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The first image was a diagram—a simple line drawing of a boy and a girl, featureless as gingerbread cookies, with arrows pointing to their brains. The hypothalamus. The narrator’s voice was calm, almost sleepy, with the precise enunciation of a public broadcast from the NOS. “Puberty begins not in the legs or the chest, but here, in the command center.”
Mrs. Visser considered this. “Sometimes,” she said. “But not forever.”
Silence.
The final segment showed two teenagers—real ones, in baggy 1991 sweaters—talking to a school nurse. The boy asked, “Is it normal to be scared?” The nurse nodded. “It’s the most normal thing in the world.” The first image was a diagram—a simple line
Lars stopped drawing.
The projector whirred to life, its spools clicking like nervous hearts. A strip of light pierced the dim room, landing on a portable screen that smelled faintly of dust and old vinyl. On it, the title card appeared in blocky, reassuring letters: Sexuele Voorlichting – Puberty: Sexual Education for Boys and Girls.
The reel slowed. The last frame flickered, then dissolved into white light. The projector clicked off. “Puberty begins not in the legs or the
Bram’s hand, to his own astonishment, went up.
Thirteen-year-old Bram sank lower in his plastic chair. Beside him, his friend Lars was already drawing a crude cartoon in the margin of his notebook, trying to look unimpressed. The girls sat on the opposite side of the aisle, a deliberate no-man’s-land left by their teacher, Mrs. Visser, who now stood by the light switch like a shepherd guarding a gate.
Then she pressed play.
The narrator spoke of menstruation. Of wet dreams. Of the word ovulation , which Bram had heard before only as a whisper in the schoolyard, a weapon to throw and run from. But here it was, clinical and gentle, as ordinary as a recipe on television.
Outside, the last days of 1991 faded into winter. And Bram, still a boy for a few more months, let the whir of the projector fade into a memory he would one day be grateful for. End of story.
“This is normal,” Mrs. Visser had said. “Your bodies are changing. This film will explain how and why.” “But not forever
Because the film wasn’t laughing. It was serious. Tender, even. When it showed a cartoon sperm meeting a cartoon egg, the narrator said, “This is how life begins. Not with shame. With a meeting.”
That night, Bram lay in bed, replaying the film in his head—not the diagrams, but the faces. The boy who was scared. The nurse who didn’t laugh. The quiet dignity of being told the truth.
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