Ruth stood, and that's when she noticed the dampness on her bottom. The toilet seat had been wet! Her mother had always warned her not to sit on other people's toilets, even those at her friends' homes. Men were supposed to lift the seat, but they never did. "Every man forget," her mother had said, "they don't care. Leave germ there, put on you."

Ruth thought about rubbing off the pee with toilet paper. But then she decided it was a sign, like a pledge of love. It was Lance's pee, his germs, and leaving it on made her feel brave and romantic.

A few days later, Ruth saw a movie in gym class that showed how eggs floated in a female body, traveling along primordial paths, before falling out in a stream of blood. The movie was old and had been spliced in many places. A lady who looked like a nurse talked about the beginning of spring, and in the middle of describing the emergence of beautiful buds she disappeared with a clack, then reappeared in another room describing buds moving inside a branch. While she was explaining about the womb as a nest, her voice turned into a flapping-bird sound and she disappeared into the cloud-white screen. When the lights came on, all the girls squinted in embarrassment, for now they were thinking about eggs moving inside them. The teacher had to call in a slouching, slack-mouthed boy from the audiovisual department; this made Wendy and several other girls squeal that they wanted to curl up and die. After the boy spliced the reel back together, the movie took up again, to show a tadpole called a sperm traveling through a heart-shaped womb while a bus driver voice called out the destinations: "vagina," "cervix," "uterus." The girls shrieked and covered their eyes, until the boy swaggered out of the room, acting proud, as if he had seen them all naked.

The movie continued and Ruth watched the tadpole find the egg, which gobbled it up. A big-eyed frog began to grow. At the end of the movie, a nurse with a starched white cap handed a googly baby to a beautiful woman in a pink satin jacket, as her manly husband declared, "It's a miracle, the miracle of life."

When the lights came on, Wendy raised her hand and asked the teacher how the miracle got started in the first place, and the girls who knew the answer snorted and giggled. Ruth laughed as well. The teacher gave them a scolding look and said, "You have to get married first."

Ruth knew that wasn't entirely true. She had seen a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie. All it took was the right chemistry, which included love, and sometimes the wrong chemistry, which included booze and falling asleep. Ruth was not quite sure how everything occurred, but she was pretty certain those were the main things that activated a scientific change: it was similar to how Alka-Seltzer turned plain water into bubbly. Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. That wrong chemistry was why some women had babies born out of wedlock, babies that were illegitimate, one of the b-words.

Before the class ended, the teacher passed out white elastic belts with clips, and boxes containing thick white pads. She explained that the girls were due to have their first periods soon, and they should not be surprised or frightened if they saw a red stain on their panties. The stain was a sign that they had become women, and it was also an assurance that they were "good girls." A lot of the girls tittered. Ruth thought the teacher was saying her period was due in the same way as homework, meaning it was due tomorrow, the day after, or next week.

While she and Ruth walked home from school, Wendy explained what the teacher had left out. Wendy knew things, because she hung out with her brother's pals and their girlfriends, the hard girls who wore makeup and stockings with nail polish dabbed over the runs. Wendy had a big blond bubble hairdo that she teased and sprayed during recess, while chewing gum she saved between classes in a wad of tinfoil. She was the first girl to wear white go-go boots, and before and after school she rolled up her skirt so that it was two inches above her knees. She had been in detention three times, once for coming to school late and twice for saying the other b-words, "bitch" and "boner," to the gym teacher. On the way home, she bragged to Ruth that she had let a boy kiss her during a basement make-out party. "He had just eaten a neopolitan ice cream sandwich and his breath tasted like barf, so I told him to kiss my neck but not to go below. Below the neck and you're a goner." She peeled open her collar and Ruth gasped, seeing what looked like a huge bruise.

"What's that?"

"A hickey, you dummy. Course they didn't show that in that crummy movie. Hickeys, hard-ons, home runs, it. Speaking of it, there was an older girl at this party puking her guts out in the bathroom. A tenth-grader. She thought she was preggers from this boy who's in juvenile hall."

"Does she love him?"

"She called him a creep."

"Then she doesn't have to worry," Ruth said knowingly.

"What are you talking about?"

"It's the chemistry that gets you pregnant. Love is one of the ingredients," Ruth declared as scientifically as possible.

Wendy stopped walking. Her mouth hung open. Then she whispered: "Don't you know anything?" And she explained what Ruth's mother, the lady in the movie, and the teacher had not talked about: that the ingredient came from a boy's penis. And to ensure everything was now perfectly clear to Ruth, Wendy spelled it out: "The boy pees inside the girl."

"That's not true!" Ruth hated Wendy for telling her this, for laughing hysterically. She was relieved when they reached the block where she and Wendy went in opposite directions.

The last two blocks home, the truth of Wendy's words bounced in Ruth's head like pinballs. It made terrible sense, the part about the pee. That was why boys and girls had separate bathrooms. That's why boys were supposed to lift the seat, but they didn't, just to be bad. And that was why her mother always told her never to sit on the toilet seat in someone else's bathroom. What her mother had said about germs was really a warning about sperms. Why couldn't her mother learn to speak English right?

And then panic grabbed her. For now she remembered that three nights before she had sat on pee from the man she loved.

Ruth checked her underwear a dozen times a day. By the fourth day after the movie, her period had not come. Now look what's happened, she cried to herself. She walked around the bungalow, staring blankly. She had ruined herself and there was no changing this. Love, pee, booze, she counted the ingredients on her fingers over and over. She remembered how brave she had felt, falling asleep without wiping off the pee.

"Why you act so crazy?" her mother often asked. Of course, she could not tell her mother she was pregnant. Experience had taught her that her mother worried too much even when she had no reason to worry. If there was something really wrong, her mother would scream and pound her chest like a gorilla. She would do this in front of Lance and Dottie. She would dig out her eyes and yell for the ghosts to come take her away. And then she would really kill herself. This time for sure. She would make Ruth watch, to punish her even more.

Now whenever Ruth saw Lance, she breathed so hard and fast her lungs seized up and she nearly fainted from lack of air. She had a constant stomachache. Sometimes her stomach went into spasm and she stood over the toilet heaving, but nothing came out. When she ate, she imagined the food falling into the baby frog's mouth, and then her stomach felt like a gunky swamp and she had to run to the bathroom and make herself retch, hoping the frog would leap into the toilet and her troubles could be flushed away.