We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  * * *

  —

  Even before heading to homeroom, Julie went to her locker and entered the combination. The door swung open with a creaky yawn as if auditioning for a horror movie. Fall ’89 and the small metal box was empty and nondescript as ever, the same locker she’d been assigned all three years at Danvers High. The one nod that it was Julie’s old locker was a discolored spot on the inside of the door where she’d Krazy Glued a photo of Pope John Paul as a young hunk in Poland. She’d taken the photo down back in June on the last day of class, not wanting the custodial staff to rip up the dreamy pontiff.

  Julie realized she was holding her breath. She wondered if she looked on edge. It was senior year, now or never, do or die, her last chance to make a mark, to prove to Danvers High once and for all that she existed, that she wasn’t anything like her mother, a young woman on the road to the nearest nunnery. What the blue tube sock had promised: this year, it would all be different. She dug around in her bag and pulled out a cigarette lighter.

  Then she pulled out a roll of Scotch tape and a picture from one of the folders in her off-brand Trapper Keeper. She’d cut the photo out of the McCall’s prom ’88 catalog. True, it was a bit dated, but some things never aged. McCall’s pattern #M3485. In the light of the corridor the picture shining, an amethyst dream. Most likely, the former Sister Mary Albert would never approve of something so gender bending, but all the same, it was love at first sight, an outfit meant to be worn by a queen at her coronation. And queen Julie would be, come hell or high water. At Camp Wildcat, when Mel Boucher had been running her mouth about the power of Emilio, Julie had happily signed on without batting an eye, even going so far as to add a personal appeal beside her own name. Dear Darkness, she wrote. Please help me be the person I was meant to be. The cross she wore around her neck didn’t feel any heavier as she’d signed in purple ink.

  The senior prom was scheduled for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. At Danvers High, there was no homecoming. Instead, we went all in for senior prom in the fall. You couldn’t start planning too early. This past Saturday during Labor Day weekend, Julie had jumped on her bike and pedaled over to Winmil Fabrics. She laid her babysitting money down on the counter and asked all the right questions of the beehived saleswoman. As she walked out of the store and into the light of the last day of August, part 1 of her plan was complete. Part 2 would require the most work, but Julie had never been afraid to roll up her sleeves, plus it didn’t hurt that she had study hall each day last period. Part 3 of her plan would be the trickiest of all. In some ways, part 3 began that afternoon at Camp Wildcat when she had laid herself bare on the page under Emilio’s cheeky stare. Really, part 3 wasn’t so much a phase as a blueprint for life. In the light, no one sees me, so in the dark, make me visible, make me worthy. She wasn’t taking any chances. Nights she prayed to the Old Testament god of her parents. The rest she left up to Emilio and her share of the blue sweat sock tied around her arm.

  Quickly Julie taped the McCall’s photo to the back of her locker above the one metal shelf meant for books. She then pulled a series of items out of her bag and arranged them in front of the picture. A pocket-size New Testament. A votive candle. A piece of Fanny Farmer mint-chocolate candy. A dandelion gone to seed. An indulgence her father had brought back from Rome. Finally, next to the McCall’s prom catalog picture, she taped up the only photo of herself taken back when she was a newborn in Saigon, in the black-and-white picture her ten little toes like grappling hooks.

  When the shrine was complete, she lit the candle and bowed her head.

  It was high school. A sea of adolescence streamed by, each of us in our own way trying to both fit in and stand out. Nobody looked twice at the girl with the schoolmarm’s hair and the ankle-length dress. So what if there was an open flame burning in her locker? It was nothing compared with the dark storms secretly and openly raging inside each and every one of us.

  When she finished praying to the powers that be both above and below, she blew out the candle and closed the door, a cloud of smoke silently streaming through the locker’s vents, the effect like something out of a heavy-metal video, as if a sulfurous portal to hell had opened up right there in the corridor just four lockers down from the second-floor bubbler.

