We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  None of us said anything about the change. Not even, hey there, looking good! Just being in the Claw’s presence seemed to make our body temperatures drop.

  All Wednesday night and into Thursday dawn Girl Cory had felt a dark wave crashing over her, her dreams filled with faceless men in tall hats who strode past without so much as a glance, the skin of her fingertips as if pricked by thorns. She didn’t mention any of these things to us, not even to Abby Putnam, her closest friend. In those early days of Emilio, Girl Cory was still lazing out on the lanai enjoying her Earl Grey and not telling us much of anything.

  But truth be told, even if she had told us, we wouldn’t have known how to help.

  * * *

  —

  Thursday afternoon the scrimmage got off to a slow start. Fenwick won the coin toss, then proceeded to futz around with the ball for the first few minutes. We didn’t harrow them too much, not wanting to provoke their big girl, Mazzie DiGeralimo. Defending against a big girl was like spraying a hornets’ nest with Raid. It was best to wait until nightfall, but if that wasn’t an option, then one should carefully formulate a plan and stick to it. Mazzie DiGeralimo was a two-time Catholic Conference All-Star. She played midfield. At 6'1", we let her go where she wanted but not without a fight. The trick to defending against a big girl was to have a teeny girl in her face at all times, the teeny girl like a chickadee going up against a hawk, the teeny girl a constant pest, though she ran the risk of getting smushed.

  Our resident teeny girl, Little Smitty, was more than up to the task. Teeny and now newly unsweetened, thanks to Emilio, she spent the first half jabbing at Mazzie DiGeralimo’s stick even when Mazzie didn’t have the ball. Admittedly it was a pretty dirty way to play. It involved flying under the ref’s radar and being a general all-around pain in the tuchus. Little Smitty took to it like peanut butter on pickles. She plastered the sweetest smile on her face and then harassed Mazzie DiGeralimo to the sticking place, even hooking Mazzie’s ankles every now and then. It was amazing Mazzie didn’t clock her one. Just watching made some of us want to do it for her.

  At the end of the first half it was still scoreless. In some ways, this meant we were winning—at the same point in our last game against Fenwick the season before, we were down 4-1. All the same, we were a little surprised we weren’t creaming them. After the crazy successes we’d posted up at Camp Wildcat, word on the street was we’d roll through the Northeastern Conference, an armored tank through a sandcastle, but alas, the afternoon was proving us wrong.

  Finally, just after the two-minute warning, Boy Cory carried the ball up the left wing to where Jen Fiorenza had parked herself in front of the net. There were still two defenders between her and the goal, so technically she wasn’t offsides. In the afternoon sun, her Claw sat like a lighthouse atop a promontory, Its incinerating beam blasting wherever she turned her gaze. The poor Bishop Fenwick goalie didn’t know up from down, blinded by the Claw. And so just like that, we were up, one to zip. Less than a minute later, Abby Putnam chipped home another one just for insurance.

  When the ref blew the whistle, it became official: 2-0 Falcons. We let out a cheer. Considering it was still just the pre-season and they weren’t even in our conference, we probably overdid it, pounding our chests and hacking at the earth with our sticks until the air filled with flying green divots. It wasn’t like the win really counted or anything, plus Fenwick could claim they’d been doing some fine-tuning on their end, that they’d been working out some kinks. As we lined up to high-five each other, Little Smitty offered her hand, but when Mazzie DiGeralimo jogged past to slap it, she slyly lifted it away in one slick motion and smoothed her hair back.

  Triumphantly we skipped back to the field house, grabbed our stuff from our lockers. We were cranking our anthem, “Look Out for Number One,” on AJ Johnson’s boom box as we thrashed around singing into our field hockey sticks as if they were microphones. None of us remembered the movie Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, which came out in ’83 and featured John Travolta strutting around like the cock of the walk through Times Square, but the song had the words “number one” in it, so Coach Marge always made sure we had a copy of it on tape.

  Set your sights on the stars and the sun!

  Look out for number one.

  You gotta push a little harder, push a little harder—

  Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!

