We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  * * *

  —

  A postscript: Later that Friday night, Mel Boucher got to thinking. She tiptoed into the kitchen and picked up the phone. It was late, but Jen Fiorenza answered just as her answering machine kicked on.

  Did Jen know who was calling? Maybe. What did they talk about? Neither of them would say. All we know is that very night Jen took her mom’s keys while her mom lay blissed out on the living room couch and drove to the Bouchers, where Mel was waiting outside. The moon hung in the sky like a bowling ball gathering speed. The two girls didn’t exchange words. In the moonlight Mel’s face looked puckish, her features sharp as a paper cut, the dark splotch pulsing on her neck.

  Jen didn’t put up a fight. It had served her well. She couldn’t complain. She’d been lucky to keep it as long as she did. Mel held out her hand.

  The moon was looking to bowl a strike. Jen forked it over. Then Mel turned and walked back into her house, hugging it close to her chest.

  In the quiet of her bedroom, she lit a candle she had secretly swiped from St. Richard’s vestibule. In the light, she looked Emilio over for damage. All our names were still there, scrawled under the simple pledge she herself had written that first night after getting clobbered by Masconomet up at Camp Wildcat.

  Dearest Darkness.

  Please give me strength in all the places You control. In return, do know You can count on me for everything. Merci beaucoup!

  Amicalement,

  Mel, #5, goalie

  Mel tried to turn the page, but the next two pages were stuck together. She couldn’t separate them. Then she looked closer and realized that Jen had glued them together. Not only had she glued them together, but there was something stuck in between them. She felt whatever it was with her fingers. The thing like a length of electrical cord, maybe a piece of rope dotted with small hard lumps the size of a tooth or a kernel of corn.

  Mel Boucher laughed out loud. It wasn’t unheard of. Sometimes her mother pressed flowers between the pages of a dictionary. Why not this? The magic was more powerful than even Mel had ever imagined. Just look at what it had wrought. All her doubt washed away. She closed the notebook, wiped the Neosporin off her neck where she had globbed it on, then went back to bed.

  In the darkness, Emilio all but grinned and winked.

  DANVERS VS. SWAMPSCOTT

  Tuesday night on the eve of the first day of school the only phone rang in the Kaling household. It was a rotary contraption, a stationary relic from the days when a teen couldn’t wander cordlessly all over the house gabbing away for hours about nothing. Andrew Kaling was busy in his study moving brightly colored index cards from one pile to another. By and large this was how he composed his weekly lectures, which maybe explained why, at only two weeks into the new semester, his Prophetic Books of the Old Testament course felt a little bit like a smorgasbord of ideas organized by a quick hand of 52 pickup.

  After three rings the phone was still going strong. Normally Mr. Kaling would’ve let it ride until his wife answered, but it was 9:04 p.m., and she was already in bed. If he let it ring until the caller gave up, there was a good chance it might wake his young son, and getting Matthew to fall asleep a second time in one night was not something Mr. Kaling wanted to consider.

  He got up from his chair and trudged into the kitchen. He was still thinking about the Book of Daniel, how Daniel proves to King Cyrus that the god named Bel is a false idol by covering the floor of Bel’s temple with ashes. In the morning, the ashes are stamped with the footprints of Bel’s priests, who each night enter the sanctuary through a secret door in order to eat the offerings left by believers. It was a nifty story that could prove his point about misplaced faith if only he could hit on the right way to tell it. “Hello?” he said, checking the bottoms of his feet for loose grit. For some reason he was feeling guiltier than usual.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kaling. I’m sorry to be calling so late.”

  He let out a sigh of relief, then reflexively threw back his shoulders and stood up a little straighter. “It is late, Heather,” he agreed, “but I’m glad it’s you.” He began trying out his reading of the story of Bel on her, eliciting her thoughts on its potential as a modern-day parable for big-haired televangelism.

