Free Cherry Bites by Alison Preston

bought two wooden lawn chairs for us. The grade eight boys in shops class at Hugh John Macdonald had built them. They were a lot more comfortable than the nylon ones Nora had brought home from Canadian Tire. Mr. Jones had painted the new chairs green.
    Nora and Myrna were facing each other and one of Nora’s feet rested on Myrna’s bare knees. My friend was painting my mother’s toenails.
    “What the hell is going on here?” I asked and they both looked up at me.
    The nail polish was pearly peach.
    “Myrna’s helping me get ready for the party,” Nora said.
    She and Mr. Jones were going to a party at the Castles’ place, Quint’s parents’ place. They lived in a huge house by the river.
    I turned around and went inside the house. I felt sick to my stomach. As I hurled up my Red Top cheeseburger into the toilet I could hear the sounds of giggling wafting up from the backyard, through the bathroom window.
    Myrna also developed an interest in Pete as time went by and he was no longer a kid. She asked me about him all the time.
    He was handsome in a pale poetic way, smart in school, and good at sports. Not football, he was too slight for that, but he played on the basketball team and with his agility he beat the high school’s all-time record for leaping hurdles.
    And Pete had a way with words. None of them were ever directed my way, but whenever an occasion called for a poem, the high school principal, Mr. Longbottom, would ask Pete to write a haiku. Here’s an example:
    pigskin champs
lead the parade
autumn rains down
    That was when the Norwood Broncs won the football championship. Pete’s haiku were often related to sports, as that was what was most often celebrated at our school.
    I don’t know if they were any good; I’ve never been a studier of poetry. It was just amazing to me that he did it. I saved them, the ones I knew about, the ones I liked. They seemed to me like they came from a good part of Pete, maybe the best part.
    Here’s another one:
    pageantry in snow
players are the figures
in a dream
    That was after some kids from the school enacted the nativity scene at an outdoor Christmas festival.
    Mr. Longbottom hung Pete’s haiku up on the bulletin board next to photos of the occasions that they described. He had the art teacher, Miss Kirby, write them out in fancy lettering.
    I developed a renewed interest in being friends with Pete. It was the haiku, I think, that sucked me in. I made a few tentative gestures. I asked him some questions, which I hadn’t done for years, about his poems, about his hurdles, about his clothes.
    “You seem to prefer wearing your shirts tucked in,” I said cheerily.
    That one was more a comment than a question.
    I left long spaces of time between my efforts, not wanting to cause a disruption. But I never got an answer.
    When I baked a blueberry pie I took him a piece on a plate and placed it next to him on the front steps. Later, when he was gone, I picked it up and offered it to a neighbour kid who was riding by on his trike. I sat with him while he ate it, watched his face and hands turn blue. Then I fetched a damp washcloth and we cleaned him up before he pedalled off home.
    The girls at school were infatuated with Pete and he counted several of them among his friends. But he didn’t have a real girlfriend till the summer he was sixteen. I heard him say to someone that he had observed the way girlfriends could take the wind out of your sails. His choice for his first girlfriend remains a puzzle to me to this day.
    It wasn’t Myrna, but not for want of her trying. She was cute in a short, cheerleader kind of way and she had a trace of wildness in her character that I fully expected would appeal to Pete. But he remained aloof from her, maybe because she was my friend, maybe because of the huge age difference between them, although I couldn’t imagine that mattering to him. Here was his chance to get laid, for Christ’s sake. Even when she used her trump