Chapter 59
In the eighth grade, Evan Mackie had asked Cherry to go to the Can Dance with him. (To get into the dance, you had to bring
a can of food for the food bank. Evan had brought two cans of green beans to cover them both.)
At the dance—at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the school gym—some of the boys had called Evan over, and they’d all stood
in a huddle while Cherry waited for him by the bleachers.
Then Evan had walked back to Cherry, while the boys all watched.
“So, yeah,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I kinda need to break up with you.”
They weren’t dating—though going to the dance together did imply that they were something.
“So . . . yeah,” he said, walking away.
When Evan got back to the boys, they all laughed. And Evan laughed. Though he wouldn’t make eye contact with them, either.
Evan stayed with the same group for the rest of the dance. Cherry’s own friends circled her, outraged on her behalf.
One of them—Leslie—went to talk to her boyfriend, who was in the boy huddle, and he told her that the guys didn’t pressure
Evan to do it or anything. “Some of them were just giving Evan shit for being a”—Leslie mouthed the next word—“whaler.”
“A what?” Cherry asked.
“It’s what they call boys who like plus-size girls,” Leslie said. “They’re so stupid.”
“You’re not even plus-sized, Cherry,” another girl said.
“Yes, I am,” Cherry said. It was the eighth grade; she was a size sixteen.
“Well, you’re not fat.”
Nobody had said she was fat. Explicitly.
“I don’t even like Evan,” Cherry said. It was true, though no one would believe that now.
Cherry didn’t even think Evan was cute. But she’d thought he was nice enough. They sat together in science. (They still would, after this.) Cherry had said yes
to Evan because she’d wanted to come to this dance, and because she’d wanted some boy to like her.
Evan didn’t hang out with the popular boys, usually. He got to hang out with them that day because of what he’d done to Cherry.
Evan was gay.
That was obvious, in retrospect. He was married now. He lived in Colorado.
Cherry still hadn’t forgiven him.