  “Yeah, I knew what he was talking about,” Heather Houston told us later the next day. “Sometimes Mr. Kaling runs his lectures by me,” she admitted. “When I call over there, I just go with the flow. Don’t tell Julie, but I’m really worried about the shape his manuscript is in.” She shook her head. “My mom works over in Salem State’s English department. Trust you me. He better get cracking if he wants to make tenure,” she said, before wandering off to buy some peanut M&M’s from the vending machine.

  What Mr. Kaling recognized: Heather Houston was a smart kid, a helluva lot smarter than the rest of us, maybe even smarter than Mr. Kaling. As he talked out his theory, he wondered why he’d even wondered who was calling. When the phone rang, if it wasn’t yet another school psychologist calling with further recommendations about his son, then it was Heather calling to chat with Julie about some Thursday-night class project. Occasionally sweet little Tina Hooper would call Mrs. Kaling with news about the sodality or the PTA, news that would make Mrs. Kaling stomp around the kitchen while making dinner, but other than that, the family’s limited social life meant the earpiece on their rotary phone still looked brand-new.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I need to speak with Julie about a pressing matter involving the Latin Club.” Much to her credit, Heather Houston had a way with adults. Maybe it was her glasses, each lens thick enough to stop bullets. More likely she flipped some switch inside her head and went full blast into Little Miss Junior Executive mode.

  Junior Exec mode worked wonders on Mr. Kaling. Dr. Kaling was an assistant professor of Old Testament Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary over in Hamilton and one of the few Catholics on campus. Secretly, the school’s brand of evangelical ecumenism really burned his bottom. To his way of thinking, it was Pope John Paul II or eternal damnation. Speaking of damnation, this year he was up for tenure, and his book, Old Testament Sins in New England, still wasn’t under contract. Julie liked to say the family couldn’t start smiling again until her dad got tenure. We never knew if she was kidding or not. A mixture of all these things plus his natural inclination to leave everything up to the missus conspired to make Mr. Kaling a fairly incurious father. Lucky for us he didn’t think to ask what kind of pressing Latin matter might rear its ugly head the night before school even started.

  “Just one minute while I get Julie,” he said, then added, “Morituri te salutant.” The second it was out of his mouth, he knew he’d blown it yet again. What did Snoopy say anytime something distasteful happened? Blech? Yeah, blech! Every time he spoke with Heather Houston, president of the Danvers High Latin Club, Dr. Kaling’s mind came up with the dumbest platitudes from the ancient world despite a solid decade of studying Latin on every conceivable level. We about to die salute you. Blech! It was the mantra gladiators from around the Roman Empire intoned on their way into the Colosseum, the sparkling sands ready and eager to absorb their blood. Tonight morituri te salutant was the best Dr. Kaling could do. Double blech! A long time ago Sue Yoon had put her finger on why Mr. Kaling could only speak fourth-grade Latin with Heather. The truth was Heather Houston intimidated him. Hell’s bells, we wanted to tell him. Join the club.

  The next day in the locker room after her trip to the vending machine Heather confessed that sometimes she felt bad for the Pater Kaling. “His book’s gonna flop unless he pulls himself together,” she said. “So I told him, audaces fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the bold.” She looked around at us for approval. We nodded that it was a solid improv. In the days and weeks to come, we would each in our own way be called on to fly by the seat of our kilts.

  Unbeknownst to him, Julie was already standing beh
ind her father. He was obviously startled when he turned around, bobbling the phone like a greased banana. For a moment in the darkness of the kitchen, she looked as if she were radiating her own light, her unbraided hair falling loosely past her waist, her white ankle-length nightgown a shroud (sometimes we wondered if she also wore ankle-length underwear—in the locker room, she preferred to get changed in one of the stalls in the bathroom). Calmly she reached out and took the phone from her father, then waited until he was safely ensconced back in the shelter of his study before speaking.

  “Hello?” she whispered into the receiver. It was how she always talked on the phone. As if God Himself were listening in on a second extension.

  “We’ve been assigned a mission,” said Heather Houston. Her voice sounded strangely hollow, like she was speaking across a vast distance in an empty room.

