Free The Loud Silence of Francine Green by Karen Cushman

and tooted and thumped, "Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger!"
    "Feel it, Sophie," I shouted over the music. "Here." I touched my ears. "And then here," I said, pointing to my stomach. "And then here, in your feet. And you're dancing."
    "Francine, do you know how silly you look?"
    "I do not. I'm jitterbugging. I'm supposed to look like this." I grabbed Sophie's hand. "Come on, let's boogie-woogie."
    Sophie resisted as I tried to pull her up. "Let go. I don't

want to do this. I don't want to feel things in my stomach and my feet. Let go!" She jerked away and sat back on her desk.

    "Sophie Bowman, sometimes I don't get you at all. Won't you even try?"
    "Dancing is so ordinary.
Everybody
does it.
All girls
dance. I'm not ordinary, I'm not all girls, and I don't want to be."
    "You could dance in an unordinary, spectacularly individual way. Come on and try."
    I pulled her up and she moved around a little, her feet turning this way and that, her arms flailing as if she were chasing bees away. "Well, it's not pretty, but I think it's dancing," I told her.
    She stopped. "That's enough," she said as she flopped onto her bed.
    "I'm sorry I said that, Soph. You weren't doing so badly."
    "I am not about to wiggle around and have people laugh at me. If I can't do it right, I just won't do it."
    "What? The brave and fearless Sophie? Come on, take a chance." Holy cow, here I was telling Sophie to try to risk a little, instead of the other way around. What a surprise.
    "Listen, Soph, you won," I said. "We're not having the slumber party. But we
are
going to get you dancing. Now get off that bed and do what I do."
    We stumbled around for a while to the music, and I think maybe Sophie enjoyed it a tiny bit although she said it was just plain hard work. "I have to stop now," I finally said. "My mother is waiting for her aspirin, and besides, my stomach hurts."
    I started home at a run, but my insides kept cramping up. Food poisoning, I thought. Or more likely too many root beer floats.

    But it wasn't. Changing for bed that night, I discovered why my belly hurt and my blouses were too tight. I had gotten what my mother called "your monthly visitor" and Dolores called "the curse." It must have been all the bouncing around at Sophie's.
    My mother gave me a box of sanitary napkins, an elastic belt, and a booklet called "So You're a Woman Now" from the people who made Kotex. She brought me a cup of milky tea and stroked my hair. "You're getting so grown up," she said. "My little girl."
    I sipped my tea and thought. I had always thought that growing up, like dying, was something that happened to other people. Not me. Yet here I was.
    Getting my period seemed so final. It wasn't like hopscotch, where if you messed up, you could start again. Yesterday I was a kid, and today God poked me in the stomach and said, "You're grown up now, Francine. What are you going to do about it?" There was no going back.
    After everyone was in bed, I called Sophie. "Soph," I whispered, "guess what! I'm bleeding. I got my period."
    "Oh, ick. Poor you."
    "I don't mind. It just means that I'm growing up. Dolores seems to handle it without too many problems." I looked down at my chest. "And it does mean cleavage, you know."
    "Well, I'm never going to get my period."
    "Sophie Bowman, for such a smart person, you're dumb sometimes."

    "Who cares?" she said.
    "Good night, Sophie."
    "Good night, Francine."

13. December 1949
Meeting Jacob Mandelbaum
    From way down the street Sophie and I could hear his voice, roaring and thundering like the sea. "How can you say Irv Noren is a better hitter than Frank Kelleher? What a lot of hooey. That Kelleher, he's such a slugger, he has muscles in his
hair.
" The voice stopped roaring—to give someone else a chance to talk, I supposed—and then resumed. "Harry, my friend," it said, "you know baseball like you know cooking."

    "That's Jacob Mandelbaum," Sophie said as we walked up the path to her