We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” joked Sue Yoon, quoting everyone’s favorite new movie line of the summer from When Harry Met Sally, which they weren’t carding for at the mall, although it was rated R.

  Mel shot us a sly wink from the stage, which was surprising because the Mel Boucher we knew was more likely to accidentally wink with both eyes. In the low wattage of the auditorium, her all-American Québécois complexion looked radiant as any seraphim come to deliver the good news. And it was good news. For a team that most recently had posted a 2-8 record, it was wicked good news. Who knew? You scrawled your name in a book and tied yourself up like a pot roast with a piece of smelly blue tube sock and voilà! The world was your oyster. Mel was our very own archangel of darkness. In time, we were all having what she was having. Even Abby Putnam signed on after some initial sputtering. And what Mel Boucher was having was nothing the Judeo-Christian world we inhabited would have smiled on approvingly.

  See, it turns out all those long dark hopeless seasons, we’d been putting our chips on the wrong god. Honestly, of all places on earth, the Town of Danvers should have seen us coming.

  * * *

  —

  To be clear: Jen Fiorenza wanted in. “What’s your secret,” she whisper-yelled into the muggy dark. It was Tuesday night. The citation Mel had received earlier from Chrissy Hankl lay tossed among her stuff. They were each lying on their standard-issue twin beds. It was too hot to be under the covers—just thinking of cotton made the temperature rise. The box fan was set to Mach 10 in the window, masticating the air with its plastic teeth. “Spill it,” Jen hiss-shouted. It was like talking while picnicking beneath a landing helicopter. From past stints at Camp Wildcat they both knew it was the most essential possession to bring to camp. Fan first, field hockey stick second. Outside in the distance the moon hung, a warped lantern above the mountains. By the end of the week it would be the Full Thunder Moon. Rumor had it there might even be some kind of eclipse. Tonight the moon’s light projected the shadow of the fan’s blades into a circle of knives spinning murderously on the wall.

  Despite the airflow, Jen’s bangs still sat at attention atop her head, her hair a bleached-blond crown. Even at night her Claw retained Its shape. Because she didn’t always have time in the morning to manually resurrect It, since 1986 she had trained herself to sleep on her back. Among ourselves, none of us ever referred to the popular ’80s hairstyle as “The Claw”—it was a name Becca Bjelica’s Serbian dad came up with to describe the gravity-defying architectural feats teen girls lovingly erected each morning fresh out of the shower. Sometimes behind her back some of us liked to imagine Jen’s Claw going head-to-head with other prominent claws at Danvers High, claws like the Leaning Tower of Paula Cavanaugh or the Space Needle of Missy Evans, as the two made contact in the hallway, each girl a mountain goat clashing for the alpha position. The Claw’s only enemy was water. Or so It believed.

  “My secret,” repeated Mel. In addition to the box fan rattling in the window, she also had a death grip on a small handheld battery-powered fan that she’d picked up at Spencer Gifts.

  “Don’t go all Canuck on me,” said Jen. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Maybe,” said Mel. There was a mosquito somewhere in the room. Even over the roar of two fans the creature’s heat-seeking drone was audible. Reflexively Mel swatted at her neck. “Mon ostie,” she spat as the thing bit her anyway. Later, toward the end of the season, when Julie Kaling learned ostie was a swear word that referred to the Eucharist, she’d practically faint.

  But blasphemy didn’t bother Jen Fiorenza any. Absentmindedly she patted the top of her head as was her habit throughout the day. It was almost midnight and all was well up top. She could hear Mel cussing across the room, the laughter of the mosquito floating through the dark. Admittedly they were an odd pairing. Jen and her four-inch Claw, peroxide queen of the jocks, and Mel, whose hair looked like the Oates half of Hall and Oates. Usually Mel roomed with one of the quieter folks among us, like Heather Houston or Julie Kaling. But this year Heather and Julie had finally wised up and paired up to be masters of their own realm rather than everyone else’s backup roommate. And since everyone else was taken, and Jen was secretly jealous of her best friend Abby Putnam over Abby’s probable ascension to team captain, and since her other best friend Boy Cory was forced by law to sleep over at the boys’ soccer camp, Mel was the only one left to bunk with. Jen figured it wouldn’t be so bad. Being roomies with the shy tomboy with a mullet would make her look extra glam by comparison. Not that she needed the help.