  Julie wondered if it was a bad connection. Or maybe it was that new thing people were doing these days, some new phone magic called three-way calling. Maybe right this very minute her best friend had someone else tucked away and listening in, a third party monitoring what was said. Julie caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the kitchen window. At the sight of herself, she too almost dropped the phone. The year before in her World Cultures class she had learned that in many Asian countries, white is the color of death. Her parents had raised her to believe white represented purity. Think of the freshly fallen snow, her mother liked to say, especially if any, uh, urges should bubble up in you. Standing there in the kitchen, Julie could see the otherworldly side of white—white as an endless void, a vast nothingness. For a moment it seemed as if her part of the blue sweat sock tied around her arm began to tighten, a blood-pressure cuff squeezing her bicep.

  “You in or what?” Distant Heather asked. Through the phone line there was a sound like thunder or a timpanist ramping up for a dramatic key change.

  “I guess so,” Julie murmured, and then just as quickly, the sock loosened. Had it ever even tightened in the first place?

  Heather’s tone also lightened. “Awesome. See you tomorrow.”

  Julie wondered if the same thing had happened to her friend—Heather’s arm slowly growing bloodless until she picked up the phone and the pact was sealed. “And also with you,” Julie answered reflexively. She returned the phone to its cradle and headed back to bed.

  At the top of the stairs, the door to her brother’s room was open. In the dark, she could see something glittering on the bed where his head should be. Two eyes turned on her, the pupils a rich urine yellow. She stifled a scream. It was just Neb, their ancient Persian. Nebuchadnezzar was sleeping on Matthew’s pillow, her brother’s head nestled in the animal’s fur. Julie made the sign of the cross, but the cat wouldn’t stop staring. It never blinked. She knew if she somehow managed to drain them, she’d discover that its eyes were full of vinegar and piss and an endless dark. Actually, maybe it was her own eyes she was thinking of.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning bright and what most teens would describe as tragically early, Julie and her mom were inching forward in the drop-off lane in front of Danvers High. From all exterior angles, the family’s new baby-blue Hyundai Excel floated serenely along, a shiny happy raindrop. Interiorly it was a different story. From the back, Julie’s six-year-old brother, Matthew, was furiously kicking the driver’s seat like an Old Testament Rockette. Simply put, the kid was a one-man biblical scourge—all he needed was an unruly beard trailing like ivy down his sternum. When not karate chopping the space directly in his path, Matthew Kaling had a tendency to use antiquated verbs and address everyone young and old as if they were denizens of yore. Sue Yoon called him the Prophet. Julie didn’t contradict her. Despite his idiosyncrasies and general all-around douchiness, the Kaling family soldiered onward through the affliction that was their only son and brother, their smiles more often described by onlookers as winces.

  Surprisingly, the new car had brought out a lighter side in the Prophet. Despite his usual Old Man Ahab demeanor, Matthew liked to describe the car as “Smurfy.” He had a point. The Excel was the exact same blue as the Saturday-morning elves who antagonized their elderly neighbor and his orange cat. The first time Mrs. Kaling rolled up in their new wheels next to the Mr. Hotdog truck in the tennis-court parking lot, Matthew had called out to a group of us stuffing our faces. “Second Corinthians,” he shouted. For some dumb reason we all looked. “Behold our Smurfy new car!”

  Abby Putnam dropped her 90% uneaten waffle cone. Boy Cory accidentally swallowed his gobstopper. AJ Johnson squirted a glob of mayo (repeat: MAYO!) on her hot dog. We were shocked the kid even knew what a Smurf was; the Kalings didn’t own a television. Famously, Julie herself had once walked full on into a rack of jeans at the Liberty Tree the first time she “beheld” a life-size cutout of Sam Malone from Cheers in among a display of Red Sox gear. From that moment forward, she always made sure to be at Heather Houston’s house working on some project or other for the science team or the Latin Club every Thursday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern and Mountain time, 8:00 p.m. Central and Pacific. After all, the Kalings were Catholic, not Calvinist. According to their god, it was okay to lust, so long as you copped to it later in the confessional.

