Hi guys, I'm new here buuut I could really use the guidance of some BP lovers with a lot more experience than me.

My history with big snakes begins and ends back when I volunteered at a reptile reserve. I worked for about a month with a six foot reticulated python last year and she was an absolute doll. Very gently (except when it got close to feeding day) and super easy to handle. SO, when I went to the pet shop the other day all I had in mind was to ask some questions and get a feel for snake husbandry. I was under educated about all that. Well, after talking with their reptile expert he assured me that I had very good basic knowledge of their care and so forth and that if I were gonna start out with big snakes I should get a BP because of their gentle nature. He handed me one of their little ones, she's probably just over a foot long, and she was great. Very relaxed and sociable, if you can call a snake sociable. He was even nice enough to inform me that on my tight budget, I could get away with buying cage accessories and substrate from petsmart, since it'd be cheaper. Well, anyway, I feel like I'm rambling so I'll try to go ahead and jump into stuff about my snake.

I've had her for a day now and this is what all is going on: She was perfect on the ride home, she did NOT want to be in the bucket they gave me, she kept popping the lid off and hanging on to my hand. Not squeezing or anything, she'd just crawl onto my hand and sit, very relaxed and even yawning a bit (Is yawning good? I didn't know they did that!). So once we got home it was time to introduce her to her new home. In her tank the warm side stays about 80 degrees fahrenheit and the cool end is right at 73 with a heating rock in the corner. She has fresh water, a log to hide under, aspen bedding, and the whole tank is about 20 gallons. As expected when I put her in, she explored a bit, got something to drink, climbed on top of her thermometer, and then hid. She would come out about every thirty minutes or so, check it out again, then go hide. I feel like this is normal? After all the guy at my reptile shop said he'd just gotten her from the breeder about two hours before I arrived, so she moved a ton in one day.

But here's where things go awry.

Today. My boyfriend decided that he wanted to try and hold her again, since she did so well on the ride home he thought she wouldn't mind it. Well she minded it. A lot. Before I knew it he had brought me a snake that was tightly curled up in the palm of his hand but, not in the protective ball way. She had her head and neck positioned in a very tight S shape, raised up from the rest of her body which was extremely tense. I told him he needed to put her back, she wasn't ready to be held but when he realized that looked to be a striking position he sat her on my bed and backed away. It took a solid hour to get her to relax enough to where I could walk her back to her tank. She explored her tank for about two minutes once I put her back in it (by this time her breathing had relaxed and she was exploring my arm and so forth) then went into her log and hasn't come back out. Also during all this she would "stand" really tall while she moved around. Kind of like a cobra but she wasn't all coiled up.

My major questions are really: She's a little more than a foot, but chubby, so is she very young or are they super slow growers (I forgot to ask her age ^^')? Is the fact that she had her neck raised up off her body in an S shape a bigger warning than if she were just laying down like that? Is the cobra thing she was doing a defensive posture? When should I feed her, the guy said she was scheduled for Wednesday feedings but I feel like she'd be too tense to eat now? Is it normal for them to be so active and friendly at the store then be a bit skeptical at home? Am I already a horrible snake mama on day one, because I'm really nervous and I just want my lil Winry to have the best snakey life possible