The Bluestockings: Chapter Seven
The One Where Eleanor Becomes a Woman 🩸
Welcome to The Nook! The Bluestockings is my latest novel, which I’m releasing in serial form one chapter at a time. These posts are free for you to read, but they were not free for me to produce. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or purchasing your own paperback/Kindle copy of The Bluestockings. Thanks for being here!
Catch Up On Previous Chapters: Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Eleanor
The first time Eleanor heard Ruby Hurst’s name, she was five years old and sitting in Sunday school, wedged at a too-small table between Sarah McIntyre and her twin sister, Miriam. Their teacher was reading the story of Abraham, whose wife little Sarah, felt compelled to remind the class was her namesake, and it was during that moment when Eleanor caught a glimpse out the window of a tall older woman in a cobalt blue hat and suit striding outside the sanctuary. Eleanor thought she looked like the delphiniums that grew in her grandparents’ garden, stretched towards the sky in one long line of color, and she pressed into Miriam’s side as she watched the woman.
“Hey!” Miriam protested. “Stop leaning on me.”
Eleanor shrank back into her seat, chastised, but raised her hand. Ms. Emily, her Sunday school teacher, paused in her lesson, the shock of a raised handwritten on her sweet, young face. She called on Eleanor.
“Who is that woman?” Eleanor asked with a pointed finger towards the window. Ms. Emily approached their table and peeked outside, where the woman in blue was now speaking with Pastor Arwen, her face scrunched in a way that reminded Eleanor of her mother when Eleanor refused to put her toys away.
“Erm,” Ms. Emily mumbled, “That’s Ruby Hurst.”
“Who is she?”
“Her family founded our little town.”
“Oh,” Eleanor breathed, not quite sure what that meant but certain by the way Ms. Emily said it and by the fancy clothing Ruby Hurst wore, her hat bobbing in time with her finger pointed in the pastor’s face, that she must be of some importance. “She looks angry.”
Ms. Emily watched out the window for a moment longer and then pulled the flimsy white drapes together. She turned to face Eleanor and her friends. “Well, that’s none of our never mind,” she said with a thin smile, “so let’s get back to Abraham.”
But Eleanor had little thought to spare for the patriarch of her faith or the felt cartoon characters Ms. Emily displayed on the colorful board in the front of their classroom. Eleanor wanted to know more about the matriarch of their town, the woman in the bluest blue who possessed so much grit she’d made their pastor flinch and clutch his Bible with white knuckles.
So when Ruby Hurst welcomed Eleanor and Maggie into her sanctuary, Eleanor could scarcely believe their luck. Ruby was much older these days than when she had last seen her, but she remained as elegant as Eleanor remembered. Her thick, silver hair was pulled into a low ponytail, which revealed large diamond studs in her ears. That and a simple platinum band on her right hand were the only pieces of jewelry she wore. Ruby looked every bit the queen of her realm standing there in the center of the Hurst library. Thousands of books encircled her with their stories, just the way Bluestocking’s did Eleanor. Although, Eleanor thought to herself with a frown, their collection wasn’t nearly as magnificent.
Upstairs in Maggie’s bedroom, Eleanor pulled out her laptop and turned to Maggie. “Okay, I’ve got some ideas about how to help Bluestocking. Most of them are just social media, but I think a few well-timed reels will help us.”
“Totally,” Maggie agreed, pulling out her phone. “But you’d have to use your dad’s phone for that.”
“It’s fine,” Eleanor replied. She clicked on a document and scanned the page. “He won’t care if I use it for the business.”
“We’re going to need more than a few reels to raise enough money to save the store, though,” Maggie said, her fair eyebrows knit together in concern. “Do you guys have author meet-and-greets? Readings? Book release parties?”
“A few,” Eleanor answered, tapping the keys of her laptop. “But they cost money, too. We had a couple of mystery writers come in October for a Halloween-themed event. There are a lot of those types around here. Savannah is literally a ghost town. Every place has some story about a haunting.”
“Oooh, I love that!” declared Maggie. “Do they do tours?”
Eleanor smirked at her friend. “Do they? You can ride in an actual hearse and eat in an actual pirate house. It’s the best.”
“We are so doing that,” Maggie said. “But after we save your family’s store. Any other ideas?”
Eleanor thought of Agatha’s suggestion that she convince Ruby to come into the store. A bold move and a terrifying one at that. Eleanor couldn’t picture grumpy, stubborn Ruby Hurst coming to town just for their shop when she actively avoided town anyway. Unless they told Ruby exactly why they wanted her to visit in the first place.
