You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott Page A

felt herself taken aback. “Your dad? Sure he is, honey.”
    They looked at each other for a moment, then Devon’s eyes darted away. Katie tried to hold on to a thought she had, something about how Eric sounded on the phone earlier, but couldn’t.
    Then, realizing: “Devon, are you okay?”
    “Everything feels different.”
    Katie reached out to touch her shoulder. It was the most Devon had talked to her about anything other than gymnastics in so long and it made her want to throw her arm around her daughter, do something. With Drew it was so easy, Drew who would still rest his pelted head against her when he was tired, asking her questions until her head ached from them.
    She wanted the moment to last, to deepen.
    “Honey, did you…did you like Ryan a little?”
    There was a brief silence, the only sound a pop in Devon’s jaw, gum between her teeth. The highlighter rat-a-tatting on the pages of the book.
    Then—“What? No. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m worried because qualifiers are—who said that?”
    “No one. I…”
    “Boys don’t look at me,” she said, uncapping her highlighter pen briskly. Straightening her back.
    “Honey, that’s not true,” Katie insisted. “What—”
    “Did someone say something to you, Mom? At the gym? Because the girls there are all…you know how they are.”
    And she did. They talked about Devon all the time, speculating and watching and wondering. Whenever she appeared in the local paper, they pored over the article for clues. Whenever Coach T. pulled her aside, they tried to eavesdrop, to hear what he whispered in her ear and what she whispered back.
    Still, Katie felt like she’d struck a nerve, the mortification of having someone stumble upon a secret feeling.
    “But, honey, if you did , it’s nothing to feel bad about,” she said gently. “I’m sure half the girls at the gym did. He was so good-looking and nice to all of you. It’s only natural—”
    “I know,” Devon said, cringing back in her chair. “But I’m not like that. Not like the girls at school, talking about boys and their abs and muscles. And their phones. All they do, Mom, is take pictures of themselves all day and send them to each other.”
    “Well, that’s what girls do,” Katie said. “Some girls. And it’s okay if you look at boys. Because, Devon, they’re definitely looking at you.”
    Devon pressed her highlighter hard onto the page, a blot spreading.
    “Everything’s always ending,” she said.
    Katie had no idea what she meant. What was ending? Childhood? She started to ask, reaching out, but Devon pulled her book up, gathered it closer to her face, as if starting to read.
    Like any teenage girl might.
      
    The hard thud of adolescence still hadn’t fully arrived for Devon, or for any of the other girls at the gym. Like any parent, Katie’d braced herself for it, and then at some point stopped waiting. Ages thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen came and went for the BelStars, and their bodies remained flat and smooth as scythes except their perky muscled behinds.
    Once, when she was seven or eight, Devon announced that she didn’t need to worry about growing, as if she could control it through sheer force of will. “I’ll grow a few inches when this is all over,” she said, her eyes grave, as if the words all over bespoke an unimaginable horror.
    We need to get her before she changes. That’s what Teddy had said, all those years ago.
    But Devon’s body didn’t seem to change. It only got harder.
    It wasn’t until a few months ago, February, that she’d had any reminder at all that Devon was a teenager, nearly a woman.
    Arms pushed in the laundry basket, Katie saw it. Glaring at her from the knot of leotards, white, blue, red. The glossy red-brown stain, smaller than a dime, at the center of one crotch.
    At last , she thought, and smiled to herself.
    But it was fleeting, then the next thought: Oh no.
    The Mom Moment anticipated and