Cherry Bites Read Online Free PDF Page B

was his first haiku. No one knew it; not even me.
    Mr. Dupont was a grade seven teacher who some of the older girls, including me, had a crush on. He had greasy hair and a lump on his forehead, but his eyes were always half closed and that caused my friends and me to think about how a man might look when he was about to stick it inside you. He made us wonder what that might be like. We did our best to ignore his stringy hair.
    I was impressed with Pete when I found out from the kids at school the details of what he had done. Even at his age he knew that Mr. Dupont was the right guy to pick. Miss Pratt had blushed and stuck the package in her purse. There was no way she was going to question it; she was too smart for that.
    Pete would do anything. Once during the spring breakup of the Red River, he hopped onto an ice floe and rode it along from the monkey speedway to the old rowing club. A small gang of boys cheered him along. The escapade could so easily have gone wrong.
    That type of thing made him exciting to be with. So Pete was a popular boy, in spite of his frailty and his nickname. And his inability to speak to his own sister.
    Miss Tufts, the school nurse, caught on to this. She saw most of us at one time or another and she saw a lot of Pete. She must have spoken to him about me and received an unusual response, because she asked to see the two of us together. I turned up, but Pete didn’t, so Nurse Tufts called my mother in. Nora must have hated that. She wanted so much to appear normal, even special, in a good way, and the fact that her kids had an unhealthy relationship would have reflected badly on her parenting skills.
    Miss Tufts suggested a child psychiatrist named Dr. Bondurant who had an office in the Manitoba Clinic. Nora agreed, of course. Anything for the health and happiness of her children, she said. I sneered inside and even Pete made a face. But we didn’t sneer together.
    The visits were fun. The doctor saw us both separately and together. When we were together Pete didn’t speak. I don’t know if he spoke when he was alone with Dr. Bondurant. I’m inclined to think that he did, but I haven’t a clue what he might have talked about.
    “My brother doesn’t like me very much,” I blurted out one day when it was just me and the doc. I drew as we talked. He encouraged that.
    “Why?” asked Dr. Bondurant.
    “I don’t know.” I lied.
    It was drilled into me not to talk about the incident: it was a rule in our house. Pete was not to know of his sister’s cruelty. He didn’t remember the biting episode, as far as anyone knew; he was only one when it happened. But he wasn’t unaware of something dreadful having taken place. He remembered the terror and connected it to me. We all knew it.
    “Do you think it might have something to do with your biting him?” Dr. Bondurant asked.
    His words stunned me into silence. I worked on my drawing of a beautiful lady with flowing hair; that was my specialty. I used the golden crayon for her hair.
    “Your mother told me about it,” he said.
    “Pete doesn’t remember it,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”
    “It’s okay for you and me to discuss it,” he said. “Your mother said so.”
    I found out later that Dr. Bondurant thought the biting incident should be brought into the open, discussed with both Pete and me, but that Nora wouldn’t allow it. She made him promise. He was the only one outside of the family at that point, besides my friend Joanne, who knew what I had done.
    It puzzled me why Nora had confided in him if she wouldn’t let him use it. I came to the conclusion that she wanted him to know that it was my fault and not hers that Pete was weird.
    The tiny scar on Pete’s face was explained away to the world at large by a fall he’d had at a very young age. The skin taken from his bum wasn’t a secret, thanks to me and my big mouth and the constant curiosity about his nickname. Nora hadn’t been able to control