“There is one thing,” Eleanor murmured, not convinced of the words tumbling around in her brain.
“What?”
“The bakery owner, Agatha—,” Eleanor began.
“Oh, this will be good,” Maggie interjected.
“—said we should ask your aunt to come.”
Maggie frowned. “Why? What would Aunt Ruby be able to do?” Eleanor looked at the floor. “Agatha thought if we could get her to show up and tell people she’d been there, then maybe more customers would start to come in.”
Understanding dawned on Maggie’s face. “Oh,” she said. “I get it. Kind of like a celebrity sighting.”
Eleanor smacked a palm to her face. “It’s so dumb, I know. I’m sorry I even brought it up.”
“No, no,” Maggie replied, tugging Eleanor’s hand away from her face. “It’s actually sort of brilliant. I mean, I doubt Aunt Ruby will be up for it, but it couldn’t hurt to try.”
“Do you think we should just tell her why?” Eleanor asked, worry knit between her brows. “Your aunt doesn’t seem like the type of person to do anything unless she has a good reason.”
Maggie chewed on her thumb. “Let’s do it,” she answered after a beat. “I think we’re on her good side now, you especially.”
“Me?” Eleanor asked.
“Yeah, you. You with the Little Women obsession and the falling out over Aunt Ruby’s library. She probably wishes you were her niece now.”
Eleanor gave her friend a playful shove. “Whatever,” she said.
Maggie shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me. You can pretend to be her niece, granddaughter, or long-lost cousin four times removed, so long as it keeps her mood somewhere above Voldemort.”
Eleanor cracked up. “She’s not that bad.”
“Again, with your Little Women obsession,” Maggie replied, holding a hand up to her cheek and fluttering her eyelashes. “‘What little girl doesn’t want to grow up to be Jo March?’”
“It’s your fault for not reading one of the most beloved classics of all time,” Eleanor shot back. “You’re lucky to have me as a friend. I’ve got all the books you could ever need.”
“Except for the bajillion Aunt Ruby has downstairs.”
Eleanor’s face fell. “Well, yeah. If you want to get technical.”
They continued plotting ideas between bites of peanut M&Ms and Twizzlers, and Eleanor was bolstered by her friend’s enthusiasm. For the first time in weeks, she wasn’t alone anymore. With Maggie by her side, the huge amount of money Bluestocking needed seemed to shrink, made smaller by hope Maggie projected even when Eleanor couldn’t muster up any of her own.
At midnight, Eleanor finally closed her laptop. “My brain is mush,” she said with a yawn.
“Same,” Maggie agreed. “Let’s talk to Aunt Ruby tomorrow and see what she says.”
Eleanor’s stomach lurched at the idea, but she nodded her head.
After they dressed for bed and settled beneath the plush down comforter, Eleanor stared up at the ceiling. She slipped the locket out of her T-shirt and popped it open. Inside was a worn slip of paper, which Eleanor had read a thousand times. The only light came from the pale glow of the moon outside, stretching across the floor in a slant through the sheer white curtains. It was enough to make out the faded black print, not that Eleanor needed to see it. It was one of many little notes Vera would leave around the house for her daughter to find, a game they played both with each other and with James. One time, Eleanor opened the fridge to find a sticky note on an orange juice bottle with the words “I need some cuddles, it’s FREEZING in here!” written in Vera’s elegant script.
She unfolded the strip of notebook paper and ran her fingers over the simple message: You’re still my favorite story. It was the last note Eleanor’s mother had written to her. Sometimes, she wondered if Vera had been trying to tell her what would happen, to remind Eleanor that even though grief was on its way, she had been loved. Once.
Vera had adored this old Victorian house, with its canary yellow paint and multi-level turrets. It was storybook enchanting and not at all reflective of its owner, although Eleanor didn’t think Ruby was as sour as she’d been made out to be by Maggie and so many others. Intimidating, for sure. But mean? Crazy?
Eleanor had read enough about villains to guess Ruby Hurst was just as misunderstood as the rest of them.
~~~
The next day, Eleanor opened her eyes to a strange cramping in her lower belly. The room was bathed in the gray light of early morning, and the house felt still, somber even. Maggie’s cheek was smushed into the pillow next to hers, a tiny wet spot visible at her mouth where she had drooled. Eleanor bit back a giggle and then gasped as the ache in her belly tightened, a fist gripping her insides. She sat up and squeezed her stomach in an attempt to massage away the pain, but it wouldn’t let up. After a couple of minutes, Eleanor moved quietly off the bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom, clutching her stomach the whole way. She sat down on the toilet and looked down at her underwear at a sight that made her gasp.
