Vanderwerp in Term Two. “Maybe she’s offed herself!” Gina suggested, with no small amount of vicious glee. Although the staff never spoke about it, we knew Ms. Vanderwerp had gone away on stress leave. Mr. Abraham took her place, a towering man with an Easter Island face and gray hair in his ears. He walked into the classroom and gave us a look as if to say, go on, try the tampon trick on me. But we would never have done it to a male teacher, Linh. There would have been shame in pulling something like that on a man—but not a shame about hurting him, because men aren’t hurt that way. They are the ones who bond over poop- and piss-themed road trip movies, after all. It was the stigma of being female. We’d have been too embarrassed to hear a man rail about how disgusting our bodies were. I also found out why the girls called Mrs. Grey the Growler. Back at Christ Our Savior, although we had a bulging arsenal of multilingual profanities, we didn’t know Aussie colloquialisms so well.
