Megan was having trouble keeping a straight face, so I glared at her.

Granny measured and weighed me again. Still 5'7", but I'd lost a couple of pounds. I might have to go back to lifting weights which I hated. My temperature, blood pressure and pulse rate seemed to satisfy her.

Then she got personal. "Have you started your period?" she asked.

"No," I answered sharply. She made a noise like a chicken clucking.

"Doctor thinks you will sometime in the next week to ten days," she supplied. "Any cramps, bloating, swelling of your ankles, mood swings, migraines, low back pain?"

"No," I said again. "What's with the catalog?"

"Just stuff you can expect."

Megan was having trouble keeping a straight face, so I glared at her.

Granny looked contrite if Megan didn't. "Sorry about the bimbo at the desk using the wrong name. We're keeping your records under Jill Hunter for the moment. But Quirkney didn't get the memo."

"Quirkney?" I repeated.

"The girl at the desk," said Granny. "How about you, Megan?" she asked, looking at her great-granddaughter. "Do you know when your next period starts?"

Megan nodded. "Probably the 13th, like next Wednesday or Thursday?"

"You pretty regular?"

Megan nodded sort of sideways. "Pretty regular. Always less than thirty days, sometimes as early as twenty-five or twenty-six."

"Mmp," said Granny. She turned back to me. "You'll have to work out your own calendar. And since you're a jockette," she snorted, "be aware that exercise can delay the arrival of your period, but that doesn't mean you get to skip the fun part."

Ice seemed to be melting on my head and running ice water down my back.

"She means PMS, the pre-menstrual stuff she listed," Megan supplied.

"All of it?" I tried not to let my voice creak.

They laughed. "Everyone's different, and every time can be different." Granny amplified the thought. "Don't worry. You've got twenty or thirty years to get used to it."

The old lady seemed to be enjoying my discomfort, but she moved toward what seemed like it might be a connecting door to another room. "You two sit out here while I go help Doctor get ready for your ultrasound. And Miss hunter, take off your clothes and put on this gown, opening in the front again."

"Hah!" I grunted—damn gown. "I don't want to do this," I said to Megan.

"You don't have to," she said.

I looked at her suspiciously.

"You're eighteen, Petey. You're a grown… person. You don't really have to do anything you don't want to. You don't have to wear this gown. You don't have to go to school. You don't have to play football. You don't have to take care of yourself or let other people help you." She picked up the gown and handed it to me. "Put on the gown, Petey, even though you don't have to and you don't want to."

I sighed and started by kicking off my shoes. As I took off each item of clothing, Megan folded them neatly and put them in a cabinet. I'd been naked in front of Megan before, so it was embarrassing but not fatal.

Finally, I stood there in the gown with the opening in the front. I pulled it closed and tied the three little strings that kept it that way. From somewhere, Megan had produced a pair of pink flip-flops that were close to my size. Normally when I wear flip-flops, they are enormous, flapping around on my feet and making me sound like the ghost of Jacob Marley's pool boy.

Megan came close and gave me a squeeze and a giggle. I returned the squeeze.

Someone knocked on the inner door, and Granny's voice asked. "Gowned?"

Megan and I both answered, "Yes."

Granny came through the door then held it open for both of us to enter. Megan's aunt, Dr. Verre, greeted us. "Good to see you, Miss Hunter, Margaret." I blinked. Megan's real first name is Margaret, and I knew that.

But this was an office with a desk, bookcases, and diplomas hanging on the wall. There was an examining table too, and Dr. Verre said I should sit there.

I climbed up on the table and crossed my legs to keep the gown decently closed. On the counter next to the table sat a machine that looked like a cross between a welders rig, a vacuum cleaner and a television set.

"I've been trained with the machine," Dr. Verre said, "so I'm going to do the ultrasound myself. That way, we don't have to involve a technician in keeping confidences."

I felt a bit of relief at that, a worry I didn't even know about gone. I smiled and thanked her, and she called me Miss Hunter again.

Dr. Verre had me get up and lie down on the examining table, with a blanket under me and one each across my legs and my upper chest. Then she spread a clear sort of slime on my middle and lower abdomen. "This won't hurt," she said, "but the sonic jelly always feels cold."

She was right about that. She spread the cold jelly with a thing like a Dremel tool that made a sound like one, too. She worked and talked at the same time, not looking at what she was doing but at the television screen that was angled such that I couldn't see anything except fast-moving shadows.

"We got your lab work back, Miss Hunter," she told me. "Everything was nominal or within norms. You seem to be a remarkably healthy young woman, in fact." She flashed me a grin with a hint of Megan's kind of mischief to let me know that she knew that wasn't as reassuring as it would be to someone else.

That made me swallow hard. Then she hit a ticklish spot, and I forgot all about it. Trying not to laugh made it come out as giggles, and that set Megan off, sitting in the chair behind Dr. Verre's desk across the room. Granny snorted, and even Dr. Verre chuckled.

"It never fails," she commented. "The most interesting places are the most ticklish, and I keep having to come back and press harder."

That almost got a squeal out of me, but I caught my breath and held a hand over my mouth. "Almost done, dear," she murmured.

She pressed some buttons, and across the room, a Xerox machine came to life and soon was printing out pages that looked like a Rorschach test conducted by moonlight.

"That wasn't so bad," Dr. Verre offered a bit of professional sympathy.

Behind her, Megan piped up. "I didn't feel a thing, Aunt Louva," which made us all laugh.

I guess the thing in the corner was a laser printer. Dr. Verre and Granny grabbed the printouts and sorted them while I climbed down off the table, and Megan and I moved to the chairs on the visitors' side of the desk. Keeping the gown closed was a pain, but I again managed by crossing my legs which seemed to amuse Megan for some reason.

I felt vaguely clean but sticky below the waist and was again plotting how to get a shower in the school locker rooms when Dr. Verre sat across from me and began going through the images she had taken of my insides. They were all gray on gray blobs with curved upper and lower edges and straight diagonal sides.

"I want to show you some things," she said. She used a pen as a pointer. "That lighter gray background is your pelvis; this dark shadow is your uterus, this smaller one your bladder. This knobby blob is an ovary.: She pulled out another shadowy sheet. "Here's your other ovary, both quite normal looking. The loops above the ovaries are your tubes."

I didn't know if I wanted to be shown this stuff, but I could not seem to look away.

She pointed at a cylinder shape and a sort of bright ring. "Your vagina and your cervix, which is the opening to your uterus. If you ever have a baby, it will have to come out through that little ring which is about as big around as a thumb right now." She paused. "Fortunately, the cervix is quite elastic and can stretch to be several inches across."

She went on, and a curious thing seemed to be happening. Her voice got further and further away, and I started losing the thread of what she was saying. "These are your uterine muscles," I barely made out. "They're what flex and contract and cause cramps when you have your period."

I heard Megan say a long, drawn-out, "Ohhhh," beside me, then Granny said, "I think we lost her."

It got very dark and noisy, like the inside of a thunderstorm. Something poked me in the back, then Megan asked, "Petey?" as I slid out of the chair and onto the floor.