by Quan Barry
It was truly a sight to behold. There was a deeply personal element to it. Like when people sing with their eyes closed. For the sake of propriety, we wanted to look away, but we couldn’t. We didn’t know if we should cheer him on or if Bert and Ernie would suddenly appear and bust us for being accomplices to negligent homicide in the unfortunate but highly predictable event that the guy dropped dead.
“Why is this happening?” AJ Johnson despaired.
“ ‘Philip,’ ” Little Smitty belched by way of explanation.
We did a double take on the van. Ferlinghetti Flowers. Of course. “Philip”! And then the morning was either ruined or just got interesting, depending on how you looked at it.
When the deliveryman finally reached us, perennial Good Samaritan Julie Kaling wondered if you could administer CPR to someone who was still technically breathing. We watched as the guy tried to walk it off, but common sense says you can’t walk off twenty years of Dunkin’ Donuts and Saturday afternoons watching Wide World of Sports and then run a wind sprint. He was middle-aged with a gut wrapped around his midsection. He probably hadn’t run a hundred since elementary school. The white box with the red bow was still locked in his arms, a baby in its christening dress. The guy didn’t even have to ask which one of us was her. He tried to swagger breezily among us, all the while panting in and out like someone breathing into a paper bag. When he finally found his mark, he placed the box on the ground by her feet oh so gently as if it were made out of Tiffany glass.
Girl Cory was still stretching her magnificent hammies, her airborne rump tight as a drum. You could tell the man was trying to be smooth, but he sounded like Darth Vader after running a suicide. “Hey there,” he wheezed. With those two little words, we knew they saw each other on the regular—only Girl Cory would be on a “hey there” basis with a flower deliveryman. She shifted her weight, her tanned left hammy gleaming with Banana Boat, the smell of coconuts and tropical adventure filling the air. Somehow the man made an elaborate show out of not looking at her butt. It almost would have seemed less creepy if he had.
The rest of us had never received a flower delivery. Some of us wouldn’t for years to come, if ever. It was so exciting Becca Bjelica peed her underwear just a little. For her part, Girl Cory didn’t acknowledge either the white box or the white knight who had come sprinting through the August morning to bring it to her. The guy didn’t seem to care. We knew he’d see her again, probably sooner rather than later. He turned and walked back across the soccer field, lighting up a cigarette along the way and breathing in deeply as if on life support.
The box lay in the grass, its red bow shining sweetly, the thing helpless and white, a seal pup waiting to be clubbed. “Well,” barked Little Smitty. “You gonna open it or what?”
“Be my guest,” said Girl Cory, her expression set to icy, which was the look she wore most of the time, her face like a young Michelle Pfeiffer staring down some mafioso goon with just a cursory glance of her wintry-blue eyes.
Little Smitty scuttled over to the box, a crab on all fours, all the while still stretching her hamstrings. “Drumroll, please,” she said, before pulling the red bow. Girl Cory didn’t even look. She simply touched the blue strip banded around her arm just under the sleeve of her Polo shirt as if for strength.
Girl Cory had everything. Looks. Finesse. Money. The cool contempt those things breed. What Heather Houston called that certain je ne sais quoi, though each time she said it, Mel Boucher would throw her a look for pronouncing the second s. Either way, with her porcelain skin and her solid gold aura, Girl Cory was our It Girl. True, Jen Fiorenza worked 24/7 to be an It Girl—she even put in overtime—and while Jen mostly succeeded, the amount of effort she shoveled into the whole enterprise kept her from achieving true It Girl status. If there’s one thing we all knew for sure, one lesson ’80s culture had imparted to each and every one of us, it was that It Girls aren’t made: they just are. That, plus the fact that Jen Fiorenza was working class, didn’t help her any. Conversely, Girl Cory’s people had come over on the boat before the Mayflower, the one that told the Pilgrims there was a there there. Consequently, it seemed only fair that in addition to having it all, she should also have a stalker.
