he was named Chassie after her grandfather Charles who went by Chas, but because it was Detroit, everyone assumed she was named after a part of the automobile. The chassis is the frame, the part everything else is attached to, which is a good thing to be named for too, but the spelling is different.

Homonyms, she learned.

"Angels we have heard on high," the girls in the choir sang, "sweetly singing o'er the plains." The boys sang back at them: "And the mountains in reply, echoing their joyful strain."

From below the balcony, parents beamed up at them. The little angels! Chassie's mother wore her old fake fur jacket that was so soft Chassie wanted to press her face into it. "You're too old," her mother told her.

Then came the part where they sang "in eggshells she's day, oh!" This made no sense, but a girl in an eggshell! They all sang louder.

Eggshells all around, but no eggs, just the dry papery shells crunching underfoot like old snow, or school papers. And somewhere the girl who had escaped.

Chassie's only seven here, this January. Still a soprano. Not even menstruating. Not yet wearing a bra. Not sure what the differences between boys and girls mean.

Boys sing different parts in choir, play different games at recess, and they like to push girls down the hill in the playground. They give each other five and say, "My man." They sidestep the girls, but are fascinated with them, always trying to look up their skirts or down their shirts. There's nothing there, Chassie wants to tell them.

Once, during a field trip to the Henry Ford Museum, the boys and girls used the same bathrooms. Teachers ushered the boys through before letting the girls in, but some boys managed to engineer an overlap. Two of them blocked a door, one boy peeked under the wall from the adjoining stall and one stood on the toilet and looked over the top. Tracy kept peeing, looking from face to face in fury. They waited until she was done to get a really good look.

At recess, Billy Sansome ran from group to group yelling, "I saw Tracy's cunt!"

Tracy sat next to the wall playing the girl game where one girl spelled words on another's back and tried to get the person to guess. They didn't know what a cunt was.

Billy gave up when none of the girls got upset. He sat on the bench with the kid on crutches and described Tracy's cunt, memorizing it.

"It looked like a mouth," Chassie heard him say, "only sideways."

Chassie spelled "candy" on the back of the girl in front of her. The girl giggled. "Cunt?" she asked.

At home, Chassie and her sister Kate took turns looking at each others crotches, piecing together what they knew.

"So this is your butt," Chassie said, touching delicately. Kate, her legs stretched overhead, craned her head to make sure it was what she thought it was. "And this is the vagina." Chassie pointed vaguely at all that remained unnamed.

"Where does the pee come out of?" Kate asked.

Chassie studied. "I don't see any more holes," she whispered. "Why don't you pee a little and I'll see where it comes from."

"I can't pee on the bed!"

"We'll put something down," Chassie told her. "Here." She took a wad of tissue out of the box on the nightstand and shoved it under her sister's tailbone.

"Go ahead."

They both waited.

"I can't do it like this!" Kate brought her legs down but kept them wide apart so Chassie could still see.

"Just a dribble. You don't need to really go."

"Okay." Kate closed her eyes and concentrated. Chassie moved her head so its shadow wouldn't block anything.

"I see it! I see it! I see the pee hole!"

A tiny fish mouth opened and a golden droplet rolled onto the tissues.

Chassie started to point, but the pee kept coming.

"I can't stop," Kate said. She sounded like she might cry.

"Oh great," Chassie said, backing away. "Can't you just squeeze?"

"No," Kate breathed. "I'm trying but it won't work."

The droplets were becoming a stream, soaking through the tissue and onto the bed.

"Great, Kate!" Chassie reached for the box of tissues and shoved all the rest of them into the stream. Still soaked. Then she moved the empty box there and positioned it so the pee streamed into the opening from which the tissues used to spring. "Okay," she said. "Just pee into the box."

With that, Kate let go the floodgates and they both heard the pounding of urine against the cardboard. Kate sighed and opened her eyes.

Chassie held the box at arms length. "God, Kate, you really had to go." "We're not supposed to say God," Kate informed her, dribbling to an end. "God, God, God! The box is breaking!"

Chassie jumped up and ran toward the trash can, then away, then back towards the bed, urine seeping out of the corners of the box and running down her arms. From the bed, Kate laughed nervously.

Chassie ran to the window. "Get over here and open the window!" Kate did. "And the screen!" Kate did.

Below in the driveway, their dog ran circles and whined in excitement looking up at them. Chassie heaved the soggy box out the window and they watched the liquid stream out of it as it fell, then splatted on the pavement like a water balloon. The dog cautiously sniffed her way toward the box, wagging her tail in low, short circles like she did when she was in trouble.

In the shower, Chassie and Kate compared their developing bodies. Admittedly, they hadn't developed much, but should any changes occur, they would be on top of it. Secretly, Chassie was terrified that Kate's body would do something before hers.

"I call firsts," Chassis said primly.

"You always call firsts!" Kate whined.

"It's because I was born first," Chassie said, stepping into the water. The basement shower cubicle was big enough for them to take turns in the water. The one who started was done first, got her hair combed and dried first, and was sitting comfortably in front of the TV while the other scrambled so as to not miss the beginning of the night's program.

Kate stood in the dry spot contemplating the burden of her place in life. "You look fat," she said. "Your stomach is pooching out."

Chassie looked down. "What are you talking about."

She sucked in her stomach. "Well, you're sucking now," Kate said. "It was before, when you were standing natural."

"You're lying." Chassie turned her back and scrubbed her hair while studying the curve of her abdomen. She practiced flexing it in and out. Then she stuck it out as far as she could and filled her lungs with air.