  Life out on the field, however, was another matter. In that arena she needed all the help she could get and she wasn’t too proud to admit it to a kindly dork. As a teen girl, Jen knew a con when she saw one, and as far as she was concerned, Mel was running a long one. Of the eleven of us, Jen was the first to smell it. After all, the long con was the main tool in her toolbox. It was how you got your way in the world. Bat your eyelashes, wear your jeans a size too small, pitch your voice high, bleach your hair to the ends of the earth. She wanted in. True, sometimes cons backfired, sometimes the seams of your Jordache gave way in public when you bent down to tie your Reeboks, but that was the price you paid for soft power. Protectively Jen cupped her Claw in her palm and gently turned to face Mel across the dark. “C’mon. Fess up.”

  “I didn’t think it would work so well.”

  “What would?”

  “The book we found during study hall on the last day of class.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and Lisa.”

  Jen racked her brain. She seemed to recall Mel floating through the hallways of Danvers High from time to time with some preppy-looking girl named Lisa MacGregor, the girl with her collar upturned around her neck like a radio dish. Maybe it was Lisa’s perfectly creased Dickies, the pink canvas belt, the boat shoes, the Swatch watch, the mint-green Izod sweater expertly tied around her shoulders, but Jen wasn’t buying it. On someone like Karen Burroughs, the head football cheerleader, an outfit like that would’ve looked breezy and effortless, as if an industrial-sized fan was aimed on Karen wherever she went, minions in the wings angling light diffusers her way, but on Lisa MacGregor, it was obviously a carefully orchestrated disguise, something she couldn’t wait to rip off once she hit the front door of her house, where she’d do just like Mel and slip into a pair of her brother’s old Wranglers and a Bruins shirt.

  Mel had a hand raised, ready to smash the next creature who even thought about biting her. “The last G period of the year me and Lisa found this book in the library,” she said.

  Could it be true? Could the Danvers High library finally be good for something? “What kind of book?” Jen asked.

  “Just a reference book full of pictures and stuff.”

  Jen imagined the two girls poring over some dusty tome. She imagined them lovingly carrying it out of the stacks, their fingers accidentally touching as they simultaneously went to turn a page, causing them to look at each other and giggle. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Religious stuff, plus all the old stuff that happened in Danvers.”

  Getting info out of Mel Boucher was like pulling teeth with a pair of tweezers. “You mean the Witch Trials.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And there was a section in it about the afflicted girls.”

  “Who?” In Jen’s defense, it was summer. Like a lot of us, she had an unwritten policy during school vacation of not using her brain to call on past learning.

  “The group of teenaged girls who accused other people of being witches.” Mel turned on a flashlight and shone it at Jen. “You know most of those girls were from Danvers.”

  Jen shielded her eyes from the light. It sounded like something she had heard before. She remembered in elementary school being dragged around one afternoon on a class trip to a bunch of sites,
at one point staring at a hole in the ground as Mr. Trelawny, the history teacher, practically wet himself over what he said was the foundation of some parsonage. She recalled learning that in the late 1600s, Salem was actually much bigger, and that Danvers used to be a part of Salem called Salem Village. Then in 1757, Salem Village broke off and became the Town of Danvers. Whoopee.

  “So what else was in this book?”

  Mel held the flashlight under her chin as if telling a ghost story. “Facts and description.”

  “And that’s how you made fifty-two saves? Off facts and description?”

  “Not really. There was other stuff too.” For a moment in the glow of the flashlight, Mel’s face took on an impish quality, her soft features suddenly sharpened, the small welt forming on her neck where the mosquito had bitten her as if pulsing. Jen blinked hard and looked again. Silly rabbit! It was just Mel and her terrible haircut, her moon-pie face, a mosquito circling her head like a tiny satellite.