Curiosity got the better of us. We relaxed our hammies, crawled over to crowd around the box. It wasn’t until Abby Putnam reached in and pulled one out that we even realized what we were looking at. Inside were a dozen long-stemmed red roses, or, rather, what had probably been a dozen long-stemmed red roses. The actual rose part was gone, each flower decapitated. All that was left was a box full of stems, the thorns big as corn kernels.
Mel Boucher read the unsigned card. “ ‘Congratulations on getting what you deserve.’ ”
“Man,” said Little Smitty. “ ‘Philip’s’ getting dark.” She made rabbit ears around “Philip,” then without missing a beat, grabbed her left ankle with both hands behind her back and began stretching her quad.
“ ‘What you deserve,’ ” repeated Sue Yoon. “Wait a second, did we already vote on team captain?” Her confusion was genuine. For once, it wasn’t the usual Yoon snark. Just for Double Sessions, she’d dyed her hair the Kool-Aid flavor Great Bluedini. She smelled like a cross between a blueberry and a peach.
“It’s not over till the fat girl does her thing,” murmured Jen Fiorenza to no one in particular. Hear, hear! Her Claw nodded Its faux-golden agreement.
* * *
—
By now it was nine o’clock, hour of dread. The August sun sat poised in the eastern sky, the true golden one ready and willing to do its worst. On this, the third day of Double Sessions, every geopolitical region of our bodies was in revolt, whole blocs of muscles screaming with soreness. We were tight in places we didn’t even know bodies could be tight in—our mandibles, the tendons of our left big toes. Good ole Double Sessions!
Only golf and cross-country weren’t out there with the rest of us drinking raw eggs and sweating our gonads off. The golf team was staked somewhere on a distant link with a clubhouse and lemonade made from real lemons. As for cross-country, once a day a pack of ghostly dweebs floated through the no-man’s-land between the football, field hockey, and soccer fields. Cross-country was the kind of sport populated by kids who needed to check off at least one team activity on their college apps in order to appear “well rounded.” Collectively it had the highest GPA of any sports team, yet nobody wanted to sit at the cross-country table in the cafeteria during lunch.
Mercifully, we didn’t know yet what physical anguish the morning had in store for us. If it wasn’t suicides, it would be something equally terrible, maybe the single-file distance run through the streets of Woodvale, where the last person in line had to sprint up to the front and then the new last person did the same thing, ad nauseam, the run an Escher print of endless pain, by mile three our quads rubber cement. It would all depend on what kind of mood Marge was in.
Marjorie Butler had coached the Danvers High varsity field hockey team through more than twenty seasons. Unmarried and childless, she was an institution of exactly one. Rumors swirled around her from the misty locker rooms of time. That she had been a member of the legendary last team to post a winning season way back when the cornerstones of Danvers High had been laid. That a tight end on the New England Patriots had asked her to marry him, and that she clubbed him bloody with her field hockey stick in response. Who could say what her origin story was, if she even had one? Maybe she’d sprung fully formed from the aisles of Coleman’s Sporting Goods down on High Street, Coleman’s the only game in town when it came to mouth guards until the Sports Authority opened up at the Liberty Tree. Either way, each morning we tried to read her big horsey grin under her blue-and-white trucker’s cap to divine what Heather Houston described as “the torment that bubbles up in her awful brain.” Heather meant it in the best way possible, like in that poem about God we had to memorize in freshman
-year English with the line about “What awful brain compels His awful hand.” In our world, Marge was God and God was Marge. Really, it was that simple.
And honestly, just like God, Coach Butler loved each and every one of us in Her own way. We were her girls. In many ways, we were her life. We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.
Today Becca Bjelica and AJ Johnson were in the middle of our circle acting as interim team captains. Each day a different pair took a crack at it, leading us through our morning stretches and whatever cardio was hand scrawled on the folded sheet of paper that Marge handed the captains at the start of each session. Tomorrow, Thursday, after our scrimmage against Bishop Fenwick, we would finally get to vote on who should permanently lead us into battle. Despite kicking serious New Hampshire ass at Camp Wildcat, there still wasn’t a lot of excitement around the vote. It was pretty much a done deal. Excepting for an act of god, Abby Putnam and Girl Cory would almost certainly be helming the ’89 Danvers Falcons. Most of us were cool with that. There was really nothing to dwell on. For the moment, our teen brains and our soon-to-be-overly-taxed teen hearts were locked on surviving whatever new torture Coach Butler had devised.
