“Sharks”

by Eloise Lindblom

Laura was 13, and she had not yet conquered tampons. Neither had she conquered saying out loud, even to her friends, even to Rosie, who was ostensibly her best friend, that she had her period and didn’t know what to do because they were at the beach. Didn’t they say blood attracted sharks? Didn’t they also say your period basically stopped in water? She had always been too scared to take a bath with her period so she didn’t know for sure. At the hotel, before they walked down to the water, she removed her pad from her bathing suit bottoms—black, thank goodness—and stood up from the toilet, imagining she could already feel blood gushing. (When she had cut her finger while slicing cheese for a sandwich last year, she had then, too, imagined it was gushing blood. Wrapped in a paper towel, she refused to look at it, imagining rivers, until her friend Diana’s mom, a nurse practitioner, had examined it and found it unmarked but for a little sliver of wrinkled skin.)  

As she followed her two friends out to the boardwalk, towel wrapped firmly around her waist, she watched them talk about a hermit crab they had seen in a store and what flavor of donut to eat for breakfast the next day. What freedom, what enormous freedom of mind to be able to skip rocks over thoughts like that. Laura licked her lips and thought she tasted blood. What if she were tracking bloody footprints all the way from their hotel? Terrified, she looked back, but there was nothing there. 

“I’m so fucking tired,” she heard a sunburnt woman in a bikini say to her friend. Laura stared at the woman’s crotch. Shaven pubes, that was for sure. Was she hiding a tampon string under those immaculately blue bikini bottoms? If she was, was she so immune to its presence as to be able to groan about being tired instead of being entirely preoccupied with her menstrual blood, or the fact that there was something actually actively inside her vagina, soaking it up?

Her friends were already laying their towels down, and Laura rushed to catch up with them, laying her towel at the end of their row. Her towel was red-striped, which meant that she had to make sure she only sat on the red stripes, in case she bled on it. But as soon as her towel was down, she was up, and running—but carefully running, holding her thighs together as much as possible—to the water. 

“Wait up!” Rosie called to her, running up behind her. “You’re never first in the water, what’s up with you?”

“I’m just so hot!” said Laura, squatting so that she was submerged up to her torso.

Rosie raised her eyebrows at her and splashed her hard. “Cool enough now?” she laughed, as Laura spat out saltwater. 

Laura didn’t answer, wondering, as she spat, whether that water had had any of her blood in it, and what it meant if she took it back in. Blood and salt were not that far apart, taste-wise. It could’ve been in there. She could still feel it gushing.

“Sharks,” she said.

“What?” said Rosie. 

“Gotcha!” yelled someone, grabbing Laura’s arm from behind. Laura yelled and spun, feeling another gush, and fell over, knocked by a wave, her head going under for the first time.

When she emerged, Rosie was bent over laughing, and Diana was there laughing too, looking superior. 

“Oh my god, I’m gonna pee!” said Rosie, and Diana shrieked and jumped away. 

Laura clamped her thighs together and smacked Diana lightly on the arm. “That wasn’t funny,” she said.

“Sorry, but it really was,” said Diana. 

They stayed in the water a while, but the others wanted to work on their tans for the first time this summer and got tired of jumping over waves spread-eagled like superman. Laura followed them reluctantly out, hoping enough blood had come out in the water that she would be safe for a little while on the sand. 

A group of boys of about their age had been boogie boarding and eyeing them covertly from the water. When the girls got out, so did they. Laura wasn’t scared of them, not quite, she just blushed deeply every time she talked to a boy, that was what she felt. She could see gleaming in the shine of the sun the hairs that stood out on their arms. None of them had periods. Maybe they had hard-ons sometimes, though, she knew about those from Judy Blume, but the thing is that didn’t impede you from going to the beach, did it. Their little penises bobbed carefree under their trunks and they probably hardly had to think about them at all. 

“Let’s take pictures!” Diana suggested, and she and Rosie sprang up, phones at the ready. 

Rosie jerked her head at Laura, trying to get her up to join them, but Laura was afraid to move from her safe spot on her red-striped towel. 

“Come on,” Diana said, pulling her up by the arm. 

As she rose, Laura felt a gush, and she crushed her legs once again tightly together. She stood awkwardly as her friends posed for pictures elaborately, their legs flying apart easily with nothing to conceal between them. Laura stood in the pictures straight like a stick.

The boys were looking, more obviously now, and some of the girls were looking back. Laura stared stubbornly away but she couldn’t help every once in a while looking over out of curiosity and perhaps jealousy. 

They started walking over. There were a lot of them, maybe five or eight, no use counting, they all looked alike and it would get too confusing too fast. They were laughing at something. When were groups of boys not laughing at something? You just had to hope it wasn’t at you, but you’d always think it was. Laura glanced around at her friends and saw that they, too, were eyeing the boys warily now. 

As they got closer, Laura because more convinced they were laughing at her. One said something that sounded like “bloody” and it was like a nightmare: turning her gaze slowly downward, she saw the worst. A thick stream of blood was running actively down her left leg. It was bright, dark against her skin, and extremely noticeable, obviously. She breathed in a quick gasp of air.

Rosie, hearing this, looked over. Laura could only look at her, her face frozen. Rosie looked confused for a minute but then she looked down too and saw what was causing the gasp and the frozen face. She looked back at the boys, who by now had stopped walking and were standing nearby. 

She moved quickly, stepping in front of Laura. “What are you laughing at?” she asked, her teeth bared.

One of the boys stepped forward, and his white white smile stood out on his dark tan skin. “Your friend needs to check her va-jay-jay,” he said, pointing at Laura, and he and all the boys laughed.

Diana stepped forward too to stand next to Rosie. She narrowed her eyes. “It’s called…a VAGINA,” she shouted. 

Laura couldn’t help laughing. 

“And it’s called a PERIOD and my friend doesn’t need to CHECK anything,” 

“It’s called a period,” they mocked. “It’s called a vagina! You don’t even look old enough for a real vagina.”

“Old enough for a vagina?” Diana laughed. “You’re either born with one or you’re not. Anyway, why are you judging how old people look? I bet your balls haven’t dropped yet.” Laura was reminded of the fact that Diana’s mom was a nurse practitioner. 

This made several of the boys falter. 

“Leave us alone!” said Rosie, shooing them away with her hand.

Their force gave Laura courage to do something she had never done on purpose before. She reached down and swiped up a fingerful of her dripping blood.

“Watch out!” she shouted, waving her finger at the boys. “If you don’t leave us alone I’ll get my blood on you! I bet you didn’t know periods are contagious!”

At this, the boys ran flat-out until they were back in the water, where they glared at the girls, who glared back. 

“Do you need a tampon? I think I have one,” Diana said, rifling through her bag. 

“Um,” said Laura. 

“I’ve never used a tampon before,” said Rosie.

“Neither have I,” said Laura.

“Neither have I,” said Diana. “My mom just said I should carry some tampons and pads around with me for just in case.”

They both looked at Laura. “Do you want to try it?” asked Rosie.

“Not today,” said Laura, because today was a nice day and she didn’t want to spend any of it sweating and nervous in a humid and dirty beach bathroom. “Let’s just go back in the water.”

As they walked in, the boys ran out.