  * * *

  —

  Listen: if Julie Kaling ever seemed like an oddball, it was for all the usual reasons—her heavily Catholic faith, the series of ankle-length dresses she seemed to wear in rotation, like Smurfette, her closet an endless chain of the same dress, her not knowing cultural basics like that Alf ate cats or the lyrics to the song “Safety Dance.” Simply put, she was considered a weirdo because of the very real everyday markers that made her a weirdo. Simply simply put: the fact that she was Vietnamese wasn’t one of them.

  Honestly, we’d stopped noticing that part about her a long time ago. After all, Julie Kaling wasn’t the only brown kid in a white family. There was Michelle Reed, a Korean adoptee on cross-country, and Brian Vanderweem, a Native American kid on the hockey team. A few other kids were scattered across all four grades, including a set of gorgeous biracial twins, a boy and a girl, who were sophomores and among the most popular kids in school. The race of these kids didn’t matter. For all intents and purposes, they were seen as being white just like the rest of us. Even Taylor Wagstaff with his shoulder-length dreads was considered a white kid, Taylor whose real dad was Nigerian though his white mom had remarried a white man. To us, it wasn’t complicated. According to the most recent census, Danvers was hovering at around 95% white, 5% other. Being “other” wasn’t what made you different. Having parents who were “other” was a whole other ball game.

  Those kind of “others” included kids like Sue Yoon and AJ Johnson, kids whose parents were the genuine article. Besides the Yoons and the Johnsons, there were a handful of “other” families in town. In the Gonzalez household, Mr. Gonzalez’s deep Cuban accent made our mothers want to keep him talking. The Dinguirards were from Belgium and never on time. There was even a family of actual Vietnamese boat people who lived over by the mall. Weekends the kids ran around in traffic. Julie’s father would purposefully never slow down when he saw the Nguyen children out with a soccer ball on four-lane Endicott Street. “The kids are from ’Nam,” he’d say. “They’ve probably got more street smarts than anybody else in this town.”

  Strangely enough, Julie’s parents had met in Vietnam during the war. At the time, her father had been fresh out of the seminary, her mother a novitiate, both of them working for a Catholic charity in the last days before the fall of Saigon. The story of how they found Julie was thin on specifics. We were never even sure if Julie knew it. Heather Houston was her best friend, and Heather’s mom would lower her voice when talking about it to other parents, using words like “abandoned” and “nobody really knows for sure.” But find her the Kaling parentis did, and bring her home, and leave the monastic life, and marry, though the order on all that was a little unclear. What was clear was that they apparently never had sex, as twelve years later they brought home the Prophet from Catholic Charities, and thus the Kaling family was complete, Thy will be done.

  And at the end of the day, after God had played His hand, Julie was one of us, warts and all. Back then, parents didn’t send their adopted kids to special schools on the weekends. They didn’t dress them up for their culture’s New Year or cook special foods to celebrate some harvest festival in their child’s country of birth. In the last year of the ’80s, Chi-Chi’s had just opened a restaurant on Route 114, in our eyes the Mexican fried ice cream a divine dessert conceived of on Mars. We were living in a world where up until Chi-Chi’s, Italian food was considered ethnic. So believe you us when we say Julie Kaling wasn’t really Vietnamese. She ate a lot of meat and potatoes just like the rest of us, all over town our nightly dinners basically identical regardless of where our people’s people had come from.

  * * *

&n
bsp; —

  And speaking of meat and potatoes, this is what Julie’s life was slated to look like from 7:40 a.m. until 1:50 p.m. for the next 180 state-mandated days:

  HOMEROOM (7:40–7:50): Mr. McMurtry rm. 137

  A PERIOD (7:54–8:39): American Civics with Mr. Barnard

  B PERIOD (8:43–9:28): Gym on odd days; Home Ec on even days

  C PERIOD (9:32–10:13): Health on odd days; Band on even days

  D PERIOD (10:17–11:02): AP Calculus with Mr. Simmons

  E PERIOD (11:06–12:12): AP Bio with Mr. Lee (3rd lunch)

  F PERIOD (12:16–1:01): Advanced English with Mrs. Sears

  G PERIOD (1:05–1:50): Study Hall

  FREEDOM?

