I remember the days in October, before November mist, the days when September sunlight still cast its idyllic hue over our lives. Back then we were able to laugh at ourselves. On the playground, we flew face first down metal slides so tall they swayed. Back when crushes were conspiracies and flushed cheeks and ice cream cones and weed-flowers plucked from parks. It was simple, no ceremony needed, and 'I like you' was always good enough. Those were honest words, we were honest, emotion too large to be clamped behind lips, lips too innocent to be tightened into scowls.
"I like you."
His hair was red, licorice braids left over from last year's Halloween, blue eyes, bon-bons from that same holiday. I've always been undecided about candy. I can never tell if it's too sweet or not sweet enough. It can keep forever, some of it, the super-sweet kinds. It can go into hiding under a bed, cuddle with dust bunnies, be unearthed months later, after the last leaves have fallen from the skeletal trees.

When hot coco takes the place of lemonade and the streets are dotted with star-lights and the adults have taken to penny pinching and sugar is hard to come by, that's when you can inchworm your way under the sheets, holding your glow-in-the-dark princess scepter and reach out your hand, now a claw as white as winter sun, and like a magician pulls scarves from his hat, so you can pull that candy from the cavern to remind you of abundance, festival, laughter, the colors on the wrappers as manifold as the colors of the autumn.

Ricky was my hidden stash of sweets, my secret addiction. We would meet at the park before school and he would help me onto the merry go round and spin me until my cinnamon pony tail came undone and my little girl hair knotted around my ears. Then we would sit on the swings and talk about all the things that were so important, my grape eyes and his blue bon bons never straying from each other. And when the sun had floated too high we would check his watch and realize we were late and we would run to his bike and I would sit on the handle bars and he would careen down hills, through oncoming traffic, both of us howling like banshees.

“I like you.” I said. We were toeing the dust below our swings, pretending time had stopped and that the school bell would never ring.

Ricky jerked his head up. “Huh?”

I flushed and stuttered. “I- I really like you.”

He chewed his cheek, fiddled with the new baseball cap his dad had bought him last week. “Okay.”

“...Okay?” I hid behind the chains that kept my swing aloft.

“What?” He kicked a rock with his sneaker. Looked at his watch. “We're goanna be late if we don't leave soon. Mr. Andreas said he'd call my Dad if I was late again.”

“But,” I squeaked. “Don't you like me too?”

He jumped off his swing. “I better go. See you at school, Anna.”

That was the morning I began to grow up. I was never late for school again, never pretended that time could stop. I started cleaning my room, slaughtered the dust bunnies under my bed. My friends would come over and find petrified candy and wrinkle their noses, so I threw it away. I often wondered why children couldn't look sour and cultivated crow's feet, frown lines. I decided that the kind of candy that never went bad was too sweet to stomach anyway.