Even after having it explained to her, Ana didn't think it made any more sense than it had before all of this crap had started happening. She'd been told countless times that getting your period was special and something wonderful and magical but she didn't think anyone had actually meant that last one literally. At least, not until she noticed the stain on her underwear while sitting on the toilet pondering life (as one does while sitting on the toilet; it was a shame men could only do it half of the time they were in there) and suddenly she became indestructible, or something.
Somehow, she was pretty sure things like that weren't meant to happen, otherwise that weird group that came to her school that one time in first year talking about traffic accidents and shit wouldn't have told them all that story about that girl whose shoelace got trapped in the bus doors and she got dragged along the ground until all the skin on her back came off. Menstruating girls and women were apparently just as mortal as everyone else. Which was maybe more than a little surprising – how many other people could you think of who could bleed for a whole week without going a wee bit dry?
(Anyway, that traffic accident thing hadn't been a very informative or helpful talk, to say the least. She'd actually preferred the one about condoms in the girls' changing room right before P.E. You know, the one where bananas were brandished and everyone was mildly mentally scarred. At least that had been somewhat useful... to the girls in her class who were convinced that becoming sexually active as soon as possible was their long-term goal for succeeding in life. One of them had already dropped out of school after getting chlamydia, or pregnant, or something along those lines. Ana couldn't pretend that she'd really been paying attention to all the rumour that had been going around.)
Well, otherwise, Ana hadn't thought too much about having what were essentially routine bloodletting sessions for the next forty-plus years; at least, not past the general reaction of 'oh my god what do I do MUM SERIOUSLY I AM YELLING!! Pay attention to my predicament, woman!' most girls were confronted with when this event occurred. At first, everything had seemed generally normal, other than she seemed to be seriously injuring herself on a significantly smaller basis. She didn't... really think that was all that normal, especially considering she was constantly having her phone fall on her face or her camera falling on her feet because she put it too far out on the edge of the desk for recordings or getting papercuts from trying to put up posters on her walls too dangerously and other things along those lines.
And then her hymen reappeared. And that was just creepy.
Ana knew it wasn't meant to be there, for one; it had pretty clearly broken after a couple of horse-riding lessons she'd been given for her birthday (it hadn't suited her lack of patience, so she stopped going after she no longer had to) when she was nine, and it wasn't like she had never bothered to 'check', as it were.
But there it was, an almost mockingly regrown blockade. Ana really wasn't sure whether to be terrified or just plain confused or even really freakin' angry, because... just... what the everloving fuck? She poked at it again, just to make sure. Ugh, that felt so weird and disgusting and wrong. But uh, going to the GP or something to ask about it seemed a little extreme. It wasn't like she was going to die of a horrible disease or something, right?
She went and Googled 'regrown hymen' just to make sure. It wasn't very informative, other than to tell her that they certainly didn't just magically regrow like cress on a wet facecloth. Unless she'd had surgery she'd somehow forgotten about.
Great. One utterly nonsensical possible explanation and no other leads. So Ana got back up, pulled her panties back up and searched around the room for ten minutes wondering how on earth she managed to lose her jeans when she'd only been wearing them five minutes previously until she decided she was bored and wanted to touch herself instead of doing her English homework, and headed downstairs to consult the almighty bank of knowledge that was her maternal figure.
“Mum! Guess what?” she called, rather creepily cheerful considering the situation, jumping the last step on the staircase and seeing if she could leap the distance between the end of the staircase and the kitchen door now (she still couldn't; dammit, she wished her legs would grow, too).
Oh. She wasn't in the kitchen. Well, that was an unexpected turn of events, Ana thought, frowning and glancing around the room as though her mother were about pop up from behind the fan-assisted oven at any moment. Apparently not. That just ruined every 'women should stay in the kitchen' joke she'd thought up on the way down the stairs then. What a waste of valuable time and energy that was! Psht, she'd have to save them up to abuse her own gender another time, she decided, bouncing back out of the kitchen and back through the hall, passing the wide fan-shaped mirror as the centrepiece on the wall.
She stopped at it, and looked at her reflection. Her face looked perfectly normal and nothing out of the ordinary (other than she'd managed to smudge her eyeliner again; maybe she should try out liquid eyeliner and see if that fared any better), at least not how she'd seen it before anything annoying like puberty happened; same straight nose, same lips only slightly too wide for her face to be in perfect proportion, same mud-brown eyes and hair... yeah, she was just about the same as she'd always been. Except maybe for that haircut she'd gotten last week, since her hair now had layers cut into it and the ends curled neatly over her slowly-growing chest. Her mum had called it 'budding', for some bizarre reason (she always had a ton of gardening-related puns on the go, it seemed), but if that was true then she was probably going to be stuck with stupid buds forever. It wasn't like anyone in her family who didn't have the unfortunate addition of a penis had anything bigger than a B-cup. She didn't exactly have high hopes for her growing body, seeing as she was still just stretching to five feet tall and had all the curves of one of those shatterproof rulers they had at school. Rulers were useful, but not really so much as a body shape.
It was like she was stuck in a child's drawing of herself.
