We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  We’d snuck out an hour after lights-out. When we tiptoed down the back stairs, the dorm was still humming, everywhere girls excited by the fact that we’d beaten the counselors. It had been pretty thrilling, the way Abby reared back and knocked it home, the ball a white comet streaking through the goalie’s legs. Already it seemed like a lifetime ago on a planet somewhere far away. By the time we arrived at the boulder, a sea of empties lay scattered on the ground, a boom box going with AC/DC’s “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” cranked past ten. With our coming, the party swelled from twenty kids to just enough to feel legitimate.

  Boy Cory saddled up to Jen Fiorenza. “Jesus,” he said. “You bring everyone?” It was true. Most of us were there, except for Abby, Girl Cory, and Sue Yoon, the triumvirate of late adapters. Some of us felt compelled to be there even though we didn’t want to be, like Heather Houston and Julie Kaling, who weren’t exactly known for their partying prowess—keggers weren’t really their scene. But still, for some inexplicable reason, it felt like we had to be together, out with our teammates in the light of the full moon, Willoughby Boulder a disco ball, all of us dancing around cackling our heads off.

  Jen’s Claw stood at full attention, Its interest piqued by the crowd as It sniffed the air. Since Monday she’d been dousing It with Sun In, burnishing It into a golden nest. “I can’t help it if people naturally follow me,” she huffed. She handed Boy Cory her denim jacket and looked around with an appraising eye. There were kids from every sports camp—lacrosse, tennis, soccer, football, plus us. Noticeably absent were our own golden boy Log Winters, captain of the Danvers High football team, and his crew. This year Danvers Football had been accompanied to camp by an assistant trainer everyone called Coach Mullins, even though he wasn’t really a coach. For some inexplicable reason, Coach Mullins had made a pact with the team that he wouldn’t shave until they won a game. The year before they’d gone a perfect 0-10. We didn’t really see how a beard was supposed to be motivational, but nobody asked us. Tonight Coach Mullins was obviously keeping his charges out of trouble. There wasn’t a Falcon footballer in sight. Jen Fiorenza quipped that they were all probably back in the dorms having a pajama party.

  A boy in a Black Dog T-shirt was walking around handing people beer. When he came to Mel, he bowed down, a liege serving his master. “The camp MVP gets double,” he said, handing her two cans of Old Milwaukee. Her face turned scarlet as he popped open both beers, her cheeks so red you could have toasted marshmallows from the heat. “Down the hatch,” the boy said. Obediently, she raised both cans at the same time and proceeded to pour most of each down her chin.

  And that’s pretty much how the night went. When the boys were in charge of the boom box, we listened to Metallica, Ratt, Aerosmith; when the girls took control, it was Madonna and Janet Jackson. At one point someone put on “Born in the U.S.A.” Heather Houston quickly scooted over to the boom box and popped in Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers. A few people bellyached at the change, but not enough for a quorum. Little by little, beer by beer, people began to disappear, couples wandering off into the night. Robby Branson had sprained his ankle at the soccer all-star game and wasn’t there, though some people said he hadn’t really hurt himself but was just a sore loser. Consequently, Jen spent the night watching boy after boy offer Mel a beer, some of them literally laying a can at her feet and then backing away, each with a light in his eyes, as if husky little Mel Boucher were the most luminous being in the world.

  The crazy thing is we all looked beautiful that night. Go figure. There was mousy Julie Kaling, her normally severe braid pouring like glossy black ink down her back; Heather Houston’s blue eyes now silvery behind her Mr. Magoo glasses; the deep copper of AJ Johnson’s skin; Little Smitty diminutive as a doll; Becca Bjelica’s double Fs for once appearing proportional and not lascivious; Jen Fiorenza, her Claw lit up like the Empire State Building, her lips glossed to the point of an oil slick; even Boy Cory, his teeth a mouthful of pearls. And yet somehow all eyes were on Mel. It didn’t matter if her hair was dense as a shrub, her shoulders wide as any boy’s. The night had voted. It was clear who the night preferred.

  A little after midnight, Abby Putnam showed up with Sue Yoon and Girl Cory. We watched as the three of them gingerly stepped through the landscape of bombed-out empties and smashed cigarette butts.

