My Period Was a Sickness. My Aunt Is the Cure.
The Foundry Academy had a special kind of hell reserved for girls.
It was called the Grit Test.
An eight-hundred-meter run designed to forge character, or so the brochure claimed.
For me, Ayla, and Jenna, it was just torture.
“Mr. Keane,” I said, my voice barely a whisper against the sharp wind whipping across the athletic field. “We can’t run today. We’re… not feeling well.”
I used the code, the one our old health teacher, Ms. Adler, had taught us back in public school. The quiet signal for when the world inside your body turns into a war zone. Period cramps.
Mr. Keane, young and kind-eyed, nodded with an understanding that felt like a glass of cool water in a desert. “Go on back to the dorms, then. Rest up.”
We were halfway back when Ayla Dunn, pale as a ghost, stumbled. “I can’t make it to the dorms, Tess. It’s too far.”
“The classroom, then,” Jenna Carmichael suggested, her own face tight with pain. “It’s empty during electives.”
It seemed like the only option.
A sanctuary.
We were wrong.
Sanctuaries don’t exist at The Foundry.
Only crucibles.
§02
We had been in the supposed safety of Ms. Harding’s literature classroom for ten minutes when the door creaked open.
It wasn’t a creak.
It was a judgment.
Ms. Lorna Harding stood in the doorway, her shadow falling long and cold across the floorboards.
She was a woman built from sharp angles and disappointment, the senior literature teacher who believed suffering was the only true path to enlightenment.
Her eyes, small and hard as river stones, swept over the three of us.
“Well, well,” she began, her voice a low, menacing purr that always preceded a storm. “What have we here? The three little mice who couldn’t run.”
Jenna flinched, instinctively pulling her knees to her chest.
“We… we felt sick, Ms. Harding,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Sick,” she repeated, savoring the word like a piece of bitter chocolate. She took a slow step into the room, the door clicking shut behind her with an air of finality. “That’s a convenient word, isn’t it? A catch-all for laziness. For weakness.”
She stopped in front of my desk, leaning in so close I could smell the stale coffee on her breath.
“Your gym teacher, a young man too polite to question a girl’s delicate sensibilities, told me you claimed to be unwell. But I passed the athletic field on my way here. And I heard a different story whispered among the boys.”
Her lips curled into a sneer.
“A story about cramps. About your monthly… inconvenience.”
The air in the room turned to ice.
“So,” she hissed, straightening up and surveying us like a hawk circling its prey. “Let’s have the truth. Are you sick, or are you just bleeding?”
§03
The silence that followed her question was thick and suffocating.
Jenna started to cry, silent tears tracing paths down her pale cheeks.
Ayla, who looked like she might faint at any moment, just stared at her hands, her knuckles white.
“I asked you a question,” Ms. Harding snapped, her voice cracking like a whip.
“It’s… it’s true, Ms. Harding,” Ayla whispered, her voice trembling. “My stomach hurts. Really bad.”
“Oh, it hurts?” Harding’s tone was mocking, dripping with theatrical pity. “The poor, delicate flower. Does the pain of being a woman prevent you from the simple task of putting one foot in front of the other?”
She picked up the massive Norton Anthology of American Literature from a nearby desk. It was thick enough to stop a bullet.
“I’ve had my period for thirty-five years, girls. Do you think I don’t know what it feels like? It’s a mild discomfort. An excuse. And at The Foundry, we do not tolerate excuses.”
With a sudden, violent movement, she slammed the anthology down on the desk right next to Ayla’s head.
BAM!
The sound exploded in the quiet room.
We all jumped. Ayla let out a small, terrified squeak.
“You are here to be forged into leaders,” Harding seethed, her face flushed with a righteous fury. “Not to coddle your minor biological functions. You think the world stops for a little blood? You think a boardroom will postpone a meeting because you’re feeling bloated?”
She pointed a long, bony finger at Ayla.
“You, Dunn. You will tell me you are a liar. You will admit you tried to shirk your duties. Or would you prefer I call the school nurse to come in here and conduct a… physical verification?”
§04
The threat hung in the air, grotesque and invasive.
To be subjected to a physical inspection, to have her privacy violated in the most humiliating way possible, all to prove something so deeply personal.
Ayla looked up, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and disbelief. “No… please, no.”
“Then speak the truth I require,” Harding commanded.
But Ayla was starting to fade.
A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on her forehead, and her skin had taken on a grayish, translucent quality.
She was breathing in shallow, rapid pants.
“I… I can’t,” she stammered, clutching her stomach. “I feel… dizzy.”
“Oh, the dramatics,” Harding sighed, rolling her eyes. “Now we add fainting spells to our repertoire of female hysterics.”
She turned her attention to me and Jenna.
“And you two. Her loyal enablers. You think this little performance will earn you a pass? Today, the Grit Test was eight hundred meters. For the three of you, it is now five thousand.”
Five thousand meters. Three miles. It was an impossible distance for a healthy person on a good day.
For us, in our current state, it was a death sentence.
“You will run it now,” she declared. “And if you refuse, you will not set foot in this academy again. I will personally see to your expulsion.”
She grabbed two more heavy textbooks.
She threw one at Jenna.
It struck her in the face, the corner cracking against the bridge of her nose. Jenna cried out, covering her face as blood began to trickle between her fingers.
The other book hit me square in the gut.
The impact was like a physical blow from the inside out. A hot, sickening wave of pain radiated through me, and I felt a sudden, terrifying gush of warmth between my legs.
I doubled over, gasping, the world narrowing to a pinpoint of agony.
Ayla, seeing what was happening, tried to push herself up from her chair.
“We’ll run,” she choked out. “We’ll…”
She never finished the sentence.
Her eyes rolled back in her head.
And with a soft, boneless slump, she collapsed onto the floor.
Unconscious.
§05
“For God’s sake, get up,” Harding sneered at Ayla’s limp form on the floor.
“She’s faking it. Pathetic.”
“She’s not faking!” I yelled, struggling to straighten up against the fire in my own body. “Her lips are blue!”
Jenna, cradling her bleeding nose, scrambled over to Ayla and frantically shook her shoulder. “Ayla? Ayla, wake up!”
There was no response.
“I said, get up!” Harding took a step toward Ayla, raising her foot as if to kick her.
That’s when Jenna did something none of us, least of all Harding, expected.
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