  As it was the first day of school, the drop-off line in front of Danvers High slugged along. Julie sat behind the wheel. Though the Hyundai was going less than 5 mph, Mrs. Kaling preemptively had a hand on the dash. Come Halloween, Julie would turn eighteen. She’d had her driving permit for the better part of a year. Still, Mr. and Mrs. Kaling didn’t think now was the right time for her to get her license. Probably it was Julie’s actual driving that made them think this. Once in the driver’s seat, it was as if she left all major decisions up to the little silver wraith on the rosary hanging from the rearview. What were His last words? “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” It was as good a strategy as any until it wasn’t. Watching the Smurfy little Hyundai lurch along in the drop-off lane, it was obvious He had His hands full anytime Julie took the wheel.

  Mrs. Kaling herself had only learned to drive the year before. Once the Prophet entered kindergarten, it quickly became evident that he would need to be shuttled between various church groups and rounds of school-mandated psychotherapy appointments; Ritalin was basically useless on the Prophet. And so Mrs. Kaling had endured a series of road lessons with a rotating cast of teens sniggering in the backseat, the drivers’ ed teacher forever with his foot hovering over the secondary brake.

  This morning, the former Sister Mary Albert sat in the passenger seat as her daughter rocked the car a few feet forward at a time, Mrs. Kaling watching as students hopped out of their parents’ cars and entered the front of the school. Julie could sense her mother’s inner battle, the struggle between dark and light, peace and inner frothing, Mrs. Kaling’s deep sense of disapproval constantly at odds with her wanting to be nonjudgmental and accepting, like feathery little Mrs. Hooper, who ran the church sodality and was vice president of the PTA and was the human embodiment of a low-calorie strawberry shortcake. Mrs. Kaling, on the other hand, was a cherry pie with three cups of underripe fruit and not enough sugar. Leaving the judging up to God was a battle Mrs. Kaling could never win. Julie wasn’t entirely sure why her mom kept trying, but from what she’d seen, the Lord worked in mysterious, mostly nonsensical ways.

  “Hurry up, Abishag,” screeched the Prophet. Ever since he’d learned the basics of phonetics, his favorite names for Julie involved various biblical concubines. There was already a permanent dent in the back of the driver’s seat from his kids’ size 11 Etonics.

  The car pitched a few more feet toward the front of the line. Finally, Julie put it in park and unlatched her seat belt. The Prophet delivered one last blow to the left kidney for good luck. As Julie stepped out of the car, her mother slid into the driver’s seat behind her, the two of them basically interchangeable in their ankle-length calico dresses, their single braids runnin
g matronly down to their waists. Mrs. Kaling didn’t kiss her daughter goodbye or wish her good luck on the first day. Instead, she turned to her elder child and said her standard parting delivered to one and all regardless of her relationship to them. “The Lord be with you.”

  Julie locked her gaze on the ground. “And also with you.” More and more she couldn’t look her mother in the eye.

  Mrs. Kaling chalked up the recent lack of eye contact to a teen thing. That plus a little bit of the devil at work, as the devil had a thumb in many pies. She reached over and rubbed the pewter crucifix around Julie’s neck. “When you get home, we need to shine this up,” she said. Julie nodded, and her mom closed the car door as quietly as she could while still making sure it was shut tight. After all, excessive noise was ungodly in a woman.

  From the backseat the Prophet glared through the window with the intensity of a thousand A-bombs, all the while scratching his head. As the car pulled away, his face suddenly changed. He gave his sister the widest most maniacal grin ever, like someone who’s poured a bag of salt in your guinea pig’s water bottle and can’t wait until you discover Mr. Kibbs’ desiccated corpse huddled among the wood shavings. Julie found herself wondering if the Prophet knew the secret of Camp Wildcat. With him, anything was possible. He was six going on six hundred and sixty-six. She watched as the car lurched away down Cabot Road, her mother in the habit of stepping on the gas, scaring herself, then easing up before stepping on the gas again, ad nauseam. Julie lost sight of the car as it pulled around a bend. She took a deep breath, then turned and joined the rest of the student body as we streamed into Danvers High for yet another year of sex, drugs, and literal and figurative rock ’n’ roll.