The radio is playing Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby” as I come up for air after a prolonged kissing session in the front seat of Donna’s massive car. The kind of kissing session where we’re both trying to prove something. She’s trying to see how far I will go. I’m trying to see if this thing will work.

“About time,” Lisa says from the back seat.

Apparently her date wasn’t as interesting.

Donna and Lisa are two girls inseparable at the hip. Good friends from the time I met them to the time I moved away from Brockville. I dated Donna in the spring of 1982 and it was expected that Lisa was, by association, my best second friend. We met during an unexpected high school teacher’s strike, giving Brockvegas teens a prolonged summer break, meaning: a lot of kids with nothing to do. I was 16 and Donna and Lisa were 18. Donna and Lisa were two single girls living in their own house on the border of town, acquired suddenly due to Donna’s parents dying within months of each other. These girls (and their living arrangements) were parent’s worst nightmare: teens living alone in a relatively remote house. Needless to say theirs was a crash pad. But thanks to Lisa, it didn’t become a dive. Hers was the voice of reason and would loudly eject any shenanigan makers.

When Donna and I decided that we were going to “out”, Lisa showered us with comical threats of cradle robbing and pedophilia.

Lisa eventually hooked up with my best friend at the time, Michael, who was 16. So she wasn’t without reproach.

But she always was the smart one in our little group. She kept Donna on a path of mental health during her mourning. She would tell us when parties got a little out of hand, like when she shut down a particularly roudy fete after Tim Picotte accidentally put his hand through a window without blinking a drunken eye.

One memory of Lisa stands out the most. She and Donna were having a heated discussion as they cleaned up the kitchen about something long forgotten. Lisa was drying dishes and trying to convince Donna to do something or other and at the height of the argument/conversation, Lisa had a white Corelle dish* in her hand. Without comment, she unexpectedly marched to the side door of the house and flung the door open that lead to the all-cement car park.

Lisa opened the side door and, with a pitch that would have certainly made her popular with the Blue Jays, tossed the plate against the brick wall opposite the door.

The dish shattered. One thousand tiny shards. No one says a word.

“Hmf. Those fuckers do break,” she said calmly. Her anger subsiding, the heat of the argument diffused.

She had a knack of dismantling a situation.

I moved away from Brockvegas when I was 17 and kept up contact with Donna and Lisa for a while but life got in the way. The last I heard from her was that she was going into Childhood Studies at a local college and that she and Donna didn’t hang out much anymore. Recently thought, Lisa and I re-connected on Facebook and she would leave great comments on my wall about my blog posts. We chatted and I learned that she had a son and a single mom and was quite proud of him, evident by the glowing posts she would display in her profile. Her son was  someone that she was immensely proud of and was the love of her life.

I learned this morning that Lisa passed suddenly on Friday. I don’t know the causes. My thoughts go out to her son and her family.

I jam my bare feet into my fraying, cracked rubber boots. The same ones I’ve had for years – old faithfuls – that have been protecting me from the onslaught of leeches found lurking just below the waterline. Nothing is more horrible than to have to pull one of these savage parasites from my skin so for protection, I have taken to wearing knee high rubber boots to thwart vampyric attacks.

I am 10 years old.

It’s the summer of 1975 and I have just been paid my allowance of $0.25 which I jam into my frayed jean cut offs’ pocket. With the influx of cash I, and next-cottage neighbour, Randy, decide to travel to the nearest store, approximately a mile away from our summer homes, to purchase high fructose treats. It’s not really a store, it’s actually a tuck shop for a campground/trailer park, but it’s the only place we can go shopping without a car ride or parental supervision.

Ten years old and I’m ready to shop like it’s Sex and the City.

The first leg of our journey is through a massive swamp. Massive to me, at ten years old. We climb over the rotting cow fence behind my cottage and we’re away, into marshy ground and past downed evergreen trees. There is a slight path we follow, forged from other kids that cut across our collective lots along the lakefront. But in the swamp, the ground trail becomes fuzzy, the only markers are holes in above ground foliage. My boots sink into the ground and water overflows into them.

Dragonflies light on sticks. The sun is blotted out by the tall trees that rise up from the swamp, branchless until the leafy canopy high above us. We chat about making a fort in the back woods, about going for a swim later, about

HOLY SHIT A SNAKE!

We hoof it. My boots nearly stay in the swamp but I manage to curl toe and keep them on my feet, despite having a litre of water in each. Water and muck can’t keep us in the swamp’s dirty grasp when it comes to snakes. Oddly enough I no longer fear them, though I choose not to imagine what it would feel like to be bit by one.

We come out on the other side of the swamp to our next obstacle: the dangerous cut through, across a cottage lot that echoes games played against Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. I never knew the owners, never saw anyone on the lot or in the house, but Randy insisted that they were heinous and needed to be avoided. Going around their lot wasn’t an option – it would mean walking a mile up to the county road and back down to the shop, adding hours to our sugar journey. I empty my boots of water and watch as Randy scoots across the yard, using lawn furniture and old tire planters as cover.

I just run straight across.

The rest of the trip is free and clear. We walk in the summer sun talking about what treasures we will find, having slayed the unseen Kraken, survived the seven tasks, found the golden fleece, etc.

The store is dark and cool and full of fresh product.  I purchase Bottle Caps, Lix a Stix (a candy stick you lick, then stick into a Kool Aid powder – duh!) and a bottle of orange Fanta. I jam a dime into the humming vending machine, open the thin glass door and pull on the bottle neck to make the machine release the sugary syrup drink. I wrench off the bottle top (non-candy, non-edible) and insert a straw. Which promptly falls into the bottle and with less than half a centimetre for my lips to grapple it, ensures that I won’t drink the entire thing on the way home.

But I do anyway.