  “It’s so weird,” said Sue Yoon as she cracked open a Bud Light that Black Dog T-shirt Boy had handed her.

  “What is?” asked Abby.

  “Not having to worry about Bert and Ernie popping up any minute now.”

  It was true. Bert and Ernie were in another galaxy far, far away, a galaxy fifty miles south down I-95 on the North Shore. Bert and Ernie were two Danvers cops who were always sniffing around all things high school related, including us kids. They had a way of materializing anytime you even thought about doing something mildly sketchy. From the way they acted they must have believed they were just one big bust away from making sergeant. At Danvers High, we called the blue duo Bert and Ernie because of their height difference and because the taller one had a massive unibrow, the thing thick as if Magnum, P.I.’s mustache were growing between his eyes.

  “Yeah,” said Abby. “If they suddenly appeared way up here, that would truly be the long arm of the law.”

  “Nice one,” someone sniggered. It was Heather Houston. She was propped against a tree, her glasses all fogged up.

  Abby walked over and wiped one of Heather’s lenses clear with her free hand; in her other, she was holding a half-eaten banana. “Having fun?” she said. A few stray kernels of Cap’n Crunch were scattered on Heather’s front.

  Sue and Girl Cory wandered off to see if they could find AJ Johnson and Becca Bjelica. It was then Abby noticed Jen sitting off by herself beside the Willoughby Boulder and smoking a Marlboro Light. The two had known each other since they were infants, having grown up across the street. In some ways, they were complete opposites, light and dark, fast and steady, but for children, friendship is often based on proximity. Somehow even through the horrors of middle school, they’d managed to stay friends.

  Jen patted the ground next to her. Abby sighed and pulled up a piece of earth. “If you don’t believe in it, then what could it hurt?” Jen said. There was no edge to her voice, no hard sell. When it was just the two of them, she often became the little girl who liked to play with Lite-Brite, her brown hair parted into pigtails. Jen flicked her cigarette off into the night. She reached into her crocodile purse. For a moment in the dimming moonlight, it looked to Abby as if her friend were putting her arm into the mouth of some toothy beast. Then Jen pulled it out and handed it to her.

  Abby stared at the cover. The whole world seemed to want her to do it. Even Girl Cory and Sue Yoon had signed, letting themselves get tied up with parts of the sock after the all-star game. Emilio gazed intently into her soul. You’re the leader, he seemed to be saying. This is what your troops want. A good leader doesn’t always lead, he added. Sometimes a good leader follows.

  The moon slipped behind a strangely shaped cloud. Something about it appeared unnatural, man-made. Abby studied it, trying to figure out what it reminded her of. The air had left her lungs, like when you fall from a great height and everything gets knocked out of you. She ate the last of her banana and tossed the peel in a bush. Finally, she took the purple Bic Jen was offering and signed her name.

  Did a bolt of lightning flash? Some of us say yes, most of us say no. What we do agree on is that there was absolutely no breeze, the night perfectly still. The odd cloud stalled on the face of the moon.

  Abby realized it looked like a dynamite blaster. Like the little box with a plunger that Wile E. Coyote was forever deploying in his attempts to blow up a bridge or blast a crater in the road, each time with catastrophic yet predictable results. It was only then she realized a chunk of the moon was gone, a red hole left in its place.

  �
�It’s the eclipse,” someone yelled. Apparently, that was the signal to go crazy. Most of the boys took their shirts off, whipped them in the air. A few of the girls did too, Sue Yoon among them, though they kept their bras on. People began hooting, jumping up and down as if they’d lost their wits.

  “It’s only a partial,” explained Heather Houston from deep in the throes of her sugar trip. “If we were in Santiago, Chile, it’d look full.”

  Then we heard a whine in the distance, the sound like a dental drill, and saw a light sailing toward us in the newly dark. AJ Johnson was the first to point out it was a golf cart. The thing wasn’t proceeding in a straight line. Soon the reason became clear. Pam was driving. She looked as bombed out as ever. “Where is everyone?” she drawled. She rode up to the boom box and hit EJECT. The empties didn’t seem to faze her, the bodies of couples lying around intertwined like vines. “They’re gonna do a room check in fifteen minutes,” she said. “You guys gotta get back to your dorms.”