  On our way out we swung by Marge’s office. On her desk was a pile of index cards and a few pens. We knew the drill. Write down two names, then fold them up and drop them in the Garfield I HATE MONDAYS coffee cup. When Abby and Sue Yoon popped in to vote, Marge was nowhere to be seen. It didn’t matter. It was the honor system. We never used locks on our lockers. There was no “trust, but verify.” We just trusted. Even when voting for captain.

  Out in the parking lot, Girl Cory’s stepdad, Larry, was buying whoever was around whatever they wanted from Mr. Hotdog. He was the only parent who’d shown up for the scrimmage, a twenty-pound video camera on his shoulder, a safari hunter tracking big game. Girl Cory got an Italian ice that had a blue gumball on the bottom. She didn’t really want it, but keeping Larry happy never hurt, and tomorrow would be her big day.

  What we know now:

  Anticipation is often the best part of life.

  Anticipating something, though lovely fun, does not make it so.

  * * *

  —

  Coach Marge was a natural-born showman. During the school year, she supplemented her income by acting as a substitute teacher. She was the best kind of sub, one who never stepped over the line and tried to teach you an entire lesson in a single class period just to look good when the real teacher came back. She would simply read off whatever lesson plan the teacher had left behind. Turn to page 110 in your social studies book and answer questions 1 to 15. It was standard sub stuff. Nothing too flashy. Still, she always made a point of arriving in the classroom a few minutes after the bell rang. We’d be sitting there in the science lab, our safety goggles in position, the anticipation building as we wondered whether or not Mr. Flanagan really had an allergic reaction to the flu shot. Then when our wonder was at its peak, Marge would stroll in in that knock-kneed way of hers, both legs stiff with chronic arthritis, the class often breaking out in applause as she announced that the Advanced Chemistry test was canceled.

  Here’s the thing: Marge understood that, when used properly, a little psychology could go a long way. She understood that sport without pageantry was just kids running around chasing a ball. And so on Friday, the last day of Double Sessions, she kept us in the dark all morning about who’d been elected team captain.

  We played our part, acting like we were above it all, like wanting to find out was for babies. Finally, just before letting us go for lunch, Marge gathered us together and said that she’d be making a big announcement at the end of the day. Argh! Just put us out of our misery already! At the same time, we had to hand to it her. We were teen girls. Look up the word “blasé” in Merriam-Webster’s and you’d find a picture of us, our eyes burning through your soul from the page. For us, life held no surprises. Been there, done that. So sometimes it was nice when an adult treated us as if we were five-year-olds on Christmas. In a weird way, it showed she cared.

  Our stomachs set on famished, we began piling in our flotilla of cars. “Where we headed?” asked Little Smitty.

  “Liberty Tree,” said Jen Fiorenza.

  “Cool,” Becca Bjelica said. “Tammy Nesbitt’s working at the Levi’s store. Maybe we can score some jeans.”

  “This isn’t a jean-scoring expedition,” scolded Jen. She held the seat forward for Boy Cory, who crawled in the back of Little Smitty’s truck cab. “This is a debriefing.” Her silvery Claw tut-tutted Its displeasure. “And Julie.” She called across the parking lot to Julie Kaling, who was getting in her mom’s car. “Thi
s is mandatory.”

  “What?” said Abby as she got in Sue’s Panic Mobile, but already Julie was happily telling her mom, who was used to putting her own needs last and took the news in stride, solemnly taking up the caboose position in our flotilla.

  We began to cruise down Cabot. WBCN was playing “Born in the U.S.A.,” but Heather Houston quickly switched the dial to KISS 108.5. We knew she hated that song, but we never knew why. How could anyone possibly hate The Boss? It seemed so un-American. For the moment it was okay with us as KISS 108 was playing Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys.” We had our windows down, except for Mrs. Kaling and Julie, who rode in silence as the rest of us sang along with Simon Le Bon.

