Tomorrow I Become a Woman

Chapter 1: The Last Ordinary Morning Wren burned the toast again. She knew it before she smelled it, the same way she'd known it every morning this week — a beat too long staring at nothing, and then the smoke curling up off the pan like it was disappointed in her. She scraped the black off into the slop bucket for the chickens, who didn't seem to mind, and put the next slice on, and waited for her mother to say something about it. Delia didn't say anything about it. That was how Wren knew this week was different from every other week of her life. Her mother had opinions about toast. Her mother had opinions about the proper way to slice an apple, and whether butter went on while the bread was still hot or after, and she had never once, in seventeen years, let a burnt piece go by without at least a raised eyebrow. This morning she just sat at the table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, staring at the middle distance, and didn't notice the smoke at all. "You're doing the thing," Wren said. "What thing." "The thing where you go somewhere else behind your eyes and I have to say your name twice to get you back." Delia blinked, focused, and something almost like her normal self surfaced for a second — a tired half-smile, the kind she gave when she was trying to be funny and didn't quite have it in her. "I'm allowed to have a morning." "You're allowed. You're just bad at hiding it." Wren sat down across from her with the least-burnt slice of toast and no butter, because they were nearly out and her mother hadn't been to market in four days, which was its own kind of tell. "Tam wet the bed again last night." That got her mother's full attention, guilt sliding fast across her face. "He didn't say anything." "He wouldn't. He's ten, he thinks it's shameful. I changed the sheets before he woke up so he wouldn't have to know I knew." Wren picked at the crust. "He's been sleeping on the floor of my room three nights out of the last five. Says he has bad dreams. He won't tell me what they're about." "Wren — " "I'm not asking you to explain Tam's nightmares. I'm telling you the whole house has been strange for a week and you've stopped correcting my toast and I think everyone in this family has decided not to say the actual thing out loud, and I'm tired of it." She hadn't meant to say all of that at once. It came out anyway, the way water comes out once you've pulled the stopper, and she watched her mother's face do several things in quick succession — hurt, then something that looked almost like relief, like she'd been waiting for someone to finally make her say it. "Tomorrow," Delia said quietly. "I know what tomorrow is, Mother. I've known since I was nine years old and Ivy's cousin's Rite happened and everyone brought casseroles for a week like somebody'd died, except she came back three days later a little quieter and nobody ever explained why the casseroles stopped feeling like congratulations." Delia's mouth pressed into a thin line. She reached across the table, not for Wren's hand, but for the plate, and buttered the last unburnt corner of toast and handed it back to her daughter like that could fix something. "Eat," she said. "Please." Wren ate it. It tasted like nothing. Everything in this kitchen had always tasted like something, and this morning it didn't, and that scared her more than anything her mother had actually said. Ivy Halloway found her at the well before noon, arms crossed, chin up, in the particular stance she used when she'd already decided to be angry about something and just needed a target to point it at. "You look terrible," Ivy said, by way of greeting. "Thank you." "I mean it. You look like you haven't slept, which, fine, understandable, but also you've got flour on your sleeve and burnt-toast smell in your hair and I need you to tell me the actual plan, because if the plan is 'walk into the woods and hope for the best' I am going to lose my mind in front of the entire village and you know I will do it, I have no restraint." "There's a stranger in town," Wren said, which was not an answer, but it was the truest thing she had. Ivy's arms uncrossed. "The one asking about the wall names? Mrs. Halloway's been talking about nothing else, she practically fainted with joy, we haven't had gossip this good since the miller's wife ran off with the — never mind. What about him." "He thinks the Rite isn't what everyone says it is." "Everyone in Hollow Bend has thought that since approximately forever, Wren, we just don't say it at the bread counter." Ivy's voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word, and Wren realized with a lurch that her best friend — loud, sharp, endlessly, performatively unbothered Ivy — had tears standing in her eyes that she was refusing, through sheer will, to let fall. "I've known you since we were four. I taught you how to whistle. I am not — I refuse to be the girl who stands at that tree line tomorrow night waving you off like it's a nice send-off, Wren, I refuse, and I don't know what to do instead, and it's making me so angry I could scream, and I hate that the only thing I can do is be angry at you for something that isn't your fault." Wren didn't have anything clever to say back to that. She just pulled Ivy into a hug that smelled like the Halloways' bakery, flour and yeast and the particular warmth of someone who'd loved her stubbornly and specifically for thirteen years, and held on longer than either of them was used to holding on for. "I'm not going in there without a fight," Wren said into her friend's shoulder. "I promise you that much." "You'd better not." Ivy pulled back, swiped roughly at her eyes with the back of her wrist, and was already reassembling herself back into someone sharp and dry-eyed by the time she let go. "Now. Tell me about this stranger. Is he handsome. Mrs. Halloway said he had a coat, which in this village is basically a marriage proposal." Despite everything, Wren laughed — a real one, short and surprised out of her. "He's asking about a dead relative, Ivy." "I can be sad about that and ask if he's handsome. I contain multitudes." She found him at the chapel wall an hour later, exactly where the whole village had already told her he'd be, standing with his hands in his coat pockets like the cold had gotten into him days ago and never quite left. He wasn't handsome exactly, Wren thought — his nose had clearly been broken once and set slightly crooked, and there was a thin white scar through one eyebrow that made him look like he'd walked into more door frames than the average individual. But he had a face that seemed to be working something out, all the time, like a man doing arithmetic behind his eyes, and when he turned and saw her standing there he didn't look surprised. He looked like he'd been doing the arithmetic about her, specifically, since yesterday. "Wren Ashworth," he said. "You remembered." "I remember most things I don't want to." He glanced back at the wall, at the row of names with nothing carved after them. "I'm looking for someone" My aunt. She'd be here — assuming your village tells the truth about what happens to the ones that don't get back." Behind them, up in the tower, the bell began to ring the hour, ordinary and unbothered, the way it had rung every hour of Wren's entire life. She had one day left of pretending that the sound was ordinary too. "My name's Wren," she said, though he already knew it, because it seemed like the kind of morning where you started over and told people things they already knew, just so they'd be true out loud. Something shifted behind his eyes — recognition, and something sadder underneath it. "Of course it is," he said, quiet, like a man confirming a fear he'd been carrying a long way to have confirmed.