We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  Speaking of Americitis, just last week she’d gotten her first set of box braids, each one no more than a quarter inch in diameter and swinging long and lazy down her back, a beaded curtain. When she sat back and studied herself in the salon mirror, she could’ve sworn she felt her piece of the sweat sock nodding its approval. You fly, girl, it was telling her, even if the boys aren’t banging down your door. On the other hand, if one more person at school today told her she looked like Darcel, the black dancer on Solid Gold, she was liable to go full ethnic on their ass.

  * * *

  —

  Of course that’s how Mrs. Sears’ sixth-period senior English would go down on a day when Larry Bird was above the fold. With Charlie Houlihan, boy brainiac to Heather Houston’s girl brainiac, using the N-word three times in a single sentence. (“Huck just wants to free Nigger Jim, but Tom Sawyer keeps treating Nigger Jim like a nigger because he can.”) Honestly, Charlie wasn’t wrong. Tom Sawyer’s insistence on rescuing Jim from the bonds of slavery when Tom knew full well that Jim was already free thanks to the death of his former owner, Miss Watson, was just some typical straight-up honky bullshit. Imagine. A child toying with the life of a grown man, and all in the name of adventure! Talk about fuckery. Fuckery ensconced as an American classic, no less.

  AJ Johnson raised her hand and asked to use the restroom. Mrs. Sears sighed and nodded at the laminated pass cut into the shape of a toilet lying on her desk. “Skedaddle back,” she said. What was AJ, a water bug? It was as if Mrs. Sears were afraid to be alone with twenty-eight students of the Caucasian persuasion talking about race, as if she wanted AJ to stay and shepherd them through their discussion, nodding periodically when they were hot, shaking her head when they were way, way cold.

  As AJ headed out the door, for a brief moment she considered going back to her desk and grabbing all her stuff, then skipping out of class and tossing the lavatory pass behind her in the air like a bridal bouquet. So long, fuckers, she’d meow, Eartha Kitt smooth. Ah, it’d be sweet! But this was real life, not some old episode of Batman. She gripped the laminated toilet in her hand and kept moving.

  AJ was used to being the only black face in each of her classes. She thought of the case she could build against the world based solely on the past six hours, her mind running over every detail like a tongue worrying a canker sore:

  Just this morning as they’d discussed the Three-Fifths Compromise in American History, she’d tried to imagine which two-fifths of herself she’d give up if legislated to. Maybe her right arm (she was a lefty) and whatever hip meat she had to spare. The teacher, Mr. Jarvitz, ever the joker, suggested it might not be that bad if he were taxed at only three-fifths his salary.

  In her elective class Television Production (for some reason Danvers High had a high-end TV studio with the leftover news set from ABC affiliate WCVB Channel 5 Boston), Laura Lee told her she couldn’t be the anchor because she didn’t sound like one (that was a new twist on an old theme). Needless to say, Laura gave Log Winters the nod instead. He could barely keep up with the teleprompter, plus he moved his head from side to side when reading the news like someone eating corn on the cob.

  In AP Biology, someone had slapped a backward Oakland Raiders cap on Skelly, the classroom’s skeleton, and draped a large red clock à la Flavor Flav around the skeleton’s neck, the pièce de résistance being the mentholated Kool jammed in Skelly’s teeth.

  In Calculus, AJ had ten points deducted off her differentials test even though she’d gotten the same answers as Heather Houston—she’d just used a different formula to get there—but the teacher said her work wasn’t what he was looking for even though it had taken her two fewer steps.

  Third-year German was the only class where she felt vaguely human. They spent the period listening to “99 Luftballons” and trying to work the lyrics back into English. Hielten sich für Captain Kirk. When you found German comforting, you knew you were in trouble.

  As AJ walked to the bathroom, she passed the trophy case outside the second-floor office. Toward the end of last year she would often stop here to gather strength. Now she searched the glass case high and low but nothing doing. Her brother was gone. It made sense. TJ’s moment was over. His senior year at Danvers High, he’d been captain of the soccer team, a member of the math team, and vice president of the student council. Up until now, his pictures were still hanging in the case. TJ holding a soccer ball. TJ standing at a blackboard covered with numbers. TJ looking vice presidential. But it was two years since he’d graduated, and Danvers High had moved on.

  AJ sighed. It felt like she’d been named “it” in the world’s most unfair game of tag. In her class of 194 students, there was only one other black girl, Enjoli, who lived with her Congolese mom and seven siblings up in the subsidized housing circle behind Purity Supreme. Back in junior high, AJ and Enjoli would smile knowingly at one another, then keep on keeping on as they passed each other in the corridors. But now when they encountered each other, they’d keep their eyes locked on the walls, neither girl wanting to acknowledge that they were different from everyone else. AJ also suspected that Enjoli considered herself to be the only real black girl in the Class of ’90. What word had TJ used earlier that summer out on the Inkwell to describe a pretty girl who went to William and Mary and wouldn’t give him the time of day? He’d called her an Oreo. Black on the outside, white on the inside. When he’d said it, he’d shaken his head, as if he’d just diagnosed the girl as suffering from leprosy.