  At the intersection of Locust and Maple, Sue Yoon predictably closed her eyes and gunned it. Little Smitty and Girl Cory followed suit, sailing through without stopping as we all yelled, “Wild boys! Wild boys! Wild boys!” We looked back to see if Mrs. Kaling was still with us. Not only was she right behind us, but she’d also blown through the stop sign. We argued among ourselves about whether or not there was a little grin playing on her face. That’s when Sue noticed the cop car sitting in the Amoco station just off the intersection. We held our breath, waiting for the flashing lights to come on, but nothing happened. As we passed by, we could see Danvers’ finest, Bert and Ernie, looking off in the opposite direction, their radar gun pointed at an old lady shuffling across the crosswalk. Even at a distance, Bert’s unibrow looked like a hedge, something his eyes had grown for a little privacy.

  At the Liberty Tree, Mrs. Kaling told Julie she’d meet her in front of Cherry Webb & Touraine at 1:45. With that, she headed off to Lechmere to look at vacuum cleaners. We split up to do our hunter-gatherer thing, then pulled a bunch of tables together in the food court and got down to brass tacks.

  “What are we debriefing about?” asked Becca.

  “Fenwick,” said Jen.

  “What about it?” asked Abby. “We won.”

  “Barely,” said Jen. “We should’ve blown them away.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty close,” said Mel. She was eating a slice from Sbarro. Somehow a whole piece of pepperoni had landed on her neck, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  “You’ve got food on you,” said Julie Kaling helpfully. She reached over with a napkin to wipe it off.

  A collective gasp went up from the table. “What?” said Mel. AJ Johnson was so shocked she accidentally salted her French fries with sugar. “Guys?” Mel said, her voice rising.

  “What’s on your neck?” whispered Heather Houston. She hadn’t gotten any real food, opting instead for a Baskin-Robbins baseball helmet sundae.

  “Oh,” said Mel. Gently she patted it with her finger. “It’s just a bug bite.”

  “You’ve had it since camp,” said Boy Cory.

  “Were you hiding it with makeup?” asked Sue Yoon. She went back to sucking the Great Bluedini flavor out of the ends of her hair.

  “Do you even own foundation?” said Jen Fiorenza. That was the part Jen found hardest to believe, not the idea that Mel would still be sporting a hickey all these weeks later, but that she’d managed to pick a shade of foundation good enough to pull one over on us.

  “Dude, that can’t be healthy,” said Abby as she began noshing on a small green banana that must have been hard as a rock.

  “Can we just get back to the debriefing?” said Mel. “If there’s time, I wanna go to Spencer Gifts to get some fake puke.” She tried to pull her T-shirt up over the mark, but nothing doing.

  “What’s a debriefing?” said Becca, and so the malevolent blotch on Mel’s neck got dropped.

  We turned back to what had brought us there in the first place. AJ Johnson shared her fries around, which tasted even better with sugar. Over lunch we managed to agree on the following:

  Fenwick wasn’t a blowout as it should have been.

  Emilio didn’t feel as powerful as he had originally.

  We needed to do more research to figure out if Emilio needed maintenance, e.g. like Jen’s Claw, if E. needed to be reenergized from time to time and, if so, how.

  This year we were going all the way to Alumni Stadium on the campus of Worcester Polytech and the state championship. And if we didn’t, look out!

  “Can we go shop for jeans now?” Becca asked.

  “No,” said Jen. The Claw swelled up menacingly, a puffer fish just daring us to keep pushing our luck. We ignored It and turned pleadingly to Abby.

  “Let’s go,” Abby said, her mouth full of banana. “I saw a 25% off sign.”

  Only Girl Cory had enough money on her to buy anything. She got a pair of 501 acid-washed jeans. Of course they fit her like a latex glove, like a glass slipper, like they’d been waiting all their lives for her and only her. We could practically hear them sigh as she squeezed them on.

  * * *

  —

  We spent the last session of Double Sessions playing games. Marge’s other forte, in addition to showmanship, was knowing when to step on the gas, when to let up and coast. It had been a week full of sunburns and stairs and soreness and blisters. Consequently, coasting was more than called for.

  The first game we played was pretty mindless. It involved seeing how long you could keep a ball in the air just by hitting it repeatedly with your stick. Abby Putnam made it to seventy-six, Girl Cory to eighty-two. Julie Kaling accidentally hit herself in the chin with the ball and bit her tongue. For the rest of the afternoon, anytime she smiled, you could see blood on her incisors.