  Nobody complained. We were ready for it to be over. People came stumbling out of the night. Heather and Julie began gathering empties, but Little Smitty stomped up to them and swatted at their arms, and they dropped everything they were carrying. Boy Cory noticed that Jen’s Claw was a misshapen bump on her head, her mascara as if a panda had done her makeup.

  “Where’s Mel?” Abby asked. No one answered.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find her,” Pam said, and pointed her golf cart out into the night.

  Jen never saw Mel come back to their dorm room to sleep. In the morning when Jen came back from breakfast, Mel was simply there throwing her stuff in her duffel. The citation of excellence she’d received from Chrissy Hankl lay crumpled in the bottom of their wastebasket. “Where were you last night?” Jen asked. She couldn’t remember how many beers Mel had been offered, each boy supplicant trembling, yet today Mel appeared bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like she could recite the alphabet in any order, forward and backward, up and down.

  Then Jen noticed a small mark on Mel’s neck. Jennifer Courtney Fiorenza knew a hickey when she saw one. She tried to imagine what boy had administered it. Suddenly her Claw began to throb, her roots pulsing their own Morse code. An image fully materialized in her brain as if someone had flicked a switch on a filmstrip projector. Jen thought the possibility over. Each picture flashed, then BEEP! The story advanced to the next frame. The golf cart. BEEP! The Full Thunder Moon. BEEP! The partial eclipse. BEEP! Mel with her scarlet face. BEEP! Mel with a beer in each hand. BEEP! Pam with her boneless bliss. BEEP! The golf cart sailing out into the night. BEEP!

  Why not? It was field hockey, after all. Most of us were at least seventeen, one year over the age of consent in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The counselors weren’t much older than we were.

  Later on the way home, none of us in Sue Yoon’s pink Panic Mobile mentioned the strange mark on Mel’s neck. We were sluggish yet weirdly animated, listless yet eager for the next stage of this weird ride to fire up. Heather Houston was the only one thinking about it. The way the mark looked dark and asymmetrical around the edges. More like a lesion than anything else. She pulled her shirtsleeve down and tried to forget about her part of the sock cinched around her arm that she’d sworn upon pain of death not to remove. Suddenly she was afraid someone else might know what she’d been thinking; maybe Mel herself at that very moment was reading her mind. The more she tried not to think about it, the more the thought seeped into every crevice of her being, her every pore screaming it. If she’d spoken it out loud, maybe we all could’ve just stopped, taken a deep breath, and simply walked away without incident.

  Here’s what she was thinking: the hickey on Mel Boucher’s neck didn’t look like anything made by any human mouth on this earth.

  Finally, the sign appeared by the side of the road. DANVERS, NEXT RIGHT. We took the exit. Even spread out over four cars, all eleven of us leaned into the curve in unison.

  DANVERS VS. BISHOP FENWICK

  Fact: like a telephone booth or a pair of size 6 Sasson jeans, the teen brain can hold only so much. This is doubly true when said information does not pertain to it. That’s why teenagers are the original narcissists. It’s not even in one ear, out the other. Truth is, 95% of stuff never wriggles in in the first place.

  So naturally over the course of the summer we’d forgotten about “Philip.” “Philip” was the kind of thing that would totally slip the teenaged medulla oblongata unless he was happening to you directly, mano a mano. But Wednesday during Double Sessions, a delivery van roared into the parking lot by the tennis courts. Then the world tilted on its axis, everything skewing 1° weirder, and “Philip” was officially back in our lives.

  It had been a dull five weeks since Camp Wildcat. Mostly we’d spent it hanging out in twos and threes in finished basements or at the Liberty Tree Mall, sometimes at various pools. When it was hot enough we’d motor over to Sandy Beach down on River Street, where you had to walk a half mile out and even then the water was barely over your head. After we returned from camp, the sweat sock banded around our arms was something of an open secret. We didn’t hide it when sunning ourselves on the back deck of Girl Cory’s iceberg mansion on Summer Street or when getting a physical so we could play a fall sport, the doctor always making us bend over in our bra and undies to check that our spines were straight and scoliosis-free.

