The Sex Talk

Warning: This is a “NSFM” story – Not Safe For Men. You have been warned.

I was about seven or eight years old when I first saw a partially balled up, bloody maxi pad in the trash bin. I immediately ran into my mom’s bedroom, bin in hand.

“Anyu, Anyu! Who’s BLEEEDING?” I said waving the garbage towards her face.

“Oh…uh…I sat on a nail at vork by accident,” she said, wringing her hands and pacing around the room. “So now I bleed all the time and I need a special tissue to catch it.” She grabbed a few tissues from her nightstand, threw them over the bad, and grabbed the trash bin from me. “Don’t tell anyvon, it’s shameful!” I believed her and forgot about the whole incident. It wasn’t until 6th grade that her little white lie became a big problem.

It was the first marking period of metal shop. We were making big useless metal key-chains or something when I felt a really weird, warm feeling on my seat. I stood up, looked down at the chair, and saw that it was completely covered in blood.

“I must have sat on a nail by accident,” I thought. I desperately tried to wipe the chair with a tissue I had in my pocket, but it just made the situation worse. I looked around at the classroom full of students and decided to hide the chair in the back of the class under an old table between massive piles of scrap metal. The teacher spotted my suspicious activity and walked over.

“What’s wrong, Stephanie?”

“Uhh…can I go to the nurse?” I whispered while tying my jacket around my waist.

“For what reason?

“Uhh….” I wanted to tell him, but I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, “Don’t tell anyvon, it’s shameful!”

I made up some excuse and made the walk of shame to the nurse’s office, clutching the sleeves of my jacket to my stomach with all my might. It was made of that horrible hot pink early 90’s ski-jacket material, so it kept on slipping off and exposing my shame. As I repositioned the jacket for the hundredth time, I looked up I saw something pinned to the door of the nurse’s office.

“Out to lunch, be back in an hour.” It was 12:15 p.m.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked over to the principal’s office. The meanest secretary in the world, Mrs. Deemie, was sitting at the front desk.

“Yeeees, can I HELP you?” she snapped, not even looking up from her paperwork.

“Um, the nurse isn’t in the office and I have a problem.”

“Well, then you have to wait.”

“But it’s an emergency…”

“What’s the emergency?”

“Um…” I looked around at the office full of administrators and blushed. I walked closer to her and said, “’There was blood all over my chair, Mrs. Deemie and….”

She looked up at me for one second. “Oh.” She reached around in her drawer for a second and handed me fifty cents. “Go to the faculty restroom and clean yourself up.”

I was completely baffled at how fifty cents could help me with my situation, but since I always obeyed authority figures in my youth, I took the money and headed towards the door. As I reached for the handle, Mrs. Deemie proclaimed, “Oh, and Little Miss? I’m going to need to take your name down and what class you were in when you got blood all over your chair. I’m going to need to send in a janitor to decontaminate anywhere you sat.”

The entire office turned around. My face turned redder than the seat of my blood-stained pants. I filled out the form awkwardly, still clutching my ski jacket and fifty cents in one hand, and scurried down the hall as fast as I could.

I entered the faculty restroom, praying for a miracle. I was hoping for some sort of pants vending machine or blood-extraction apparatus, but instead, there were just a bunch of normal toilets and sinks. I spotted a vending machine in the corner with a sticker that said “50¢”. There were no other words or symbols, other than a picture of some sort of cylinder thing on the left and some sort of rectangle thing on the right. I realized that the square resembled the special napkin that my mother uses to catch her nail-blood! As I inserted my money into the machine, I wondered how many women all over the world had to use these napkins because they had accidentally sat on nails. I turned the metal handle, heard a click sound, and a metal coin sound. I felt around at the base of the machine, jiggled the handle, and looked on the floor; the machine took my money and gave me absolutely nothing.

It was at this point that I started to feel a bit woozy, so I got into a stall to “assess the situation”. When I pulled down my pants and saw the sheer volume of blood that had accrued, I immediately turned to the toilet and threw up. After about fifteen minutes, I felt a little better, so I snuck back to the nurse’s office. She still wasn’t there. Painful menstrual cramps had started to kick in, so I went back to the lady’s room. I didn’t know what else to do, so I sat on the toilet and cried. Thirty minutes passes…forty…an hour. Eventually, I heard someone come into the restroom.

“Hey, who’s in there?” she asked as she heard my sniffing. “Are you okay?”

“My bottom is bleeding and no one will help me,” I whimpered. “Am I going to die?”

Through some magnificence power of persuasion, the teacher convinced me to come out from the toilet, convinced the secretary to call the nurse, and found me a nice bed covered in exam table paper so I wouldn’t mess up any more furniture. As laid on the bed, clutching my stomach, the teacher stroked my hair and asked me a very important question, “Stephanie…do you know where babies come from?”

“Yes. My Nagymama told me that kissing a boy puts a baby in your belly , then you get fat, and you poop the baby out of the bottom of your foot.”

She sighed, sat down next to me, and gave me a very brief, but graphic and accurate description of “the birds and the bees.” In the background, I could hear the nurse attempting to communicate with my mother on the phone, “No, she’s not in any trouble. No, she’s didn’t do anything. She just needs to go home from school…”

Eventually, my mom showed up with an extra pair of pants and a maxi pad the size of the Hoover Dam. I curled up in the back seat of her old station wagon and we road silently home. After taking some medicine and napping in my bed for a few hours, I decided to get up and play a little “Sonic the Hedgehodge 2” to pass the time.

My mom stood in the doorway for about a minute, watching me play the game. Eventually she said, “Stephie…I need to talk to you about something…”

I paused the game and looked up at her. “Yes, Anyu?” Most people avoid “The Sex Talk,” but I wanted answers! Why did Nagymama and Anyu lie to me? What’s the deal with this “penis” thing that people keep mentioning? Why the do restrooms have tampon machines if they never work? Also, what the heck is a tampon anyway?

Anyu furrowed her brow, pointed at me and said, “You get pregnant, I f*ck you up.” Before I could open my mouth, she turned around, went back to her room.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I went back to playing “Sonic”. We never spoke of “The Birds and The Bees” again…but at least I manage to defeat Dr. Robotnik.

Graphic by Michal Zacharzewski