SARAH didn't expect to spend this morning trapped in the toilet at Margaret Hilditch's house while her best friend rifled through his sister's underwear drawer looking for "girl's things".

The pair were home alone at his mother's house by the sea in Cornwall. They had come from two week's at George's place in Scotland with the flu and consequently had been sent straight to bed.  Now, three days down the track, Margaret had decided the dynamic duo were well enough to fend for themselves for a little while, taking the twins and her older daughter out for ice cream, fish and chips and just to generally get out of the house. She'd promised Dane and Sarah a treat when she came home and they'd been content enough with that - for the first few minutes at least.

Still to completely shrug off the virus they were, none-the-less stir crazy, neither had ever been good at being cooped up during the holidays, especially now at 14, both just a few weeks from starting their second year at boarding school. It was particularly hard to stay in bed now because George's had been such fun – fishing, camping and roaming free. There had been six of them, George's younger sister Lilly, Sarah, George, Neville, Dane and Dane's best friend Boyd up from Eton. They had run wild most of the time and although Lilly and Sarah were girls, the boys didn't treat them any differently now. Dane had seen to that, well in Sarah's case at least.

He'd made sure she was included in all their activities last year at Neville's and slowly she'd been seen as one of the boys, it helped that she was a bit of a late bloomer and hadn't really developed much and that, coupled with the fact she could run as fast and climb as well as any of the boys, had helped. Her uncanny knack of being able to talk adults into things that the boys couldn't also didn't hurt and now she was a full member of the gang; so much so that when George had issued Neville's invitation to Scotland, Sarah's name been on it too.

Of course, the one complication had been Lilly.

The little red-headed girl with the huge blue eyes – a year younger than the rest –had, for some inexplicable reason, developed a full crush on Dane.

She followed him everywhere.

She hung on his every word like a lovesick puppy.

The geeky gawky Dane had been more than a little embarrassed and slightly horrified. He didn't understand it, Boyd and Neville were way better looking, all three of his sisters went gooey around Boyd with his big brown eyes and his perfect manners (not that Dane's own weren't impeccable) but Boyd "Birdie" Crowe was already on his way to being charming and sophisticated even as a young teen.

Whatever he had didn't work on Lilly (or Fox either to be honest); the sun shone from Dane in Lilly's eyes much to the amusement of his friends who'd teased him about being the only one with a girlfriend.

It wasn't the worry he'd expected to have, Dane's main concern had been that Boyd and Sarah would clash – he'd had two best friends before and it hadn't worked out very well, in fact, he didn't talk to either of them now. He didn't want that this time, a year of writing to Fox and eight years of school with Birdie and they were like family. To lose either one of them would be downright catastrophic. 

It had been Boyd who supported him at school during the divorce but it was Fox who had been there when he needed someone and she didn't take any rubbish from him -ever. While Boyd made allowances for Dane's moping,  Fox wouldn't let him ever feel sorry for himself. They were his support network and his friends. He'd hate for them not to get on.

However, the two had laughed their heads off at Dane and his camp follower and had bonded over teasing him about Lilly to the point that they'd soon become the three amigos and part of the wider gang of five - "as thick as thieves" his mother would say.

It had been two weeks of fun, swimming, and fishing in the river, tramping through the small hills on George and Lilly's property. But one too many chills and Dane and Sarah had paid the cost. It didn't help that Sarah always wore a baggy T-shirt over her swimmers which held in the cold. More than once Dane had seen her shivering, lips turning a fetching shade of blue but she refused to take the shirt off. Dane suspected he knew why - his own older sister had been about Fox' age when her boobs had suddenly popped out from nowhere. That was weird enough, but Fox was one of the boys and none of the other boys had boobs, she stood out already without um "standing out" anymore. He decided discretion was the better part of valour. Self-preservation and not getting punched in the arm were motivators too - so he'd said nothing and they'd both paid the price.

However, nature takes its course, whether we like it or not and Fox's femininity had asserted it's self in a big way that morning.

And now here she was.

"Fox come on, I'm busting," he'd said bouncing from one foot to the other outside the door, his blindingly blonde curls bobbing furiously.

"Go away!"

"Fox stop being a girl you've been in there 40 minutes," Dane said desperation in his voice, he'd been patient but the downstairs loo was out of commission. And after previous incidents, he didn't think his mum or the neighbours would appreciate him whizzing in the back garden, well not in broad daylight.

"Is your mum home yet or Jane?" she said sounding desperate and small and not at all like his confident friend. She was staying with them for two weeks while Neville was off at his maternal aunt's place and his parents were abroad. She could have gone too but Fox wasn't keen on Neville's maternal cousin Rory or his aunt for that matter. They treated her like she was weird and strange and while she was, she didn't need people accentuating it. Her dad was off on a dig again. He'd asked her to come this time and while she'd love to go one day, they had seen each other at Christmas and term break and well, she'd had a better offer. Margaret had asked and she'd jumped at the chance to meet Dane's family and to run on the beach. He was such a good writer and his descriptions of his granny's old home had interested her. But there had been none of the swimming and beach rambles that she'd hoped for because of the flu and now..................

She heard Dane slump against the door. She had nothing with her.

"Fox are you okay?" he asked.

She sighed.

"When will your mum be back?" she asked again.

Dane looked at his watch.

"Another hour I think," he sighed.

"Fox, what's wrong, can I help?"