Monday during conditioning Heather Houston had thrown up on Cabot Road in the homestretch of the run. Her glasses went flying into the road, but thankfully she was wearing her old indestructible pair and not her hot-pink new ones. Tuesday during wind sprints Boy Cory had an asthma attack, even though he didn’t have asthma. Just this morning in the field house Marge had handed the white sheet explaining the morning conditioning over to Becca and AJ. As the two girls came out of Marge’s office, they tried not to show their fear. They didn’t do a good job of hiding it. Heather Houston threw up a little in her mouth even before they revealed what we’d be doing.
Headless roses or no headless roses, the hour of reckoning was upon us. We left our gear where it was. Silently we walked en masse over to the football stadium, our faces as if someone were playing taps. The athletic fields were adjacent to the field house. If Danvers High School was a body, then the field house was a benign lobe connected by a stalk. And just beyond the field house, at the very edge of the school grounds, was Deering Stadium, where the football team mostly lost.
“Are you sure we all have to do this?” said Mel Boucher. It had taken a good three weeks but finally the ominous love splotch on her neck was history. It seemed to disappear almost overnight. We were glad it was gone. When it had sat adorning Mel’s neck like a bad decal, we could hardly stand to look at it and yet it was all we could see when we looked. Ever since being named MVP at Camp Wildcat, Mel had slowly been trying to weasel out of stuff. “A goalie doesn’t need to be able to sprint,” she’d say, but then Marge would throw her a big toothy grin and Mel would rub her blue-banded arm as if trying to summon up some power.
AJ Johnson sighed. “Marge says it’s called a tour de stade.”
“What language is that?” asked Becca Bjelica.
“Really?” said Heather Houston.
“Sainte Merde,” moaned Mel Boucher.
“None of that fancy stuff now,” corrected Little Smitty. “Just say ‘holy shit.’ ”
Yeah, holy shit was right. There was no room for prettifying it. We could all agree on that. We stood gazing up at the home-field side of the stadium. In the morning light the stairs sat mischievously winking at us, a set of uneven aluminum teeth. There were sixty steps from top to bottom. According to Marge’s instructions, you had to run up the right side and then jog across to the middle aisle, take the sixty steps down, then race over to the left aisle and work your way back up. There were only three aisles total—one right up the middle and two on the ends, but Marge wanted us to run the circuit ten times. AJ Johnson, our resident number cruncher, did the math—twelve hundred stairs total—but as a resident number cruncher she was also smart enough to know when to keep it to herself.
We watched a hawk circling overhead, the bird lazing in the air like a daydream. Ah, to be among the feathered creatures of the earth, to float mindlessly above it all! AJ snapped us out of it. Decisively she stepped up to bat. For the time being, she and Becca Bjelica were our team captains. They were supposed to lead us through our morning conditioning, lifting our spirits in dark times by shepherding us through despair in the hopes that each of us would smash through our own personal walls. But Becca was fearfully searching the skies for bees, and standing there on that first step, AJ froze under the anticipation of the pain to come. Already she could feel the struggle of getting out of bed the next morning, her quads incinerated. It wasn’t like the stadium was that tall, but there was something about the lack of a railing in the middle set of stairs coupled with the height, and suddenly she felt dizzy.
Gently Abby Putnam stepped in front of her friend. The sound of her foot on the aluminum step rang through the air. “Let’s space out,” she said. “Ten seconds in between runners.” From the looks on our faces she knew this was no ordinary wall we were pre-hitting. “All right,” she said. “Make it fifteen. Line up.”