  An Oreo. Is that why Enjoli no longer looked at AJ and smiled? It was probably true. She, AJ Johnson, was most likely also an Oreo. Classic Double Stuf. She could quote the Nena hit and sing it in its original German (Nur neunundneunzig Luftballons), but except for Bobby Brown, she couldn’t identify any of the young brothers in New Edition.

  AJ pushed the door open on the second-floor girls room. Everyone had a story, that’s what her mom always said. She stood in front of the mirror and looked long and hard at herself. But what was hers? She liked the way the new braids made her hair more versatile. She could braid the braids or pull them back in a ponytail. Mostly she just wore them loose, the braids hanging down her back. It was weird. On Solid Gold, Darcel hardly ever sported braids. She usually wore a weave, her long hair fluffed up like a white girl’s, yet people always seemed to remember her in braids. AJ swung her head from side to side, imagined herself slinking expressively toward the camera to the Pointer Sisters’ “Slow Hand.” Even the few times Darcel did wear braids, AJ looked nothing like her. Darcel’s skin was a smooth mahogany, her body long and sinewy. AJ was a beautiful dark roasted-coffee color and thin as a stick. It was her father’s favorite joke.

  Q: What’s brown and sticky?

  A: A stick.

  But Mr. Johnson would keep going.

  Q: What’s brown and sticky?

  A: AJ.

  Okay, she could see that the braids were somewhat Darcel-esque, but that time Becca Bjelica dyed her hair Bozo the Clown orange, nobody had accused her of looking like Cyndi Lauper. Am I right or am I right, AJ thought. The old TJ would’ve understood, the TJ who liked James Ingram and Ashford and Simpson, but now the old TJ was wiped clean from the trophy case, and besides, at this very moment the new TJ was probably doing the Cabbage Patch through the streets of DC while beatboxing some KRS-One.

  AJ checked her makeup. She could barely see where she’d applied Covergirl’s Peacock Surprise. When Jen Fiorenza painted AJ’s face for the pep rally, unlike everyone else, the blue had barely shown up on her skin, though the white half of her face had really popped. So that’s how it was. White needed black to know itself, but what did black need? Maybe someday there’d be a cure for Americitis. One could always dream.

  That afternoon we were scheduled to play away at Lynn Classical. After Swampscott, we’d won our next six—Gloucester, Revere, Ipswich, all shutouts. We had ga
mes twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Secretly AJ was dreading this afternoon.

  Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin,

  You never come out the way you came in.

  It was a long story. If she was unlucky, it would be an afternoon of judgment, an afternoon of Oreo-ness. If, on the other hand, someone were looking down on her from above, then it just might be an afternoon of nothing overly remarkable. That was the thing about Americitis—you never knew when and where it might flare up.

  On the way back to senior English, AJ found herself standing in front of a fire alarm. PULL, it said. Why not? That’s all she had to do to put an end to Huckleberry Finn for the rest of the day. She ran her fingers over the red box, wondered if it was a devious-enough act, something that could help power us through today’s game. Emilio was growing sluggish again. The petty shenanigans we’d all been pulling were starting to grow weak. We needed to up our commitment, said Jen Fiorenza. “You guys need to get wicked,” she said, after our 2-1 win over the Saugus Sachems, our closest game yet. “I don’t care what you do, just make it bad.”

  AJ let her hand linger on the alarm. Could it be that easy? She remembered the summer afternoon when her brother TJ had come home in the back of a cop car. The taller cop with the crazy eyebrow double-checking the address, making sure the house with the white columns and the three-car garage was really where this kid belonged. This kid whose only crime was trying to cash a check for a hundred dollars that Mr. Johnson had written him so he could buy a pair of cleats for baseball. TJ’s only form of identification a mangled DHS student ID. The bank teller pressing her panic button beneath the counter, all the while smiling broadly in her brother’s face.

  AJ took her hand off the alarm. She was surprised just her touching it hadn’t conjured Bert and Ernie up out of thin air. Those two were always running around town as if on a scavenger hunt for crime, the duo perennially trying to fill their scorecards. A black girl pulling the fire alarm would probably make their day. White kids pulled the fire alarm all the time and got suspensions. Once a few years back a stoner sent the whole school outside shivering in the November air, and twenty minutes later the kid was back in Western Civ stinking up the place with his pot fumes. Later when AJ herself was back in English, listening to more fuckery about Huck Finn, she wondered why she hadn’t just pulled it already.

  * * *

  —

  “Someone remind me why we’re doing this,” said Sue Yoon. We’d turned off all the lights in the locker room, though a blond strip was still leaking in from under the door that led out into the field house, our faces left in partial shadow, eleven gibbous moons. “Where do we think we are,” she said, “in an episode of Amazing Stories?” In the dark you could smell her hair, which today was dyed Sunshine Punch.