"Look." She turned around. "I'm preggers."

Kate giggled and stuck hers out too. "Oh my back," she said. "Will you rub my legs for me, dear?"

"It's coming, it's coming," Chassie panted. She did the Lamaze breathing they'd heard their mother doing for months. "Phoo, phoo, phoo. Hold."

Behind her back she slipped the bar of soap between her buttocks and let it slip to the shower floor.

"My baby! Don't let it go down the drain!"

Kate reached out of the shower and grabbed a towel. "Here." She held it open and Chassie gently laid the bar of soap in it, wrapping the towel up like a receiving blanket and cradling it.

"What shall we call it?"

"Palmolive," Kate said and they both laughed.

"Girls!" their mother called from the top of the stairs. They went instantly silent.

"Let me have my turn, you waterhog," Kate whispered.

Chassie sniffed. On the mat she cracked open the bathroom door, tossed her wet towel, minus the soap, onto the laundry pile, and reached under the sink for a dry one.

She'd been getting dry towels from under the sink ever since she was old enough to take a shower by herself, and she'd never seen anything unusual in the cupboard. This time she found a glossy magazine with the picture of a naked woman water-skiing on the cover. She studied the woman's butt. Where on earth did people go water-skiing in the nude? Inside, well. It was a Playboy.

When Kate finished her shower she didn't say a word, but joined Chassie squatting before the cabinet and silently turning over the pages. Chassie held each page by the very edge, careful not to let her fingers or thumb touch any of the images.

"Gross," Kate whispered.

Chassie felt a tightening between her legs. "Look," she said. "You can see everything."

Different women in different positions. Dark nipples, large breasts, black women, blond women with golden pubic hair, tattooed hips, pink nipples, vaginas that looked slick and soapy. They had likes and dislikes. They read books. They looked happy, or else half-asleep.

"Put it away, quick," Chassie hissed. "The police are coming."

"The police?"

"Well, I don't know." She slammed the cupboard door. "But I think we're going to get in trouble."

Chassie sat on the toilet seat of the upstairs bathroom, her hair turbanned in a towel, her body zipped into her winter robe. At the sink, her mother sprayed No-More-Tears onto Kate's hair and tried to pull a comb through. Chassie didn't even notice she'd let Kate get away with going first.

"Mommy," Chassie said, "there are pictures of naked women in the basement bathroom."

Her mother stiffened. "Ow!" Kate said.

"Yes, there are," their mother admitted, and all three were silent for a while. "Why?" Chassie finally asked.

"Your father-" she started to say. Then she set the comb down on the counter and put a hand on her hip.

"Look," their mother said, "I've never kept anything from you. Well, except for birth control pills, and I don't know why I did that. I guess I didn't want you to think they were candy or something."

"What do birth control pills do?" Kate asked. Kate and Chassie looked at their mother's belly.

"Well," she said. "You have to use them correctly. Anyway, the pictures are for your father. He-" Chassie's mother leaned against the counter and shoved her fist into her back. "Whew," she said. "He's really moving around."

"Or she!" Kate said.

Chassie glared at Kate. "But why?" she asked.

"It's a thing men like to do," her mother said. "In the bathroom." She picked up the comb and began picking at a snarl in Kate's hair.

Chassie thought about the tightening she'd felt in her bowels and this bathroom thing began to make sense.

Her father did seem to take forever. Their mother was always telling them to whisper and not bother him, like when he fell asleep on the couch on weekend afternoons. Chassie's mother said he had hemorrhoids, which certainly sounded horrible enough to warrant silence.

"Okay, your turn, missy," her mother said.

Chassie unwound the towel and stood in front of her. Even though it sometimes hurt, she loved her mother combing out her hair. The hand on her chin or her shoulder to steady her against the tug of the comb, the spritzes of detangler. Her mother's belly pressed into her shoulders and Chassie held her head as still as possible even when it felt like her mother might pull a clump of hair out at the scalp.

She thought of the long hair on the women in the magazine, the different colors, skin tones, nipple sizes, pelvis shapes.

"Am I going to look like you when I get older?" Chassie asked. So many bodies. She wanted one that was familiar.

"Well you might, but you might not. You could be bigger or smaller. In fact, you look so much like your grandmother, you'll probably be blessed like she was up top."

Angels we have heard on high.

"I don't want to be blessed."

Her mother hoisted her belly up onto the bathroom counter and rested it there. She looked Chassie in the eye. "Whatever you develop into will be beautiful," she said. "You can't do anything about it, it just happens. But I want you to know that no matter what, you'll be perfectly lovely."

Chassie felt herself wanting to cry. She believed herself to be too old to cry without a very good reason. She cried anyway.

"But I want to look just like you," she sobbed, and her mother moved closer so Chassie could bury her face in the material of her silky nightgown.

"Shh," her mother said. "It will be okay."

Near the door, Kate sniffled, and then she began crying in the way she always did: a long wail followed by hiccups and sniffling. Totally undignified.

Her mother pulled Kate in with her other arm and stroked both of their faces. "My beautiful girls," she cooed. "Both so lovely in your own way." Chassie and Kate cried harder and harder and neither one of them knew why. Later in bed, Chassie lay staring at the ceiling and thinking. Beautiful? Truly?

She turned to Kate. "Do you suppose it's true?" she whispered. Kate was asleep. In the darkness illuminated by a blue nightlight, Chassie felt under her pajama top and rubbed her nipples. Nothing. Then she felt her crotch for any hair. Nothing there.

© Kristy Nielsen