Free Gawky by Margot Leitman

from the dangers of the white rock. Instead I felt like the girl who cried crack pipe.
    I spent the rest of the cleanup dragging my feet and hanging out with the practically-out-of-the-closet-musical-theatre-loving kid. I don’t think he was truly all that interested in making me his #1 BFF after all, but at least he was polite. I found a few Rolling Rock bottles, but I had seen my parents drink those at their wild New Year’s Eve parties each year; they were nothing to get excited about.
    The rest of the afternoon was just as uneventful, and I went home disappointed.
    The next few times I hung out with Amanda, I refused to watch Airplane ! and insisted we work on our homoerotic dance routines instead. Amanda liked Airplane ! because her mom had it on VHS and it had real boobs. But I couldn’t handle it anymore; the horrible letdown of the beach cleanup had made watching Airplane ! with its Beach Cleanup Lady-esque female lead nothing but misery.
    A few months went by. Then, one day in school, I felt an unusual pain in my stomach. It was almost the end of the day, and I didn’t want to go to the nurse’s office because she always took my height and weight even if I just needed a Band-Aid. With stomach cramps like this, the last thing I needed was to learn that I had grown even one-quarter of an inch more since I had been there last week for a much-needed ice pack after hitting my head on the classroom bookshelf. I toughed it out until the end of the day and slowly walked home. When my mom came home about an hour after I did, she quickly deduced that I had gotten my period for the first time.
    â€œYou’re lucky you didn’t bleed all over your peach pants,” my mom said. “I know this is difficult for you, Margot. Probably none of the other girls in your class have their periods yet, but I think you’re more mature. Aren’t you lucky to be tall?”
    My mother, at five foot nine, was always reminding me how lucky I was to be tall. All her reasons were equally sucky— You’ll always look older than you are. You can wear men’s pants! Shop in Big N Tall stores! No need for a stepladder ! But none were as sucky as pretending that it was a gift to get your period before your classmates. I sat in the wicker chair unable to hide my pout. My mom looked at me and said with compassion, “Well, sweetie, what do you want me to say?”
    I suddenly realized that my mother, who had spent a lifetime crying over nonsense like season 6, episode 113 of Laverne & Shirley , didn’t quite have the perfect recipe to make me feel better when something upset me. While I could quell my mom’s tears by telling her that Laverne and Shirley would always be best friends at heart even though their lives were going in a new direction, my mom did not have quite the same knack for succinct, calming words of wisdom. Instead she kept trying her best, saying, “It’s fine. You’ll be fine, sweetie.” She put the kettle on, as she always did at 4:00 PM , her all-American New Jersey version of high tea. Contrary to what various Maggie Smith characters had told her throughout theyears, tea did not solve everything. My father had now been reduced to an all-hot-chocolate hot-drink diet in a protest against my mother’s tea addiction. He was a little old to fake being allergic to tea, but I could tell he wished he could. When my dad’s mother passed away, I had never seen so many used tea bags lying around the kitchen sink. My mother downed the tea like an Irishman downing whiskey at a wake.
    The teakettle whistled, as she slowly and methodically prepared the black tea in her sterling silver Cartier teapot engraved with someone else’s initials, another of the free castoffs we got from my grandmother’s job. She looked over at me, her too-tall daughter sulking in peach pants at the kitchen table. “Well, is there anything I can do for you?”
    I looked up,