  But if anyone asked, we said it was a kind of friendship bracelet. You know, it’s a girl thing, we’d chirp. The adult in question would chuckle avuncularly and think, ah, the simple lives of teen girls! and we would bat our eyes at them as we slipped off the hook, footloose and lecture-free. For now, Emilio was living with Jen Fiorenza, our names and the secrets we’d pledged unto death shining in purple ink in the dark of her underwear drawer.

  And so August passed like a fad. Heather Houston got a new pair of glasses with hot-pink frames à la Sally Jessy Raphael and headed out on a college tour around New England. AJ Johnson went with her family on their annual vacation to the Inkwell on Martha’s Vineyard where she remembered she was black. Becca Bjelica had a constant backache and her period the whole time. Little Smitty rode the tractor around Smith Farm secretly destroying the spinach, which she hated eating, Smith Farm the last of two family farms left in Danvers. Mel Boucher checked her neck anytime she passed a highly reflective surface. Girl Cory did whatever it took to get out of babysitting her younger cousins. Abby Putnam lifted down at the Y three days a week while continuing to eat multiple bananas 24/7 and got some definition in her quads. The rest of us snuck into movies, stole makeup from Ann & Hope, worked twenty hours a week at Purity Supreme, et cetera. And then August was mostly over and Double Sessions were upon us.

  Double Sessions were a sweaty mix of the best of times and the worst of times. They were a rite of passage that marked both the beginning of the fall sports season and the end of summer. Each year a week before Labor Day, the fall sports teams spent five days reenacting the montage scene from Rocky. The big four were all represented—football, soccer, tennis, and field hockey—each team out on the various playing fields adjacent to Danvers High, each sport intently punching the proverbial sides of frozen beef while trying to get back in shape after a summer of Fritos and Mountain Dew.

  The days consisted of two sessions, nine to noon and two to five. It was hot and hellish. People’s skin turned assorted shades of boiled lobster in a single afternoon; even AJ Johnson’s bronzed shoulders started peeling after a full day in the August sun. But we kept going because everyone else kept going. We pushed through the pain because pain was the only meal on the menu, and we were having what everyone else who’d come before us and would come after us was having, namely a big ole shit sandwich large enough to feed thousands, a shit sandwich otherwise known as team sports in America.

  It was a little before nine o’clock. We were circled up on the grass behind our goal. This was where we always dropped our gear, our d
uffel bags bursting with shin guards and water bottles, sunscreen and athletic tape, suntan oil and cans of hair spray, elastics, tampons. By season’s end, the grass would be flattened into an indecipherable crop circle, the ground a Rorschach inkblot, but for now it was lush and green. We were all there—freshmen, JV, varsity—all of us with our hands and feet planted flat on the ground, our butts waving high in the air as we bent over stretching our hamstrings.

  We heard the delivery van before we saw it. A series of ear-shattering carburetor farts filled the morning. Little Smitty yelled, “Hey butthole, it’s Speedy Muffler Time!” Even while doubled over stretching our hamstrings, the whole world upside down, we saw the driver hop out, leaving the engine running. Then we watched as the man began booking it our way full speed over the neighboring soccer field while carrying a white rectangular box all gussied up with a red velvet bow, the driver’s arms ceremoniously locked around the box the way people carry firewood in movies, elbows forward, said people happily throwing another log on the flames right before the masked lunatic jumps out of a nearby copse and ruins their sing-along.

  The comparison to Standard Horror Movie Trope #1 was actually pretty apt. Something was in the act of being ruined. You could feel it in the air. The hair began to stand up on our blue-tagged arms. We watched the deliveryman and his mysterious package move toward us as if the man were reliving some past moment of glory on the gridiron. We could practically see him dodging imaginary opponents, feigning and parrying his way through an army of orcs as man and box put yard after hard-fought yard behind them, the members of the boys’ and girls’ Danvers High soccer teams spread out over the field like obstacles in a video game, each one wondering what the hell was going on.