Free The Queen of Everything by Deb Caletti Page A

seriously veering away from each
other, my mother and I, after I got my first
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    period. It was when I first thought she might
be crazy. Or at least so far away from where I was and needed her to be that she
might as well not be in my life at all. It was not an easy time. I mean, not a
year before it was still fun to poke the cups with your finger when your mother
went bra shopping. Then suddenly, you've got all the guys at school snickering
about hooter harnesses and over-the-shoulder boulder holders with the same
nervous giggles people get when they go to funerals and serious stuff like that.
And just when you think, Okay, the breast business stinks but I can handle
it --boom. More than anything, you can use a little casualness, a little
humor. Someone to laugh with about those advertisements for pads with
wings.
    Instead, my mother took me to the doctor, which
was fine except that Dr. Mary's nurse was a guy named Larry, who looked like a
construction worker. Larry wore tight jeans and had a red too-much-beer face and
looked like he should have carried that squishy blood-pressure thing in a tool
belt. When he asked what we were there for, I started blushing like crazy and I
wore that blush the rest of the day, throughout Dr. Mary's talk about my developing (like I was, maybe, a roll of film), and all during the
menstrual-cycle celebration I had to endure back home. Picture me with a wreath
of baby's breath stuck on my head and in a circle around me, Miss Poe
and
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    Mom and Janey from the marimba school and Mom's
friend Bea Martinson, who had tried for years to be a lesbian, except she
couldn't do the sex part. All of them holding glasses of sparkling cranberry
juice in the air and making goofy toasts and Mom with a limp daisy stuck in her
buttonhole and happy eyes like I'd just won the lottery or something. Miss Poe
spiked her own juice and got rip-roaring drunk and poor Hugh Prince wouldn't
look me in the eyes for a week. I wondered why Mom didn't just rent a billboard,
or better yet, paint Jordan's first period on the island's old oil tank and tape
on a few red balloons.
    I thought she'd lost her mind. She was
disappointed I wasn't more enthusiastic. Let me tell you, when my mother said,
"Close your eyes, Jordan, I have a surprise," and took my elbow as we stepped
from the car after the doctor's visit, I somehow wasn't expecting a period party
complete with a cake that said, welcome, woman.
    Not quite a year later, Nathan became more than
a boarder, something I only found out when Mom dropped the news that she was
pregnant. The whole thing turned my stomach. I'd spent the last few months at
school hearing about Ovary and Uterus, which if you ask me, sound like a couple
of gossipy old spinster ladies who refuse to drive themselves around anymore.
Now I was face-to-face with not only
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    them, but Fetus. Why they call babies something
so unfriendly I will never know. Fetus is the kind of word that comes to
mind when you think of aliens or cousins marrying, not when you think of
babies.
    "We're having a commitment ceremony," my mother
said.
    "I thought only gay people had those," I said.
I'd had enough of her ceremonies.
    That look again. And two weeks later, me with
another bunch of flowers stuck to my head, standing out in the meadow, wind
whipping our dresses in a column around our legs as Reverend Lee from Big Mama's
church said hocus pocus and waved his hands over our heads as if he were a
magician whose costume just happened to have a white rectangle on the
throat.
    I thought they'd write their own vows, the long
mushy type you see on soap-opera weddings, but they stuck to the traditional
ones. At "I, Nathan, take you, Claire," Nathan's jaw started to quiver and my
mom grasped his hand and squeezed. At "sickness and health," his eyes filled and
his voice caught, and by the time he got to "until death us do part," the most
he could do was wave his hand at Reverend