My twelfth birthday arrived in May, marking two years of living as a girl in my new timeline. It was hard to believe I had changed so much, but the proof was in more than just my long hair and dresses. It was the way I talked and how I moved, not to mention how I acted. I was using the slang that girls use and was adopting a lot of female mannerisms. I wasn’t put off by it; on the contrary, it felt normal. I was having a much happier time in middle school than I had as Matthew with a full social calendar and a life filled with friends.

  However, despite the joy of my life as Maya, memories of my old life would often creep in. And in the days surrounding my twelfth birthday my mind often wandered to another twelve-year-old girl who was somewhere in Chicago. Matthew’s wife Catherine was out there, and I knew that every day she was heading towards a dark time in her life according to what I wrote in The Butterfly Manifesto. However, for the past few weeks I had been working on that particular project.

  It took the better part of a month to track down her address. I was able to get the library’s help in finding the number for the Chicago yellow pages, and since I knew Catherine’s maiden name and her parent’s names I was able to find their address. I confirmed it by making an extremely brief long distance phone call to the number listed. Her father answered, quickly confirming this was the correct house. With that was established, I went through several drafts of a letter to introduce myself, which a kid could conceivably write, and settled on this:

  Dear Catherine,

  Hi! My name is Maya Peterson, and I am a sixth grade student from Minnesota. I’ve always wanted a pen friend, and I got your address from my school. I hope that we can be friends. I go to Hoover Middle School, and my favorite class is Social Studies. What’s your favorite class? I also like to practice piano and I am taking dance lessons. I also really like to read and I watch movies a lot. What do you like to read?

  Here are some pictures of me. This is me at my dance class, and this is me playing on the piano in my room. I hope I hear from you soon!

  Sincerely,

  Maya Peterson

  I figured it was simple enough, and that receiving a letter was a big deal to a kid back in the day. I stuffed a few Polaroids of myself in the envelope, and hoped for the best. It was all up to her if she responded or not. I felt a pang of sadness as I dropped the envelope into the mailbox. The man Catherine would eventually marry would never exist, but at least she could have a friend named Maya. A friend that could be there to potentially offset the dark times that were coming in her life.

  In the meantime, I had a lot of friends, and got along well with most of my schoolmates. There were always activities and slumber parties with my various girlfriends, though I had never actually hosted one. There were moments that I felt like a pretender, but that was becoming less and less common, especially how saturated I was in everything going on in my new life as Maya. I simply hadn’t had the inclination to host one, but I figured my birthday would be a good reason to do so.

  “How many girls are coming?” Tim asked on the day of the sleepover, as I was clearing away the basement for the party.

  “Five.”

  “There’s gonna be five girls staying over tonight!?”

  “Well, six including me.”

  Tim groaned audibly. “Ugh, there’s gonna be six girls in the house!?”

  I flashed a wicked grin at him. “Yeah, and we’re going to be dancing and doing makeup, and being really loud tonight! All night! And it will all be downstairs just outside of your room! Won’t that be fun?”

  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 away. Within the hour he made plans to spend the night at his friend Tanner’s house.

  The girls started arriving around six o’clock with Erin arriving first from down the street. Carla and Danielle arrived together, and finally two girls that I had befriended over the school year named Amanda and Michelle were dropped off by their parents. Dad drove off to pick up the pizzas while we all socialized and proceeded to take over the basement. One of the girls brought some teeny-bopper CD that blared through the stereo, and though I pretended to enjoy it in my mind I bemoaned the fact that despite the great music released in 1993 we weren’t listening to that.

  Speaking of music we weren’t listening to, Danielle was the first to notice my guitar tucked away in my room. “Maya, I had no idea you played the guitar!” she exclaimed.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Oh, I got it for Christmas,” I said, sort of embarrassed. My guitar playing was a holdover from my previous life as Matthew. In Matthew’s timeline, I had taken up the guitar for several years as an adult, and I still had those years of practice in my head as Maya. It was something I did privately to pass the time; go through the classics or try to remember how to play songs that haven’t been written yet. Officially though, I had only been playing for the last 5 months.

  “Play something! Play something” echoed my other friends, who piled into my room. They swarmed me and I ended up sitting on my bed with the girls arrayed in front of me on the floor. I plugged in my amp and reached for a pick that was sitting on my shelf.

  “Okay, but just so you know, I’m not that great.”

