Cherry Bites by Alison Preston

seemed to be all that was on his mind. They hadn’t had any gigs yet, but they had a manager and something was in the works. They called themselves Beaver Tree. It couldn’t have been Henry who came up with the name; it didn’t sound like him at all.
    I talked to Joanne about Duane.
    “What am I gonna do?” I said.
    “I don’t know. I don’t think he treats you very well. Maybe it would be best to try and forget about him?”
    They weren’t the words I wanted to hear. Why couldn’t she say that Duane secretly loved me, that she’d heard it from a good source?
    “I can’t forget about him,” I said.
    Joanne was in a steady relationship by now with a boy named Quint Castle, who was president of the school. He was a star. Everyone approved and I was jealous till Joanne told me that she didn’t love him.
    “What?”
    “Sometimes I don’t even like him,” she said. “He’s such a know-it-all.”
    “So what are you doing with him?” I asked.
    Quint and I had played together as kids and I did recall him being a bit bossy.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to get out of it. He kisses like a dead man.”
    But she didn’t get out of it, not for another year. She was in no better position than I was.
    My desire for Duane was useless and I knew it. He couldn’t give me what I wanted from him, so I began to find it easier to wish for something that was impossible: I wished that I could be him. I tried to see things through his deep brown eyes. This shift in desire undid me.
    On a Saturday night in the summer of 1966 Duane got me.
    We were at a party at Joe Turner’s house. I had gone with Joanne and Quint, had listened to them fight all the way there.
    “I don’t think we should go to this party,” Quint said.
    “Why not?” said Joanne.
    “There’ll be beer and greasers and probably fights later.”
    “So! It’ll be fun!” Joanne skipped ahead and walked backwards for a few steps. “Maybe a beer or two might loosen you up,” she muttered as she turned around.
    I wished for her words to get swallowed by the windy night, but they didn’t. We were between gusts.
    “It’s not me who needs loosening up, thank you very much,” Quint said. “I’m fine just the way I am.”
    “I’m fine just the way I am,” said Joanne.
    “Uh-oh,” I said.
    “Joanne, are you mimicking me?” Quint asked.
    “No.”
    They saw me to the breezeway of Joe’s house, made sure I knew some people, and then left. They were too riled up at each other to stay. I heard the snippet, “…kiss like a dead man,” shouted in from the boulevard. It was Joanne doing the shouting and I figured that would end it, but it wasn’t enough to break them up.
    Joe Turner’s parents were away. He was one of those guys who was old but still in high school. He hung around with delinquents and it was always a thrill to be at his house. It looked like lots of other parents’ houses. There was even plastic on the living room furniture.
    But the basement was Joe’s world and that’s where the party was. It had a bar with a fridge. I helped myself to a beer and sat down at one end of a worn-out couch. I watched Duane come in and notice me while I half-listened to what an older girl named Myrna had to say. It wasn’t uninteresting—she was going on about stiffs, as in dead people. Her dad was an undertaker. She seemed to think it was some kind of claim to fame. Maybe it was to some of those people. There was so much I didn’t know. But I had trouble concentrating on anything but Duane that night.
    There was a room off the rec room that housed the furnace and Joe’s weight lifting equipment and a bed. I’d been there before. There were sheets on the bed that smelled like the boys’ locker room at school. I knew that because I had been there too.
    Joanne and I had snuck in once when our boys had gym. We had gym too, but we told our dim-bulb teacher that our chemistry teacher, Mr. Froese, needed our help with some tricky