  Another game involved being spun around in circles while blindfolded, then shooting on net as everyone else shouted directions about where to aim. AJ Johnson was some kind of homing pigeon. No matter how much we spun her, she turned and faced the goal each time no problem. After that, we had a driving contest to see who could hit the farthest. Abby’s ball sailed all the way over to tennis. It was still moving when it hit the chain-link fence surrounding the courts.

  The last game we played involved circling up duck, duck, goose–style. One girl would stalk around the circumference of the circle. As she walked around, she’d describe a positive attribute about someone but in a fairly generic way, getting more and more specific as she approached the girl she was describing. Then she’d tap her on the head, and the chase would ensue. It was pretty corny, but we played along anyway.

  Julie Kaling started things off. “This Falcon is kind and strong, dedicated and confident. She has our backs, and with the good Lord willing, will lead us to Worcester.” We all sat waiting for her to tap Abby Putnam, and when she did, Abby chased her down within a few seconds.

  As Abby walked the circle, she began describing Sue Yoon. “This Falcon’s like a Skittle—she comes in every flavor of the rainbow.” Sue popped up and chased Abby but couldn’t catch her. As Sue took her turn walking the circle, we didn’t know who she was talking about until she tapped someone.

  “This Falcon’s like peanut brittle. Take a bite and you just might chip a tooth, or you might get a mouthful of honey.” She sensed our bewilderment. “C’mon,” she said. “I’m talkin’ ’bout our next captain.” With that, she whacked Girl Cory on the head and took off.

  “Okay, ladies, let’s bring it in.” Marge was standing with one leg up on the bright orange fifteen-gallon Gatorade jug, her fist tucked under her chin. To Heather Houston, she looked like The Thinker. Everything about her pose said it was time. Friday, late afternoon, Double Session ’89 behind us. It felt good to be done. Monday would be Labor Day, a day filled with BBQ and final trips to the beach. Tuesday would be packed with last-minute deals on back-to-school shopping. Wednesday, our senior year would start. We would be at the top of the pecking order. We would command every table in the cafeteria. We wouldn’t know the names of anyone beneath us. There was a new genre of teen movies built around senior year, stuff like Pretty in Pink and Some Kind
of Wonderful. We would be the stars of our own lives. We would wallow in every glorious second of being the biggest fish in the pond.

  Marge cleared her throat. “You ladies had a tremendous week up at Wildcat this summer,” she said. “I’ve been honored to lead this team for the last twenty years. This year, I can feel it.” She didn’t say what “it” was. She didn’t need to. Thanks to eleven pieces of blue tube sock, we were calibrated like a finely tuned bomb. Anything could spark us.

  “You with me?” she said.

  We roared.

  “All the way?” Marge asked.

  We roared louder.

  “Who are we?”

  “Danvers!”

  “Who?”

  “Falcons!”

  “Say it again!”

  “Falcons!”

  “Who’s gonna win?”

  “Falcons!”

  “And ladies, this year your team captains are…” She paused for a small eternity. In the silence we could hear the music playing from the Mr. Hotdog truck parked down in the lot. The music as if some monkey wearing a cap was dancing nearby.

  “Abby Putnam!” Already we were slapping her on the back, hooting and hollering. Then Marge gave us the news straight no chaser. “And Jen Fiorenza!”

  For a moment it was as if we had collectively blacked out. In the silence, some of us thought we heard crickets chirping. None of us remembered gathering our stuff, walking back to the field house, AJ Johnson finally hitting play and her boom box roaring yeah yeah. Only Julie Kaling smiled sincerely and said congratulations.

  “Yeah, mazel tov,” snickered Sue Yoon.

  It wasn’t like Jen was our enemy. She was Abby’s oldest friend in existence. It was just so unexpected. We could feel different parts of ourselves tingling. The roots of our hair. Our blue-banded arms. Our blood. We looked at Girl Cory, but her face was empty, a cloudless day. She was no longer sipping a mug of Earl Grey out on the lanai while the rest of us were packed in the kitchen. She was gone, long gone, somewhere far away in a whole new McMansion, one with a wrought-iron gate and a guard at the entrance to keep us, the riffraff, out.