  The girls ignored me and kept cheering me on. I took up my pick, and decided to play the solo I had been working on recently: “November Rain.” I don’t think the girls were expecting me to go that hard, and were immediately transfixed as I began to shred. When I was done, they sat still and stunned. It was Erin who spoke up first.

  “Maya, you’re a rock star!”

  Once the cheers and clapping calmed down, they started giving me requests. I wasn’t able to do all of them, but if they popped it into the CD player I was getting better at playing songs by ear. To be fair, it was pretty easy to impress my group of eleven and twelve year-old friends. After about a dozen or so songs, I begged them to let me have a break and it was only the offer of food that let me have a breather.

  We feasted on snacks and pizza, polished off with the cake that Mom and I had made together, and topped it off by opening my birthday presents. They were the typical sort of things girls received which I accepted gratefully. They may have just been stuffed animals and clothing, but admittedly I thought they were very cute. Once we finished eating, we watched a movie on the VCR followed by a flurry of board games. It’s a good thing Tim wasn’t here, because we probably would have found a way to torture him.

  As Erin was braiding my hair, I noticed that Carla was off to the side with her knees curled against her chest. She hadn’t really participated even when I was doing my one-girl guitar show and was sort of staring off into space. I figured something was up, so once Erin tied off my braid I approached her.

  “Hey Carla, are you okay?” I asked.

  She seemed a bit startled, but collected herself. “Oh, no, it’s nothing. I’m just not feeling well today.”

  “Are you sick? Do you want my mom to get some aspirin or something?”

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’m not sick,” assured Carla, who seemed suddenly embarrassed.

  The other girls suddenly tuned in, and it was Amanda who spoke first. “It’s not, you know what, is it?!”

  Carla suddenly went very red and buried her face into her knees. The chattering in the room immediately stopped.

  “It is, isn’t it?” shot Danielle. “It’s your, um, thing.”

  “Guys, don’t make fun of her!” snapped Erin as Carla started shaking a little. “That’s not very nice!”

  Amanda and Danielle suddenly got defensive. “I wasn’t,” they said in unison.

  “You shouldn’t tease,” Michelle piped in quietly. “You know it’s going to happen to all of us.”

  The silence was deafening, despite the happy music piping in from the speakers. There was an unspoken grim realization, and a fear inside of each of us. Even myself, who had the benefit of adult memories from my former life. I knew that periods were inevitable, but I had no idea what it would be like. I was actually terrified of it, despite my ability to rationalize it. I could only imagine what everyone else was feeling.

  It was Erin who spoke up first, as we all sat dumbly. “What is it like,” she asked Carla gently.

  Carla brushed her black bangs from her face. She sniffled a little. “It’s a little embarrassing.”

  Danielle touched her shoulder. “You don’t have to talk about it. But I promise not to make fun.”

  “Me too,” Amanda and Michelle intoned. I nodded with them.

  Carla shifted to sit cross-legged and hugged herself. “I don’t know. It's kind of uncomfortable, like a stomachache, but lower.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked Erin.

  “A little. It hurt more yesterday.”

  “Did you bleed?” asked Danielle.

  Carla nodded. “It was a few drops. But then I put a pad over it.”

  “What’s a pad?” asked Amanda.

  “It’s called a sanitary pad,” I explained. “You put it in your panties so that it doesn’t bleed into them.”

  Carla 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. But she got some for later and she told me how to use them.”

  “I have to change mine when I go to the bathroom.” Carla reached over to her bag and pulled out a flat, white packet. The girls leaned in closer to take a look.

  We ended up taking one from my bathroom closet and passing it around. I had already seen one before, but the other girls studied it, transfixed. They were probably trying to figure out how it was supposed to work, Carla explained that the soft part takes in the liquid. Someone wondered aloud about how much it could absorb, leading to all six of us huddled around the bathroom sink and dunking it in water. The answer was a surprising amount. After making a bit of a mess, Erin and I ran out to the garage in order to throw the bloated and leaking pad in the outside garbage can.

  By the time we got back, the girls were laughing and smiling and even Carla looked a lot better. Being a girl may have been a hassle, like being shorter and weaker while dealing with biology that was literally a pain. But times like this where we supported each other made it…manageable. The girls turned up the music and started bopping to the music, though I sat with Carla as we simply watched.

  Later, as I lay in my sleeping bag among the pile of softly sleeping girls, I mused over my circumstances for the thousandth time. Boys wouldn’t hesitate to make fun of one of their friends if they showed any sort of vulnerability, and not for the first time was I delighted by being female.