Maybe it was the blue sweat sock tied around our arms like Ma Bell connecting us to one another. Maybe it was Abby’s own personal belief in us. Maybe it was shame, that same force that powers men through war in an effort not to be the only one who can’t cut it. Slowly, an energy began to spread through our limbs. Some of us began to project ourselves into the future, a future in which Deering Stadium was long behind us, and the subsequent survival stories we’d have to tell. We fell in line, our hearts pre-hammering as we watched Abby charge up the first set of stairs, her black ponytail streaming behind her like a battle standard. She was a one-woman ad for potassium. Chiquita Banana would’ve been proud.
Fifteen seconds later Girl Cory went racing up after her, Girl Cory’s icy eyes locked on some blue beyond beyond the stairs. We wondered if she was still thinking about what lay in the white box beached in the grass behind the goal, if maybe she was relieved it wasn’t a severed limb or, even worse, a passive-aggressive love poem. That was the thing with “Philip”—his gifts weren’t the love offerings of someone deep in the throes of an infatuation but rather someone who wanted to be noticed. It was also possible that Girl Cory’s mind was on other things, like what she should ask her parents for once she became team captain. Her stepfather was president of Danvers Savings Bank. His own kids were already adults and not half as spoilable as Girl Cory. If she framed it right, he just might buy her anything. After all, the guy spent all day behind a big mahogany desk saying no no no, but he couldn’t/wouldn’t say no to the apple of Danvers High’s eye.
Not even ten seconds had passed before Jen Fiorenza launched herself into the stratosphere, her Claw a hood ornament soldered tight to her head. She looked more determined than we’d ever seen her, her face locked on kill while she raced up to heaven to give awful God a piece of her mind. Some of us felt a jolt in our own bloodstreams, as if we’d just beer bonged ten Mountain Dews at once.
Sixteen minutes later the agony was over. Happily, nobody died. No vomit had been spilled. Abby, Girl Cory, and Jen had even lapped some of us, but there was no shame in it. To their credit, all of the freshmen players finished. There was a feeling of accomplishment coursing through our veins. Take that, world! Proudly we pimp walked back to our beachhead. The football team watched us roll by. Even through their helmets you could hear them sniggering, though on a lower frequency you could smell their teen-boy fear. We laughed in return because it was obvious their own coaches were getting ideas and that they’d all be running Deering Stadium sooner or later.
Once back on our home turf we rehydrated, languorously slathering on more sunscreen or more oil depending on our starting hue, all of us acting as if twelve hundred stairs weren’t no big thang. Marge was out setting up some cones on the field. “How’d it go?” she called. Abby Putnam flashed her a t
humbs-up.
Right before our opening drills, Abby walked over and picked up the white box from Ferlinghetti Flowers. She trotted over to a small gully on the edge of the playing field. The box was cardboard, the flowers organic. After a few good rains everything would disintegrate. She chucked the whole thing, card and all, into the tall grass. Internally we nodded our approval. Getting rid of your friend’s stalker’s mutilated offering without being told to is what a good leader does. She had our votes.
If we had been paying careful attention, we might have noticed that Jen Fiorenza was sucking her index finger. It was the early days of Emilio. If we had concentrated really hard, we might have noticed the faint metallic taste of blood in all our mouths. All Heather Houston could taste was unvomited vomit.
* * *
—
The rest of the morning was anticlimactic. We ran through a bunch of drills designed to perfect what Marge called the Rotating Rhombus. It was a new invention of hers, one she had started piecing together the season before, a style of defense where the centerbacks, halfbacks, and sweep shifted over the field depending on where the ball was at any given moment. Most teams played a simple defense where each player marked the offensive player in their zone. But the Rotating Rhombus was more fluid than that. Ideally, it meant that at any one time there should always be at least two people between the ball and the goal.
Becca Bjelica was having a hard time figuring out where to be. When the ball was within the twenty-five-yard hash mark, the rhombus always collapsed. And each time this happened, there was Becca smiling sheepishly in the middle of the chaos and leaning on her stick like Mr. Peanut with his cane and top hat. We didn’t understand what the issue was until a few minutes to noon.