Mirabelle only half believed what she had read on the toilet door at school, but she had gone so far now that she wasn't turning back; so toodle-hoo, and toodle-pip - she was going all the way, and that felt hip.
Mirabelle put the Vaseline on her lips and on the hairbrush handle too, and wiped her finger with a bunch of toilet tissue that she had secured from the bathroom on her way to bed from the loo.
Mirabelle spooled out a length of the cotton thread, and threaded both of the largest darning needles, sitting meekly upon a sagging edge of her cross-legged bed, with the same piece of cotton thread. She had her dark t-shirt over the lamp shade to cut out most of the light for her parents.
She tied the ends of it together so that the needles were threaded on the loop of thread just longer than the distance between her two.
She had felt in the tub that she was still sealed.
Mirabelle felt sad for robbing her future husband the experience of breaking through it, but it was hers and she wanted to do it.
It felt smooth and slightly elastic. When she pushed, it tingled and sort of burned.
She had sharpened the pencil at school, and used it for a while.
She was afraid of its newly sharpened sharpness. She tried to see it with a mirror on the floor and her father's flash-light from behind.
She couldn't see it.
It looked like a picture in a book at school she saw of an oyster out of its shell in biology, or a jelly fish she found on the beach when she was four, and poked with a stick for a long time.
The longer she tried to see the smooth thing in there, and pulled the workings about, the redder it all got.
It started out small and very pink, but now she was afraid of it.
It was deep red and swollen and two, sort of butterfly wings, dropped down toward the mirror now.
Everything went quiet around here.
The room disappeared around her.
Mirabelle could only hear her own breathing, and was only aware of the swollen red butterfly oyster jellyfish thing in the mirror. She was afraid again.
