I was in the bathroom at school and I was about to have a cigarette, when it occurred to me that I also needed to change my tampon. It was really cramped in the stall, and I had a tough time getting the proper items out of my backpack since I had nowhere to set it down. Finally I finished switching tampons, but when I came out of the stall all my friends were laughing at me. Somehow I’d thrown the new tampon away, and I was now smoking the used tampon! You can guess what happened to my cigarette!
My boyfriend and I were bowling together one night, and he was doing really well. After one of my turns, he went up to bowl again, but as he approached the lane, he slipped and fell on his back. He fractured his tailbone, crushed a vertebra, damaged his spine, and broke one of the fingers he’d had in the bowling ball. When I ran up to see what was the matter, I realized that my period had started, and I’d dripped blood all over the floor, causing him to slip. Talk about embarrassing!
I was out at a cafe with a bunch of my friends one night, and one girl had brought along her new boyfriend. He was telling us lots of really funny stories, and we couldn’t stop laughing. At the end of one especially funny story, I laughed so hard that I knew I had to go pee, but just as I jumped up from my chair to leave, I lost control and a big wet spot showed up on my pants. Since I was standing up, everyone saw it! Just then my period started and I bled all over myself, too.
My pals and I were at the library one night debating the merits of Joyce’s Ulysses, and I was about to contest the claim that Joyce’s use of stream-of-consciousness writing was fundamentally different from Virginia Woolf’s. But right in the middle of my example, I mixed up Stephen Dedalus and Richard Dalloway. My friends burst out laughing, and my face went bright red! I was so humiliated. Then, just as I was about to correct myself, my bloody pad fell out of my shorts.
I was having a fight with my boyfriend one night when I grabbed a hunting knife in a fit of rage and slit his throat from ear to ear. Still not satisfied, I stabbed his chest repeatedly, then busied myself slicing the skin from his face. Then my mom called me down to dinner and I went, forgetting that I was dripping with blood. When my dad saw me and my blood-covered clothes, he laughed and said, “Looks like your period’s come a bit early this month!”