  And so ten minutes later Emilio Estevez had a second name tucked safely under his boy-next-door grin. Mel finished tying a thin strip of fabric she’d cut from an old blue tube sock just above Jen’s bicep and sat back to admire her work. “I have one too,” she said, then flexed, showing off the blue scrap tied around her arm just under the sleeve of the ratty Red Sox shirt she slept in. “Don’t take it off,” she added. “Now you’re connected.” For a moment it sounded as if impish Mel was back, but Jen pushed the thought out of her mind.

  “To what?” she said. “Why blue? They had this color back then?”

  “It’s our school color, dummy. The Danvers Falcons.”

  Just then their mini-fridge kicked on. Jen jumped at the noise. “Am I supposed to feel different?” she said, trying to act nonchalant. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted in through the window. She could hear music playing but couldn’t tell where it was coming from or what it was, maybe Milli Vanilli or Debbie Gibson, maybe some four-legged being baying at the moon.

  Mel switched off the flashlight and crawled back onto her bed. “Abby’s right,” she said. “This season, it’s our time.” She picked up her handheld fan and aimed it directly at the new mosquito bite on her neck.

  Jen didn’t answer. For a long while she lay sweating in the darkness. When she finally did fall asleep, she found herself dreaming of a flock of small yellow birds, her mouth as if sealed with candle wax, the hair atop her head like a tree growing black roots down into her skull.

  The following afternoon on Wednesday we beat Cohasset 2-0. Abby scored the first goal. Mel made fifty-seven saves. And although she’d been playing left forward for as long as any of us could remember, that afternoon Jen Fiorenza scored only the fifth goal of her career. As the ball shot through the Cohasset goalie’s legs, for a tremulous moment Jen’s blond Claw seemed to gleam with a dark light of Its own.

  * * *

  —

  Thursday at dinner over a bowl of Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries, Boy Cory was giving Jen her final intel of the day. The cafeteria was crawling with kids from every sports camp, the lacrosse girls sporting strange tans, their faces reverse raccoons where their goggles left the skin pale around their eyes. In amongst the feeding chaos, Jen had managed to commandeer her own table, which was no small feat given the number of kids rumbling around holding trays laden with bowls of ice cream. It had been a long hot afternoon, the temperature almost 98°, the air superheated like swimming in a vat of human blood, but we had masterfully whipped Rochester 5-1.

  “Fact,” offered Boy Cory. “Some soccer kids are throwing the all-star party anyway.”

  Jen Fiorenza didn’t bat an eyelash, but her Claw seemed to perk up at the news. “They’ll never pull it off,” she said, but Boy Cory could tell the Claw was saying, “Where?”

  “Either way, I’m gonna check it out,” he said. “Tomorrow night out in the woods by Willoughby Boulder. It’s a good location,” he added. “Secluded but still open.” Friday would be the last full day of camp. Each sport would have its own all-star game against their counselors, after which it was tradition that a group of seniors would party on one of the fields sometime after lights-out. Then come Saturday, we would all pack up our box fans and shin guards and drive back up or down I-95, depending on where we’d come from.

  The year before, the all-star party had gotten out of hand. Two sophomore girls from Revere ended up in Wentworth-Douglass Emergency getting their stomachs pumped. This year the camp had made it clear that sneaking out of the dorms Friday night was a no-go, but what were they going to do? We were seniors. It wasn’t like they could send us home early.

  Boy Cory rubbed his arm. The day before, Jen had snuck him up to her dorm room, telling him she had something important to show him. Once there, she’d cut a strip off Mel’s old sweat sock. “This’ll grow some hair on your chest.” She didn’t notice him shudder at her words, though she wouldn’t have cared even if she had.

  “What’s it supposed to do?” he asked.

  She glared at him as if it were the dumbest question she’d ever heard. “Impart awesomeness,” she said.

  They were sitting on Jen’s bed in the dorm room she shared with Mel, the box fan in the window moving the hot air around. The instant the blue fabric kissed his skin, Boy Cory felt a small shock, as if he’d just touched something metal after walking across a thick carpet in wool socks.

  “How’s it work?”

  “Who cares?” said Jen. The Claw sat atop her head radiating Its blond force field. “Just don’t take it off.”

