If somepony peered closely at one of the rickety tables in Sugarcube Corner she might notice that, in addition to being wobbly, it was actually wobbling. A yellow pegasus curled herself up underneath, sitting in a cramped pose usually reserved for the unborn. She rocked back and forth, clutching her shoulders with her hooves.
“So, Pinkie,” said Rainbow Dash, “what was your first period like?”
Pinkie blinked a couple of times, then shook her head as if it was possible to dislodge confusion like she could a pesky fly. “I dunno,” she admitted. “But my first comma was spectacular!”
“That’s not what I—” Dash sighed. “How about your first time? I heard you and Caramel totally had a thing!”
“Caramel is sooooo good…” Pinkie put on a wistful expression. “Sugar is tasty, vanilla is okay and butter is… alright but when you mix them together and heat them you get something delicious! Twilight would probably say I’m a silly-mcbilly but cooking has to be magic! How else could you mix icky flour and gritty sugar and runny eggs together, burn them a whole bunch, and make a yummy cake!”
Fluttershy pressed her hooves harder over her ears. She couldn’t just ask them to stop. If they stopped then it would be completely silent and awkward, and she would be the one responsible for killing the mood. She did not want to be that pony. She’d had enough of being that pony.
She knew that if the room got quiet, then they would all begin to think about how the door was locked from the outside again. She knew they would start thinking about how they were trapped until the Cakes got back from their family outing.
And in this hypothetical silence, she knew that Pinkie Pie would start singing.
About being trapped.
The contrivance, commotion, and claustrophobia made Fluttershy just want to smash her way through the triple-reinforced magi-glass windows. (After Pinkie’s third party cannon mishap, the Cakes opted for something that could withstand a measly explosion or two.) Fluttershy loved her friends as much as she loved her animals, but being surrounded by other ponies, even her best friends, tended to exhaust her—especially when the afternoon had been nothing but the same thing over and over again. With that thought, Fluttershy rocked back and forth a little more determinedly.
Pinkie’s face peeked under the top edge of the table, upside-down, her bouncy bangs fighting against gravity and failing. Blue eyes met teal. “Mrr murfle murrr mrrr mrrr murrrrr?”
Fluttershy lifted her hooves from her ears. “I’m sorry, Pinkie… I, um, didn’t quite catch that.”
“Are you okay?” Her voice was cheery, but her expression less so. There might have even been something like concern. “You don’t look so good!”
“It’s just, uh, please don’t be mad—”
“Oh, silly,” Pinkie said. “We could never be mad at you! Right, Dashie?”
Rainbow rolled her eyes, which Fluttershy took as a “no”.
“Um… well, I don’t—” Fluttershy took a deep breath because what she was about to say next was one of those things where she had to say it all at once or risk not saying it at all. “I don’t like it when you fight!”
Rainbow, who was literally hovering over the countertop, landed and fluffed her feathers. “How is this fighting?” She snorted. “It’s not even debate!”
“Yeah!” said Pinkie, crossing her eyes. “Even if Dashie does keep asking me a lot of really confusing quest—”
“No!” The forcefulness of Fluttershy’s voice startled everypony, especially herself. “You know what Rainbow is saying, Pinkie. You’re a good pony, but right now you’re pretending to be dense on purpose! And—and Rainbow Dash, you should be ashamed of yourself for asking all these personal questions just to put her on the spot. You’re trying to make her feel awkward! It’s not nice!”
“Gee, Fluttershy,” Rainbow said, suddenly very interested in the cracks of the tiled floor. “I was just trying to—I didn’t mean to.” She scuffed a hoof. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Pinkie Pie said. “Sometimes when I see ponies playing a neat game I think hey! I want to play too! And then I keep having more and more fun and sometimes my fun starts being more fun than everypony else’s and I don’t know when I start being annoying but it happens and I didn’t mean to and I’m sorry too.”
Fluttershy smiled at the two. Now that they no longer wanted to spend all their pent-up energy getting on each others’ nerves, she wondered if maybe they could all do something a little more constructive.
Almost as if in response, Pinkie beamed from ear to ear and zipped up the stairs. She came back down again with a battered hardcover in her teeth, then plopped it on the floor in front of Rainbow Dash. “I know you asked, and it was rude of me to pretend I didn’t know what you were talking about. This is my menarche memento.”
The other two ponies gaped at her.
Fluttershy did not know why anypony, not even Pinkamena Diane Pie, would make such a scrapbook.
Pinkie continued, undaunted. “That’s me when I was twelve.” She flipped to a photograph of a younger, ganglier Pinkie Pie.
Fluttershy noted, with a stab of ancient envy, that the Pinkie in the photo already had her cutie mark.
“Most fillies just wake up one morning, and BOOM! They’re mares!” Pinkie winked at Rainbow Dash. “Not me! I was in gym class!”
She flipped a few pages, and the next photo was of the inside of a gymnasium. Young Pinkie Pie stood surrounded by colourful fillies, all of them wearing shorts and sporty headbands.
Who would have taken a random snapshot like that? Fluttershy wondered. She looked over to Rainbow, whose pupils were contracting into pinpricks. Her neck was arched backwards, as if, without moving her legs, she was trying to get as far away from the offending book as possible.
“You know, it’s kinda nice to have someone to talk about my periods with!” As she spoke, Pinkie bounced up and down on the spot. “You know that feeling when you wake up and you can feel your inner goddess blossoming into its full beauty?”
Even Fluttershy had to stare.
“Um,” Rainbow Dash said articulately. “That’s really, uh…”
If Fluttershy had thought that Rainbow seemed uneasy before…
“Oh yeah! Sorry! I’m probably boring you with all this.” Pinkie Pie quickly flipped a few pages ahead, skipping over more photos of her classmates. “Here’s my first tampon!” she chirped, twirling the book around so they could both see better.
Rainbow Dash looked away so quickly that Fluttershy worried she might get whiplash. Dash’s legs tensed, and her wings beat with the frantic fury of a hummingbird’s heart.
For a moment, time stood still.
Then, with a deafening roar, she rocketed towards the front window, prismatic shockwaves shaking the building to its foundations.
Triple-reinforced magi-glass makes a distinctly eerie twinkle when it shatters, but it was drowned out by the peal of a pony-sized object breaking the sound barrier from a standing start.
When the ringing in their ears had abated a little, Fluttershy found the courage to peek at the photo of Pinkie’s “first tampon”—which was so blurry that the image looked more like two fillies than anything. Fluttershy frowned.
“Pinkie,” said Fluttershy. Her voice, subdued even at the best of times, was barely audible over the tinnitus. “That was mean.”
Pinkie stepped over the hissing, vaporising shards of broken magi-glass. The afternoon sun lit her coat up in a brilliant bubblegum pink. “It got us out of here, didn’t it?”
“Um…” said Fluttershy.
Despite what some movies and books might say, girls simply did not make menstruation scrapbooks or throw period parties.
Pinkie winked in response. “This is my middle school yearbook.”
Author's Note
I would like to thank Crowind, Mystic, feotakahari, nietzsche and alexmagnet for their help in making this story readable.
(Yes, I am aware that equines have estrus cycles rather than menstrual cycles.)
