Cherry Bites by Alison Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

cards. Jack Logan was missing. I didn’t hear Luce make any sound at all but they were doing it to her one by one.
    The only thing that made the reading of this bearable was Nora’s tone, the matter-of-factness that she used to cover what surely must have been trembling beneath the surface. Unwittingly, she protected both herself and her future daughter with her abrupt way of putting things. Or, maybe she didn’t yet own the words to describe her true feelings; maybe she never would. At this point she still called herself I . The references to herself as she didn’t creep in till a little later. That passage was written in 1939, in the summer, when Nora was just turning eleven.
    I was a good five years away from sex when I was eleven. At fifteen I was still a virgin; Henry had been so polite.
    A boy named Duane started hanging around me. He was so handsome that I was suspicious of his interest in me. Maybe he sensed my vulnerability after Henry left, saw me as an easy target.
    He was a little shorter than Henry, who was over six feet tall. Duane’s hair was dark brown and combed back, like a greaser. He wore jeans that were way too tight, but a lot of boys did. My stomach did crazy things when I thought about him or saw him in the flesh.
    Duane’s family lived just one street over, on Claremont Avenue, but he seemed exotic to me, partly because his last name was different from his sister’s. He was a Simkin and his sister, Greta, was a Bower. I liked to think of his mum having had sex with at least two men, probably hordes more. This gave me something in common with him. I had no proof that Nora had slept with anyone other than my dad and Mr. Jones but I had my suspicions.
    Greta was my age, but she was one year behind me in school so we didn’t know each other well. I couldn’t ask her about her brother and trust her not to tell him.
    Duane started walking me home from places, like school, the Red Top Drive-In Restaurant, where we hung out at night, or friends’ houses, where we went when the parents weren’t home.
    But I always knew that I wasn’t what he really wanted. He never asked me out, never took me to a movie or anywhere at all. Not that Henry had taken me to movies. But at least we’d talked when we walked and he’d taken me to people’s houses—not just home from them.
    I knew that Duane had done it to lots of girls by then. And for some reason he wanted to do it me.
    “Plee-ease, Cherry,” he would say when we were necking in various rec rooms around the neighbourhood. “Come on, Cherry. This is killing me,” he said. “You’re driving me crazy.”
    I liked that. I liked that I was driving him crazy—if indeed I was—but I wasn’t going to let him fuck me. I had learned from somewhere that once you did it, boys lost respect for you and there was no turning back.
    The whole winter I turned sixteen, Duane kept at me. He touched my breasts.
    “Nice tits,” he said and I buried my red face in a pillow so he wouldn’t see how he embarrassed me. He touched me over my jeans, gave me my first non-self-induced orgasm that way. He drove me wild, Duane did.
    “Nobody kisses me the way you do.” He said that to me. Never I love you , he didn’t say that; I’ll hand that to him.
    He had plenty of others. I was never his girlfriend. He went steady with girls and kept after me. He took them to parties and movies and school dances; he even gave a girl his ring once. But he kept after me.
    I couldn’t figure out what exactly I meant to him. He liked me, I guess. We laughed now and then. But why did he invest so much time? Maybe that was it. After a certain point he couldn’t give up because too much time and effort had been put in. He couldn’t stand that it was for nothing, or for almost nothing.
    Henry’s letters had fallen off. He still wrote, but not as often and not at length. And he no longer talked about how it would be when he came back. He played guitar and sang in a band and that