future, our destiny. We have no other option than to marry and bear children.”

“What is motherhood like?”

Joanne’s face twisted up like she had bit into a lemon. “Swollen stomachs and labor pains and sacrifice and crying infants swaddled in blankets that grow up to be boys who abuse women who were abused to create them.”

Lucia’s face paled. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what I’ve seen.”

“That sounds awful.” 

As a child, Lucia idolized her mother. She watched her every move and wanted to be just like her. The thought that she was where Lucia had come from and who she had the possibility to be was thrilling! But as she got older she began to realize that her mother was not as perfect as she thought. She was flawed and her smile was fake. She saw her mother’s resentment of her and how much she was jealous of her youth. She wasn’t meant for this. Lucia was everything her mother could’ve been and she was everything Lucia was going to be. 

“Sh*t.” She breathed.

Joanne nodded. “I want to be so many things. I want to do so many things. See so many places, try new experiences. I want to leave here and see the world. But I know I should not hope, because sooner or later, they will come along to thwart my dreams if they haven’t already. Lucia, tell me, when you look in the mirror, what do you  see?”

“A girl.”

“I see a monster.”

Which was worse?

“It’s horrid and deformed, like out of a nightmare. I see the sorrow and suffering of the thousands of women in my family before me that shaped my bones, the maternal chains around my hollow pelvis, and the train of once-blooming indigo flowers behind me wilting. My mother and I, we’re connected. Not just by blood, or because we have the same eyes and hair and color. We also have the same memory of pain. To give and give and give but yet get nothing back. To sail your love so vastly all around the earth while nobody picks up a paddle for you. To extend your ready-to-bleed hands to the thorns and not have anyone prick their finger for you. To watch her carry the weight of the injustice with nowhere to put it down and finally understand why storms are named after people.”

It was silent for a moment after Joanne stopped talking. The wind picked up around them sending a chilly shiver down their spines, and she pulled her jacket tighter around herself. When she looked at her friend, her shoulders were shaking and she was wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

“Lucia, what are you doing?”

“Crying.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think I was meant to be a daughter. I should’ve been a butterfly.”

“One day,” said Joanne, watching as the tears swam adrift in Lucia’s lost eyes, “we’re playing with dolls, all young and soft with honeyed skin and soft curls running free, and the next we’re Persephone ripped away from her loving mother by Hades. And once the Demeters are awakened we have seasons of anger and depression and grief because how else are we supposed to express the church bells in us, gonging day in and day out? How else are we supposed to handle the boat, rocking and roaring in the waves of our minds? How else are the poems in us going to get written, the tears to cry, the choir to sing? How else is my girlhood going to be believed if I don’t tear Olympus apart brick by brick and beg the gods myself for life?”

“I don’t want to grow up.”

“Neither do I.”

“I wish I could pause time.”

“Me too.”

She broke out into tears again. “Oh, this is a tragedy. Just this morning I was giddy with excitement at a chance to be older and see the real world. Now I’m too confused and I feel sick. I need to go kneel at my mother’s feet and cry for her forgiveness.”

“Well, I need to eat.” said Joanne. Her cavernous stomach gurgled with the sound of underground thunder, but that wasn't what she meant right now. “I’m starving. This hunger is not in the body, but the soul, and it’s killing me. I can’t take the weight anymore. I need a crutch to stop it from crushing me and then I need to sleep a while so my transition won’t be as painful.”