While you were in the bathroom, splashing on some of your father's aftershave, I watched the girl you had a crush on eat a maraschino cherry. She held the stem, dangling the bright globe above her parted lips, then lowered the cherry into her wet mouth in one swift motion.

She smiled at me, and she ate another. She asked me if I wanted one.

I nodded and she motioned me closer. The hair on her arms was golden. I wanted to rub my cheek against that fuzz. She lifted another cherry from the glass jar and held it up. I held out my hand but she shook her head. I opened my mouth and she fed me. The fruit was sweet and soft and filled my mouth with juice.

At the movie theater you held her hand; I saw your fingers twine with hers in the dark from where I sat, on your other side. And the next day, after you'd kissed her on the front porch of her house, light-drunk moths flickering around the two of you, you told me that she tasted just like maraschino cherries.

We were shooting hoops, heat rising off the asphalt court, bringing a damp shine to our faces and chests. You described the restaurant you'd take her to that night, the one by the harbor where you could watch the boats glide in through the dark water.

I thought of her parted lips, the curve of her hips in her jeans. I imagined lying down next to her on the football field in the dark, breathing in the musk of cut grass and skin. I shot my basketball after you shot yours. I listened to the whish as the two basketballs followed each other through the net, the slap slap as they bounced. Then I told you about your mother and the man I'd seen with his hands in her hair.

Your brother told me later that you made your mother cry, that your father slapped you so hard the ghost of a hand lingered on your cheek for a long moment, pale and bloodless. Your parents would file for divorce before the summer ended, and you would move with your mother to upstate New York, where snow tumbled from the sky all winter long.

Here where snow is rare, the girl you had a crush on would kiss other boys, but never me, not once.

Kate Blakinger's short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Southeast Review, and Vestal Review. She lives in Philadelphia.