Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chicago – May 1914
It started with an ankle.
Not even a bare ankle. A stockinged one. White, pristine, and momentarily revealed as a girl leaned down to retrieve a dropped handkerchief near the lily pond.
Edward Masen had not meant to look. He hadn't even noticed the girl at first—only the swans. He had been standing beside his mother beneath the arching fronds of a bird's nest fern, pretending to be deeply invested in the Latin names etched into the garden plaques. Then the handkerchief fell. The girl bent. The ruffle of her petticoat lifted ever so slightly. And there—there—was the ankle.
Covered.
Stockinged.
Brief.
Devastating.
A single horrifying, traitorous beat pulsed through Edward's body. A heat bloomed in his cheeks, neck, ears. Something shifted—down there—and it was very much outside of his control.
He froze.
No one else seemed to notice. The girl had already retrieved her handkerchief and gone off, chattering with her governess, yellow ribbons bouncing in her curls. But Edward stood stock-still, bracing himself against the nearest fern as if it could steady the sudden chaos in his body.
It had happened.
And it had happened because of an ankle.
He tugged his coat down in front of him with trembling fingers. Panic buzzed behind his ribs. Had anyone seen? Had his mother noticed? Would she say something?
No, of course not. Elizabeth Masen couldn't even say "legs" without pausing delicately and substituting in words like limbs or appendages. If she so much as suspected that her only son had been undone by a flash of white stocking, she might actually perish where she stood.
"Are you well, Edward?" she asked, glancing at him beneath the brim of her hat.
He swallowed. "Yes. Just warm."
She raised her parasol. "It's the sun, I expect."
It wasn't the sun. It was Satan. Satan and his ankle-thrusting temptresses in garden conservatories.
She shifted her parasol to shield him. "You're not coming down with something, I hope."
Yes. Puberty. It was fatal, wasn't it?
Nothing about what happened seemed evil, but it also didn't feel right. His body had reacted in a way he hadn't expected—or, frankly, agreed to. It felt like someone had handed him a foreign machine and said, "You'll be operating this now, good luck."
He tried to put it out of his mind.
He failed.
No one had explained anything. He'd gathered vague things from overheard conversations and the mysterious way the older boys elbowed each other and laughed about "the deed." He'd once asked his good friend Thomas if he knew what it all meant, but Thomas had just shrugged and said, "It's something about glands, I think."
Glands? What glands?
He hadn't read about glands in the Catechism
He didn't speak the whole way home. Sat stiffly on the tram with his arms folded and his eyes glued to the advertisement for hand soap. Thought about monks. And the Great Fire. And that boy in Sunday School who'd burst into hives when asked to define "modesty." Anything, anything but that ankle.
That night at home, he sat hunched over his Latin primer but retained absolutely nothing. He was distracted. Haunted. By an ankle
There had been no warning. No pamphlets. No awkward talk. He was still vaguely under the impression that this sort of thing only happened in medical emergencies or to older boys who read the wrong kinds of novels. He had done nothing—absolutely nothing—except exist within visual radius of a ladies ankle, and now his body had become his enemy.
He flopped face-down onto his bed and groaned into the pillow.
What if it happened again? What if he became the kind of boy who reacted to every glimpse of feminine hosiery like it was a gunshot?
What if—God forbid—it happened during Mass?
He sat bolt upright in bed, suddenly horrified by the thought of being aroused in a pew.
The room felt too small, too hot. He opened the window and leaned out into the spring air, breathing like someone recovering from battle.
This had to be normal. Surely. But no one had ever said anything. His father never spoke of "those matters." His teachers all carried canes. And the only time his mother had come close to explaining a bodily function was when she mentioned a baby cousin who had "soiled his cloth diaper".
The worst part was, this didn't even feel exciting. It felt terrifying. Like he'd just uncovered a secret no one wanted him to know.
He clutched his prayer book like it might help and resolved not to think about it again.
But the next day, he caught sight of another girl's foot slipping out of a carriage and nearly dropped his books.
By the end of the week, he started carrying them in front of him. Just in case.
(I feel it necessary to clarify that I am also a minor!! I didnt want to go into graphic detail as he is thirteen here. It just felt too much a rite of passage to exclude, and a good opportunity to show the stigma around sexuality at the time!!)