  You had four minutes in between class to get where you needed to be. The school was big, three full floors plus the field house, but it was doable. For some kids, four minutes was even enough time to float into the bathroom and suck down a Marlboro. When there was a special assembly, each period would be cut short by six minutes to create a special eighth period. Friday would be our first eight-period day. The whole school would spend the final period in the field house at the annual fall pep rally. Karen Burroughs and the rest of the football cheerleaders would paper a big hoop with the Falcons logo, and then as the marching band played the Budweiser jingle, all the fall athletes would run through the hoop single file, a bunch of trained poodles, football going first, even though they were the losingest team at Danvers High.

  But Friday eighth period was whole eons away. We still had to survive the first day. The first day mostly involved a lot of explaining, a lot of handing around various sheets of paper, in science class a lot of pairing up, a lot of trying to avoid pairing up, et cetera. By the time G period rolled around, Julie Kaling had forgotten about standing in her kitchen the night before, the blue tube sock cutting into her skin, the phone an echo chamber. Now as she went into the last period of the day, the bag from Winmil Fabrics swung breezily from her wrist. She felt light-headed with anticipation, like Ruth in the Bible story on her way to Bethlehem with nothing but dreams. Julie’s plan was to sign out of study hall with the pass Mrs. Emerson had written allowing her to spend the period in Home Ec. This is how she intended to spend her G periods for the foreseeable future: bent over an ancient Singer sewing machine.

  But such are the best-laid plans of mousy girls and men. Instead, Heather Houston stood waiting at the entrance to Senior Privilege, her new hot-pink glasses dwarfing the rest of her face, a half-eaten bag of Doritos staining her fingers. And with that, the movie starring the biblical Ruth in Julie’s head came to a screeching halt, the film burning up in the projector, the smell of charred celluloid floating through her brain. “Don’t worry. I got us covered,” Heather said, pushing her glasses farther up her nose. “Just play along.”

  Neither of them had even been in Senior Privilege before. Thanks to the crappy furniture, the novelty wore off once you stepped through the door. Senior Privilege was a study lounge exclusively for seniors. It had a handful of vending machines with second-rate candy bars, stuff like $100,000 Bars and Charleston Chews, a couple of beat-up faux-leather couches in addition to the usual smattering of long tables with chairs. Basically, Senior Privilege was a carrot. Each year it was a way for the senior class to feel superior to everyone else at school, a privilege that the powers that be in the main office hoped might make the more disciplinarily challenged among us fly somewhat righter. It was also a cost-free privilege that could be easily revoked when needed. Getting kicked out of Senior Priv meant you had to go sit in regular study hall back with the rest of the plebs.

  “Play along with what?” Julie asked, but they were already standing in front of Coach Mullins’ desk.

  Around Danvers High, Coach Mullins was a sad sack of all trades. In the winter and spring, he refereed for basketball and baseball; in fall, he presided over detention and was a general sports trainer. During the day he filled in for teachers when a warm adult body was needed, mostly sitting in in study halls and classes that required him only to continue breathing. Admittedly, teenagers aren’t the best at guessing the age of anyone over twenty, but Coach Mullins was a tough nut to crack. He was probably pushing no more than thirty on the speedometer, but on the first day of school he was more than a month into his pledge not to shave since the football team had failed to win even a single scrimmage up at Camp Wildcat. Already he looked like Grizzly Adams, and the official season hadn’t even begun.

  Heather handed Coach Mullins a hall pass. He didn’t look up from his Boston Herald, just pushed the sign-out book across the desk, then pensively stroked his pelt. As she took up the pen after Heather, Julie thought of all the pieces of paper she’d ever signed her name to over the years, the way we put so much stock in what is essentially just a concept. “That was easy,” said Heather, on their way out the door. Her glasses flashed under the hum of the fluorescent lights. It was only then in that first step out of Senior Privilege that Julie realized the passes they had given Coach Mullins were fake. One small step for man, she thought, one giant step for darkness.