Blood, and lots of it.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” she whispered in a frenzied panic as she snatched tissue from the roll and wiped at her clothes. This was not happening. Not here. Not now.
Eleanor darted a glance around the bathroom for any item resembling a sanitary pad. But this was a house of older women, and it was doubtful she’d find a drawer full of liners or tampons in the vicinity unless Maggie had already gotten her period and had a bunch stored away in the cabinet. Eleanor leaned over and reached for the door under the sink, praying, but it contained only cleaning sprays and extra shampoo bottles. In the drawer by the toilet was a package of Q-tips, three floral hand towels, and a pair of nail clippers.
With shaky hands, Eleanor rolled up the toilet tissue around her palm and then placed it inside her underwear. Her pajama pants were stained, too, and there was no way for Eleanor to hide it until she got back to the room. She sat in disbelief, her mind a storm of swirling questions. Then she began to cry.
Eleanor was a smart girl. She had been waiting for this day to come. Unlike most girls her age, she felt excited about the prospect of getting her period for the first time. It was such a grown-up thing to say. I’ve got my period. But this? Hiding in Ruby Hurst’s bathroom with no one to call to for help, no one to come and sit by her side, no one to celebrate this strange, lovely moment with her? Suddenly, Vera’s absence was a gaping wound in Eleanor’s chest.
Hiccups jumped up her throat, and she sobbed around them, tears streaming down her cheeks and off her chin. It felt like the grief would kill her. Eleanor was usually capable of keeping it at bay, stuffed down under a torrent of words and imaginary lives and stories of other people’s hardships. Here, in Ruby Hurst’s hundred-year-old bathroom, Eleanor had never felt more alone.
Why had her mother gone? Why had she left Eleanor to fend for herself, to learn all on her own what it meant to become a woman?
Why hadn’t her mother thought of this moment...and stayed?
Eleanor’s cries were interrupted by a gentle knock at the bathroom door. “Eleanor, honey?” came a tender voice on the other side. It was Marianne. “Are you okay?”
Eleanor swallowed the lump in her throat and rubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she croaked.
“What’s going on, love?” she pressed.
At those gentle, loving words, Eleanor leaned over her lap and cried some more. She wanted to make it stop—just make it all stop—but she couldn’t. The blood. The pain. The sadness. It was all here now, flowing out of her body, a broken dam. And Eleanor was a broken girl. She didn’t want Marianne. The only thing that could fix a broken girl was her mother...and Eleanor no longer had one of those.
Marianne spoke again. “Can I come in please?”
“No!” Eleanor cried. She scrambled to pull up her pants and flush, mortified now to be caught. “No, thank you,” she said again, more calmly. She swiped a sleeve across her tears. “I’m okay. I just had a stomachache, that’s all.”
“I can get you some medicine if you need it,” Marianne replied. After a silent moment, she added, “Are you sure that’s all?”
Eleanor looked at her splotchy complexion in the mirror and winced. Turning on the tap, she splashed cool water on her face and let out a long, shuddering breath. “I’m sure,” she said in a small voice.
Marianne was quiet, and Eleanor stared at the shadows her feet cast under the bathroom door. Please go away, please go away, she begged in her mind.
“Okay,” Marianne finally replied. Eleanor could hear the hesitation in her voice. “But if you have any more trouble, you just let me know, alright?”
“Okay,” Eleanor replied. She watched as Marianne’s feet moved away, and she pressed an ear to the door, listening for the sound of her steps to recede. Then Eleanor washed her hands and tiptoed back to the bedroom where Maggie was still sound asleep. She peeked under the covers, fearful that she would find a bloom of crimson stains on the sheets, but they were clean. Maggie shifted, and Eleanor dropped the comforter, racing to her bag on quiet feet to change into a pair of jeans. Then she slipped back under the covers and squeezed her eyes shut, willing her mind to erase this moment. Was this how Ruby had felt when Alice disappeared? Had she, too, woken up one morning to find that she had grown up without her mom on accident?
Like Sal in Walk Two Moons, Eleanor longed to make sense of how her small, cozy world could exist if her mother wasn’t in it. How she could exist without her mother.
After finding the book in their little free library, Eleanor had read for hours that night on the couch, lost in Sal’s epic cross-country adventure with her lovable, quirky grandparents. She had cried angry tears when Sal finally found her mother. It wasn’t the way Sal or Eleanor had hoped she would.
They always want to leave, Eleanor had thought. Then she’d thrown the book onto the floor, furious that even a character in a novel had to face this sad uncertainty. At least Sal had gotten some answers.