"I'm bleeding," she whispered through the door, even though there was no one else in the house. At school, home and even at Aunt Chars she had things; she knew what happened to a woman's body; she'd read all the books (mum had made dad buy them when she was sick and he'd left them in her room) but this had never happened before even though she was a week and a half from 14. She'd begun to wonder if it ever would; maybe she really was a boy? That would be okay, she liked being part of Neville's gang, one of the boys, but she'd started to develop breasts, proper breasts in the past few months and, and now this.

"Oh god where, what happened?" Dane asked sounding horrified. "How badly, where were you hurt?"

She almost laughed then.

"No Dane I'm a girl, it's girl stuff, you know women things and I don't have anything to well you know."

He flushed red. It hadn't occurred to him that........ Well, he knew about periods from school. Sir had put a tampon in water and the class had all watched horrified as it swelled up. He knew Jane........... well he'd seen mum shopping for that kind of thing, even if he'd tried not to.

"Jane!" he exclaimed. "You could go into her room; I think she keeps them in her top drawer."

"I can't, I don't want to.............. you know........ get it everywhere."

Dane sighed.

"You can't stay there for another hour, I'll burst before then and mum is still going on about the last time I did it in the garden and that was ten years ago."

"Can you go? Please, Dane, please?"

He sighed she was his best friend, but Jane's underwear drawer.............

"Okay um what do you use – the tampon thingies or you know the band-aids."

"I.......this has never happened before.......can you see if she has pads – the band-aidy things?"

Jane was going to kill him, he'd need some of those band-aids to put on his wounds – big ones - when she found out he'd been in her room, looking through her underwear. It was bad enough when he accidentally pulled a pair of his sisters' knickers out of the washing basket. Maybe he should go to the kitchen, get some tongs and rubber gloves? Tongs, gloves and a face mask. Yes, that might do the trick.

Dane sighed, Fox was going to owe him for this. It was weird to think of her needing this stuff. To think of his friend as well, as a girl. To him, she was just Fox now.

He opened the door warily. It was like he was entering the forbidden zone, the twilight zone – he was Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom and all this girly stuff was worse than the rats and snakes Indy faced. Actually, he wondered if Indy would accept a mission like this but then Indy liked girls and while Dane liked them he hadn't really been up close with one and he wasn't sure he wanted to yet.

He picked his way through the trail of clothes dropped on the floor to his sister's drawers, a man on a mission. Birdie could have his Indy Fedora if he didn't come back alive...............

Dane opened the drawer, really wishing he'd got those tongs. But his luck was in. There on the top was a plastic bag of things, he gingerly grabbed it, struggling to open it, then he lost his patience, his need was great, and bam the little packages exploded across the room. He didn't have time to pick them all up. He really needed to pee now or he was going to explode. He ran back down the hall and knocked on the door; a small feminine hand slipped around the jam and grabbed the package.

By the time his family returned, Tom and Sarah had managed to put most of the pads back in the plastic and were playing cards in his room.

But of course, the poo hit the fan pretty fast because no matter how hard they tried they couldn't get all those little packages back in the plastic and so Jane was quick to discover the alien incursion.

They heard her stomping down the hallway.

"Have you two been in my room?" she asked angrily poking her around the door.

Dane turned red, Sarah followed.

"I, we, um Fox needed she hadn't, I'm sorry, we would have asked but..........." Dane stuttered, he loved his sister but she could be fierce when she was cross and he knew he'd crossed that invisible brother-sister line - he was about to die. 

Except Fox wouldn't let him. 

She had his back. 

He knew she was a little intimidated by his sister who was 17 in a few months and head girl at her school.

"Dane was just trying to help, I've never, this has never, I didn't have anything and he said you had things and he needed to pee and we tried to put everything back and I promise I was the one that put the pads back in your drawer, not Dane," Sarah said in her stream-of-consciousness spew of words.

"I'm so sorry!"

Jane's eyes soften.

"It's really your first one?" she asked.

Sarah nodded.

Jane smiled at her brother, reassuring him that it was okay.

"Daney go get mum, would you?" she asked. He nodded and was gone in a flash not really wanting to be privy to this secret women's business anymore.

His mother, Jane, and Sarah talked in Jane's room for the next hour while Dane ate the chips his mother had brought home, taking some up for Fox first, and then settling down to watch TV with his younger sisters. He could hear giggling and laughing wafting down the stairs. It was weird to hear Fox giggling like a girl, a woman now he supposed, that's what happened wasn't it? She was a woman? He tried not to think about that, the morning had been traumatic enough.

His mum took the older girls out later in the afternoon, leaving him in charge, and returned with a whole heap of packages. He really didn't want to know what was in those. But he knew he loved his mother even more than before if that was possible - Margaret Hilditch had treated Sarah like one of her own, in exactly the same way she had treated Jane under the same circumstances, taking the girls out for tea and cake at the local cafe and then shopping. 

They'd come home with all the necessaries but also with a couple of new bras, properly fitted, to replace the ones she'd bought with her embarrassed father a few months earlier and even a new figure flattering dress. She'd made sure to celebrate the rite of passage and make a fuss of a young girl who needed a mother and didn't have one.

Margaret already had three daughters – what was one more?

Sarah was an odd bird but Margaret thought there was something endearing about the girl and she was a good friend to Dane. She had also been so grateful for the help, there had been something sad that she was so shocked that someone would take the time to do this for her.

So then as a special treat, they all went out to dinner that night, though in truth Margaret was too tired to cook.

Sarah wore her new dress and undergarments, pushed and separated, out and proud and feeling like she belonged to something, somewhere finally. 

"Wow!" Dane said when she came down the stairs.

"You look like a girl!"

She crinkled her nose, rolled her eyes and punched him in the arm.

Yeah, she may look like a girl but she was still his Fox.