  “Ever?” Boy Cory was trying to imagine what his newly awesome life might look like. “What about when I take a shower?”

  “Ever,” said Jen. “Take it off, and whatever awesomeness you had evaporates.” The Claw gave a bored nod of agreement as if the evaporation of awesomeness were common knowledge. “Not only does it go away,” Jen added, “but you’re left two times less awesome than you were.”

  Boy Cory stared dubiously at his arm. He gave it a week at the most. It probably wouldn’t even make it through the end of camp. There was no way this thing would stay on his arm longer than that. It already looked like it was coming apart.

  “Don’t worry. It’ll last,” said Jen, as if reading his thoughts. “You’ll see.”

  It was Wednesday’s 2-0 win over Cohasset that had prompted her to march Boy Cory back to the room she shared with Mel and tie him up, then stand over him as he signed his name in the notebook with Emilio Estevez on the cover, Jen’s Claw casting a menacing shadow on the wall behind the two of them.

  “Personally, I’m more of a Judd Nelson man,” Boy Cory had quipped as she handed him a purple Bic, “but whatever.” Mel hadn’t been present at the time, but Jen didn’t think of Emilio as belonging to her anymore. Moon-faced Mel Boucher didn’t have the muscle to get everyone on board. Maybe the wallflowers might listen to her, like Heather Houston and Julie Kaling, but it would take some finesse and outright bullying to sign up the rest of the team, folks like poor little rich girl Girl Cory, who had everything and was everything a girl should be, or headstrong and unabashedly earnest Abby Putnam, who was her own one-woman conga line and would never jump off a cliff even if everyone else did for a legitimate reason, like in order to escape a fire, and Jen was ready to deliver the whole lot of us.

  She told Boy Cory the rest of the rules, which in addition to not taking it off also included following any urges you might get all the way to the end no matter what. Once his name was in the book and he was tied up, he felt the briefest shiver, as if the two of them were connected in some way, him a thrall and her the master. He had always played the worker to her queen bee. It seemed only right to have this physical proof of his obeisance.

  Now in the cafeteria, it hadn’t even been a full day, and already his arm was sore. He’d been tied up with the part of the sock down near the toe, and, simply put, he needed a longer piece. The
thing felt too tight. Fitting it to be snug might work on a girl, but on him, he could feel the blue fabric cutting into his skin anytime he lifted his arm as the muscle expanded. He imagined everyone else could see it, could feel the sharp pain whenever he flexed, all over the cafeteria, all eyes trained on him and his arm. Usually, all eyes were trained on him. He was the only boy in the Division 1 Northeastern Conference, plus he had one of those first names that could go either way a full decade before unisex names became a thing. It probably didn’t help that the beautiful Girl Cory, whose real name was Cory Gillis, was legendary. He, on the other hand, was the decidedly unlegendary Cory Young. Boy Cory had heard a rumor about another boy playing somewhere out in western Mass, but it was just a rumor, like the rumor about a girl down on the South Shore playing second-string quarterback for some Division 3 school. Or the rumor that Mr. L’Heurre, the math teacher, lived with Mr. Hill, the health teacher, which we believed because from time to time they both referenced a cat named Barbra.

  Boy Cory was something of an enigma wrapped in a kilt. On game days he wore a blue-and-white kilt like the rest of us, often tying a blue bandana around his head the same way Jen Fiorenza did to support her Claw during play. It had been a bit of a commotion when he first asked to join the team freshman year, but in time everyone had adapted as we had gone on losing even with a boy, so the idea that he gave us an unfair advantage wasn’t an issue.

  Boy Cory rubbed his arm for the umpteenth time. Wearing a kilt was no big deal. Yet a piece of sock knotted around his upper bicep made him feel self-conscious, a marked man. “Leave it alone,” said Jen. He took one last bite of his turkey fricassee and tried to remember the important news he had to tell her.

  “Robby Branson wants to know if you’re coming Friday.”

  “Robby who?”

  Boy Cory managed to suppress what would have been an epic eye roll. Why did she have to make it so hard? “Beverly’s soccer captain.”