One week before my thirteenth birthday, my first period arrives. I can’t say I’m totally surprised. My body has been sending me signals for months: dreams, cramps, and the feeling that something important was about to happen.

It’s where it happens that comes as a shock: on a Southern California freeway. 

I’m seated behind my father and next to my younger brother, who is asleep on the seat next to me. Dad is driving us home from a trip north. For the last two years, our family has been in a state of flux; sometimes we stay with Dad, sometimes with Mom. Right now, my brother and I are with Dad, and our youngest brother is with Mom.

I lean forward and tap my father on the shoulder. “Dad,” I whisper, not wanting to wake my brother. “We need to stop.” My father jerks, as if startled from a deep sleep. This is how he drives: with total focus, completely absorbed in the task.

“Why?” he asks, eyes on the highway.

I hesitate, not sure how to answer. This goes beyond simply stopping to use the bathroom. I need things—sanitary napkins, a place to clean myself up. My mother—but she’s not here.

“Um,” I say, “I just started my period.”

My father sits up in the driver’s seat, now fully alert. “Oh. Wow. OK, we need to find a store.” Dad speeds up before pulling off at the next exit. He screeches to a halt in front of the nearest convenience store. “I’ll be right back,” he tells me. 

I feel the blood leak into my underwear. I hope it won’t stain my new jeans. I’ve watched my mother try to get bloodstains out of her own clothes. As I wait for my father to return, I remember my mother telling me how, when she and my father were first married, she would send him out to buy pads for her. “He wasn’t the least bit embarrassed,” she said in a tone of wonder. “He told me he was proud to do it. It showed he had someone he cared about.” 

While the past two years have been deeply upsetting, at this moment, I know Dad will do the right thing.

A few minutes later, Dad returns with a package of Kotex, hidden in a brown paper bag. He clears his throat. “There’s a restroom around the corner,” he says, gesturing toward the back of the store. I take the bag and find the restroom, which has one stall with a broken lock. My father stands guard outside.

I open the package of Kotex and pull out the enclosed elastic belt. There are no instructions, and it takes me a while to figure out how to put it on. I remember my mother telling me that when she was a teenager, she used cotton pads held on with safety pins and soaked the used pads in buckets of water. “Between my mother and four sisters,” she once said, “there was always a bucket full of pads.” 

Finally, I pull the belt up over my legs and secure it around my waist, threading the pad’s cloth ends through the loops that hold it in place. My underwear is stained a rusty brown. A deep, primal, iron-tinged odor rises from the blood. I pull up my jeans. The pad feels snug, a little pillow tucked against my private parts, as I’ve been taught to call that region of my body. 

I open the bathroom door, eyes lowered. I follow Dad to the car, waddling slightly, the bag in my hand, wondering if people can see the pad bulging from my pants. 

After we’re both seated, he meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. “All OK?”

“Yep,” I say, feigning nonchalance, as if life-altering events like this happen every day. 

I feel the pad shifting under my bottom as I pull the seat belt over my budding breasts. I glance at my brother, still asleep, still a child at age ten. A wide chasm has opened between us. He has no idea that his sister has just turned into someone who can have babies.

As Dad steers us toward the on-ramp, I lean back in my seat, amazed. Something incredible has happened. Soon I’ll see my mother and tell her about it. For now, I’m steadied by my dad’s calm, easy-going manner and my brother’s even breath. For now, we’re out here on the highway, traveling full speed ahead.