  She could see a light dawning in her friend’s eyes. Why hadn’t it occurred to anyone before? Heather Houston was beyond reproach. Her reputation as a straight-A+ student for the past three years would unlock every one of Danvers High’s doors and then some. She could float untouched through the school as she pleased, a spring zephyr in pink glasses unaccountable to anyone. Julie realized that, in some ways, the same could be said of her. Playing the nice quiet Catholic girl for the past three years could potentially have its benefits. She felt herself shiver. Or was it more of an urge? She tried to fill her mind with images of the pure driven snow, but the feeling persisted. There was a butteriness to it, a secret delight. At that moment, the two friends could have gone anywhere in the building. They could have gone anywhere in the world, for that matter.

  And where did they go? The second-floor library.

  Once inside, they waved to ancient Mrs. Bentley, perched on her stool behind the counter like a cactus, Mrs. Bentley simply something that needed a little water now and then. Quickly the two girls got down to brass tacks. The card catalog did not disappoint. The section was bigger than they’d expected, but it made sense, seeing as how it had all hit the fan right there in Danvers.

  First, they made a stack of books all unimaginatively titled The Salem Witch Trials. Most seemed to hover around the level of young adult. “What do they think we are, idiots?” hissed Heather. In the reference section, they found the book Mel and her friend Lisa had discovered eons ago, way back in the merry ole days of June. Religions of the World was an oversized book with a small section on the Witch Trials. Heather flipped the page before Julie even had a chance to finish the second paragraph. “There’s nothing in here about tying a string around your arm.” She sighed. “But it does mention signing your name in the Devil’s book.” She picked up yet another of the The Salem Witch Trials and started skimming. “Hey, it says here you can see the future if you drop an egg white in a glass of water and then hold it up in front of a candle.”

  Julie tried to imagine doing such a thing, the difficulty of getting the white to drop but not the yolk, but all she could hear was her mom yelling at her for wasting food. One time two years back she’d washed her hair with a raw egg because she’d heard it would give her hair insane shine, and even now two years later her mother would still rag on her for it if given the chance. Despite her mother’s scowlings, it might be worth it to try to smuggle an egg out of Sister Mary’s kitchen. Who didn’t want to know the future? She had so many questions. O All-Knowing Egg White, would she ever get her own G period project off the ground? Would a boy ever ask her out? Would anyone ever kiss her? Or was she doomed to eternally spend her free time here in
the library, searching for the secret words that would carry the field hockey team to States, everyone else’s dreams realized but hers?

  There were only a few minutes left in the period. Aimlessly she continued to flip through Religions of the World. In the center of the book was a series of full-page color photos depicting men in long white dresses twirling themselves into ecstasy, others of beautiful black people in Africa jumping vertically up and down. In one photo, a line of men in black suits knelt before a stone wall, each man pressing his forehead to the edifice. She flipped to a map with lines connecting different parts of the world, one running from West Africa to the Caribbean to Haiti to New Orleans. There was a small inset of a man holding up his tattered sleeve, the man’s broad smile missing a few teeth, his face creased but deeply contented, a red cord tied around his bicep.

  Quickly Julie closed the book. Her heart was beating in her throat. Had she really just seen those words? Juju. Santeria. Voodoo. She didn’t even know what they meant. Around his arm, the man’s red cord looked thick as a watch strap. She decided it couldn’t be a bad thing if the man looked so happy. And what was that saying—ignorance of the law is no excuse? Well, in her case, it would be an excuse. Quietly, she put the book back on the cart to be reshelved.

  By the end of the period, they had learned next to nothing, but Heather’s spirits were high, each eye magnified in its pink frame. At the very least she and Julie had amassed a list of primary sources and real adult books that looked promising, stuff like American Witches and The Devil in Massachusetts. “This could be good,” said Heather, tapping one title with her finger. She went into her Latin voice, the voice she used when conjugating verbs (amo, amas, amat), which was a cross between a Catholic priest and the Count on Sesame Street. “The Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of the Witches.”