Free Birthday Girls by Jean Stone

hi-fi.”
    Maddie said nothing.
    “A birthday party,” Kris commented. “Great. I’ll be sure to wear this dress.”
    • • •
    The party had been a success.
    At first Maddie was embarrassed that she’d worn her new Mousketeer T-shirt, the one with the box-lettered black stencil of her name across the front and the official Mickey Mouse Club emblem in red and black on the back.
    “Maybe we should call you Annette,” Kris said, referring to the lines of Maddie’s bra that showed through the thin cotton. But Betty Ann said Kris was jealous because she’d be wearing an undershirt for the rest of her life, and then Abigail laughed and said she was surprised that Betty Ann knew what bras were at all, seeing as how she was younger and had five brothers and all.
    They soon learned that Betty Ann knew about much more than that: her mother had given her a book called
Now You Are Ten
, and it told what was going to happen to them—all of them—that they would start bleeding from between their legs.
    Abigail said, “Impossible.”
    Maddie hadn’t heard anything like that either but was simply glad that the conversation had moved from her chest.
    “She’s right,” Kris announced. “It’s called your period and it comes every month.”
    Abigail looked skeptical and suggested it was time to eat.
    After chicken and potato salad and chips that they ate off gold-rimmed china with a fancy crest on the bottom, the woman named Louisa presented them with their cake. Maddie thought it was the perfect time to use her new camera, the kind with a timer. Everyone groaned except Betty Ann.
    “I love pictures,” she cried with that pixie-like grin that few people—even Abigail—could say no to.
    “Okay, let’s stand behind the cake,” Abigail ordered. “we should line up like Rockettes.”
    Maddie winced. She did not want to pretend to be a Rockette. Everyone knew she was too short. And too fat. But her friends fell into position, one knee raised, hands on hips, flat chests out.
    Maddie looked through the lens. “It looks boring,” she said. “Let’s make it more fun.”
    Without speaking, Kris smiled. Then she leaned over, scooped two pink-frosting roses from the edge of the cake, and pushed them into Abigail’s face.
    The hostess screamed.
    “Perfect!” Maddie shouted, set the timer, and raced around to be in the shot.
    Click.
    While the housekeeper muttered and cleaned up the mess, Betty Ann made her pronouncement about birthday wishes.
    “Please, please,
please
,” she begged the others. “Please let’s write down our birthday wishes and seal them in a bottle.”
    And because Betty Ann was Betty Ann and no one could say no to her, they wrote down their wishes and put them in an old milk bottle Louisa brought from the pantry.
    “Be careful what you wish for,” the woman warned. “It might come true.”
    The girls all giggled, and Maddie wrote down her wish, deciding that she liked her new friends after all.
    “By the time I’m eleven,” Maddie carefully wrote, “I hope I have filled an album with pictures of me and my friends.” Then she erased the last four words and wrote “my friends and me,” just in case her college-English-professor father ever read her secret birthday wish.
    • • •
    1960
    By the time they were twelve, it had become a tradition.
    “This is the most important year
ever
,” Betty Ann said as they clustered on the floor of Abigail’s bedroom, the milk bottle by their side, the slips of paper ready to accept their birthday wishes.
    “Why?” Kris asked.
    “Because next year we’ll be teenagers, and we’ll get to do whatever we want!”
    Abigail stopped herself from commenting that technically Betty Ann would not be a teenager for a year and a
half
. And that with her tiny size, she’d probably still pass for eight, ten at the most.
    “Can we have boyfriends?” Kris asked.
    “Well …” Betty Ann said quietly, “Sure. I suppose. But I was thinking more that we can