Would Ruby? Would Eleanor?
And if Eleanor's questions could be answered, where would she even begin to look for them?
~~~
Eleanor called her dad as soon as Maggie was up and asked him to come get her, claiming she had an upset stomach. At breakfast, Marianne cast concerned looks her way but, thankfully, kept Eleanor’s breakdown in the bathroom to herself. At first, Maggie pestered Eleanor to stay longer in the hopes of talking to Ruby about the bookstore, but for once, her family’s shop was the furthest thing from Eleanor’s mind. All she wanted was to go home to her own bed and sleep.
“I’ll see if Marianne can bring me by the bookstore when you’re feeling better,” Maggie told her while they waited on the porch for Eleanor’s dad to pull up. “I wish you could stay longer.”
Eleanor could hardly meet her friend’s gaze. “Me too,” she said. “I had fun, though. Thanks for inviting me.”
Maggie eyed Eleanor’s puffy, drawn face with curiosity etched on her own, but didn’t press the issue. As soon as James’ truck turned onto the long, gravel drive, Eleanor hugged Maggie and waved goodbye. “I’ll text you from Dad’s phone tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder and made a beeline for the truck.
“Hey, kiddo,” James said as she opened the door and tossed her bag on the floorboard. “You alright?”
Eleanor offered a quick smile and turned to face the window. Maggie stood watching them and waved as James began to pull away. Guilt gnawed at Eleanor. She wanted to tell Maggie about what had happened, she really did. It just felt too...big.
“Yeah, I just need to go back to bed, I think,” she replied. Her fingers twisted in her lap. “Can we stop at the gas station real quick? I want to grab a ginger ale.”
“Sure, honey,” her dad answered. He reached over and pressed his palm gently to her forehead, a gesture that was both tender and much too touchy-feely for Eleanor right then. She pulled away. James frowned but only said, “You don’t have a fever. I’ll run in and grab you some crackers, too. You have to keep something on your stomach.”
Panic tightened in her gut. “Uh, no,” she said quickly. “That’s okay. I’ll go in and get it.”
“You sure?”
“Totally.”
When they parked in front of the convenience store, Eleanor nearly threw herself out the passenger door and raced inside. The store smelled of disinfectant, and her stomach roiled. The cashier hardly spared her a glance as she paced the aisles, searching for feminine products. The only ones available were heavy-flow tampons—how much flow was heavy?—and three boxes of overnight pads with wings. Eleanor grabbed one and tucked it under her coat before getting a ginger ale, then decided to go for broke and snag a bag of pickle-flavored Lay’s and a bar of chocolate, too. Wasn’t this the kind of food she was supposed to eat on her period? She’d have to look it up when she got home.
Eleanor’s face burned when she placed her loot on the counter. The cashier, a rail-thin older man with a goatee like Captain Hook’s, scanned each item and tossed them into a plastic bag without a word. The thought of his hands on the pads Eleanor would soon stuff inside her underwear made her cheeks burn. Please hurry up, she thought, tapping her foot. She stared at the card machine, willing it to process faster. When it beeped, Eleanor snatched both the card and bag away with a mumbled thanks.
“Got what you needed?” her dad asked when she climbed into the truck’s cab. Eleanor nodded and slunk down in her seat, grateful that her first attempt to buy what appeared to be skinny diapers was over. How do people do that all the time? She shoved the bag behind her feet and pressed a cheek to the window’s cool glass. Eleanor wanted to crawl under a rock for five to seven days.
At home, stowed away in the safety of her bathroom, she pulled the thick package out of the bag and turned it this way and that, searching for instructions. There were none, but it seemed pretty straightforward.
Taking a seat on the toilet, Eleanor withdrew the pad from the plastic wrap and unfolded it. She tossed the used tissue paper in the toilet and bunched the soiled underwear into a ball to be tucked deep in the recesses of her laundry basket. Not that her dad did her laundry anymore, but Eleanor couldn’t take the risk. The thought was too humiliating to entertain.
She slipped on her clean underwear and put the pad sticky-side down, wrapping the wings around underneath to secure it in place. It was ridiculous. If Eleanor bled enough to fill a pad this size, she would die! But she pulled her underwear up anyway and shifted, uncomfortable. It felt like she was straddling a horse. How was she supposed to walk without waddling?
Eleanor peered at her reflection. Her hair was the same. Her face was the same. Her eyes were the same. Her boobs were definitely the same, which was to say nonexistent. How could such a monumental change be happening inside her body, and Eleanor not see it in the mirror?
Like everything else in her life, Eleanor’s newest secret would stay just that.
