Mirage

She has fallen into a whole new world.  We came back from the NJHS induction ceremony, and she'd unexpectedly and inexplicably become more grown up, as if she'd stepped across some invisible boundary line.

"How long have you known you like him like this?" I asked as the car rounded the curve before our turnoff.

She thought for a little bit.  "Since yesterday afternoon," she replied.

Suddenly she wants to get up early to have time to do her hair and get to school early enough to maybe speak with him in the hallway, this child who would give her left leg to sleep late and whose hair normally resembles a haystack--a lshining, golden haystack, but a haystack, nonetheless--when she is finished "fixing" it, which until now has consisted of dragging a brush quickly through the thicket of her wild curls.

She came to the car after school yesterday so obviously happy that I was sure he had asked her to "go out" with him, the term used among Jr. High students, I am informed, for being someone's steady girlfriend of boyfriend.  No.  He had come to sit with her at lunch and give her his cinnamon roll, however, and he held the door for her, and he sat by or behind her in all the group pictures being taken that day, and he had a conversation with his pals about what a good friend she was, and he asked her to sit with him and his friends during lunch the next day. 

She glowed, shimmered with happiness, the mirage of a beautiful young woman flickering and shifting with the face of my fourteen year old child as she told me of the day, her voice softer, gentler, brimming with a ripening richness I'd not heard in it before.  Mystery, thy name is woman.