Free Cherry Bomb by Leigh Wilder Page B

to the zipper of her dress. "I don't know," she whispered in the dark. If there had been electricity she would have turned on the lights.
    "Come on. You like me, right?"
    She did too. Away from Matt and the other jocks he was smart, and read books and watched the news and had opinions about things other than sports and cars, and he didn't mind watching Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her. She harbored secret dreams of them going to college together and getting married. She was pretty sure she could love him. Or maybe she did already.
    So she let him unzip her dress and he slid the straps off her shoulders and then she was topless in her grandmother's living room. His hands were warm in the chilly air (no heat either) and in the dark he surprised her by drawing his tongue across her bare skin and sucking on her cold-enhanced nipples.
    Things progressed from there, but she stopped him when his hands found their way up her skirt and to the waistband of her underwear. It was ridiculous that her first thought was that her underwear was the full-bottomed, white cotton kind, in a time when the Thong Song was playing on the radio and Jessica liked to show off her drawer of strings with bits of lace attached. "Stop," she told him.
    "C'mon Penny. I want you." He did want her--she could feel how much pressed up against her stomach.
    "No. I haven't--I've never." Kenny was her first real boyfriend. "I'm not ready."
    He begged her again, and she smacked his hand when he tried again, but in the end they were sitting on opposite sides out the couch, Kenny drinking from his can of beer. "I brought condoms and everything," he told her.
    "I'm sorry."
    "Let's go back to the party."
    She shook her head. "No. I want to go home now.”
    He took her home, but he had apparently gone back to the party afterwards, and told Matt all about what had happened. "Hey, Penny," he shouted down the crowded halls Monday morning. "Heard Kenny tried to take your cherry and it bombed!" Everyone in the hall stopped and stared. "Ha. Cherry Bomb." Matt laughed at his own lame joke, but by the end of the day kids she didn’t know--freshmen even--were calling her Cherry Bomb. It stuck and for the rest of the school year...Cherry Bomb.
    She’d cried into Jessica’s shoulder in the girls’ room for all of second period, and after that she dumped Kenny. She did not say a single word to him the rest of the year.
     
    *****
     
    Penny took the chair Matt offered her. "Hey Cherry Bomb. How've you been?" He looked much older—too much beer, she decided. All of his football muscles had melted away into fat.
    "Good," she said, trying to get her bearings. "I'm living in Manhattan now." She'd practiced the speech, she was prepared for them to give her false complements but secretly be jealous. Matt didn’t seem to care.
    "Look at these boys," he said instead, opening his wallet to reveal pictures of three kids. "My oldest is just ten--he's the star of the peewee football league." Matt’s wife, Amanda, sat next to him. They had been on the cheerleading squad together. Penny had thought she was putting on weight towards the end of their senior year. Amanda was still putting on weight--she was plump and very obviously pregnant again.
    "It's too bad you don't have any children," Amanda told her. "Being a mom is really the best thing in the world."
    "Of course," Penny said. They were supposed to be jealous, damn it! No wonder Jessica didn’t want to come back. "Jessica is doing a play right now," she said quickly. "That's why she couldn't come. She's playing Katharine in a feminist reconstruction of The Taming of the Shrew ." They gave her blank looks. "She's doing really well," Penny finished lamely. "And sends her best."
    “You two aren't lesbians, are you?" Amanda said in a near-whisper. "That’s what everyone thought when the two of you ran off like that right after graduation. Is that why you aren't married?"
    "Is that why you wouldn’t give Kenny your