  “Focus, people,” hissed Jen Fiorenza. In the limited light, her Claw gleamed like a black mirror. If we had looked closely, we would have seen each of us reflected in Its surface, all of us in our blue-and-white game-day kilts, DHS painted in blue on our cheeks. “We’re recharging here.”

  “This never works,” muttered Little Smitty. “Who knows anyone this has ever worked for?”

  Julie Kaling was lying on her back in the middle of our circle. Nobody said it out loud, but we’d picked her for her quintessential virginness. Plus it was one of the few times when we thought of her as being Asian. She was small boned, which we hoped would work to our advantage. Her hair was out of its braid and spread out all around her like the rays of a star. We had to kneel on it in order to be close enough, basically pinning her to the ground, Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Becca Bjelica was the only one who noticed that Julie seemed more vibrant than usual, her glossy black hair like spilled ink. Becca made a mental note to ask her later if she was still using Prell.

  “Who wants to do the honors?” asked Mel Boucher. In the dark, the splotch on her neck seemed to be faintly glowing, an ember among cold coals.

  We all looked to Abby Putnam. She sighed and put aside the banana she’d been eating. “Okay,” she said, collecting her thoughts. If she’d been standing behind a podium, she would’ve taken this moment to straighten her papers by tamping them on the lectern. “Once upon a time there was this girl.”

  Boy Cory rolled his eyes. The old Boy Cory would’ve been happy just to be in the room, but the new Boy Cory had sprouted three inches since Camp Wildcat and now had opinions. “Why it’s always gotta be a girl?” he said.

  “Are you for real?” said Girl Cory. Just ten minutes ago she’d found a single sheet of a Mad Libs about Little Red Riding Hood in her sports bag, every slot filled in with the word “wolf”: Little Red Riding [article of clothing] WOLF was walking through the [a landscape] WOLF to bring her [a person] WOLF a basket full of [plural noun] WOLVES.

  “Come on, guys,” said AJ Johnson. “We gotta be on the bus in ten minutes.” AJ’s sense of punctuality was impeccable. The girl was never late. Secretly it was yet another thing about herself that AJ suspected made her an Oreo. That, and her general affinity for numbers.

  “Just sayin’,” said Boy Cory.

  “Sometimes it’s a boy,” AJ added.

  “Yeah,” chimed in Becca, “but if it is, he’s usually just a kid. Like definitely under ten, probably can’t even tie his own shoes.”

  “Would you guys shut up?” said Jen.

  “She was secretly really beautiful, but nobody ever noticed,” continued Abby.

  “Why?” asked our victim, Julie Kaling.

  “Shhh, you’re supposed to be dead,” said Heather Houston.

  “Why what?” said Abby.

  “Why does nobody notice she’s beautiful?” asked Julie.

  “Maudit,” said Mel.

  “No, I wanna know too,” said AJ Johnson.

  “Beats me,” said Abby.

  “She lived in a world where the standard for beauty was based on only one physical characteristic, but she was beautiful in every other way except for that one thing,” said Becca Bjelica.

  Sue Yoon thought she could hear the sound of crickets in the silence that followed. (As we would come to learn in the weeks ahead, thanks to the AP Biology greenhouse, there was actually a cricket infestation at DHS.) We all looked at Becca. It was the smartest thing she’d ever said. She stared back at us and smiled. Through her uniform you could see where her three sports bras were cutting into the flesh under her arms.

  “Fine. Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl who lived in a society that was messed up and superficial. She got so tired of feeling sad about being ugly that one day she walked to the reservoir on the edge of town, put a ten-pound weight in her pocket that she’d stolen from her brother, who was into fitness and proper nutrition—”

  “GET ON WITH IT!” said the Claw.

  “—and walked into the water.”

  Julie closed her eyes. We knew she was doing her best to try to picture herself walking into the reservoir with a dumbbell somehow wrapped up in her calico dress, but her dresses were usually pocketless. She gave up and just imagined herself carrying it in her hand, maybe doing a bicep curl or two as she sank.

  “She went straight down,” said Abby, “down to where it was cold and dark. When her feet touched bottom, a bubble escaped her lips. She watched it slowly rise back up to the surface. Then she died.”

  “Finally,” said Jen. Now we had arrived at the good stuff. AJ Johnson was doing everything she could not to scream that we were going to be late.

  “And so now it’s our job to bring her back up into the light, no matter what she looks like, like if fish have eaten her eyes, or if her nose has gotten soggy and fallen off,” said Abby.

  Jen motioned us all in closer. We scooted forward, each placing our index fingers under Julie’s body. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” intoned Abby.

  “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” we repea
ted. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

  We said it a whole bunch of times, maybe even more than the thirteen times required. Julie looked like she’d fallen asleep. “When do we lift?” whispered Becca Bjelica.

  “You haven’t been lifting?” said Jen.

  “I didn’t know we were supposed to yet.”

  “Well, start now.”

  “Are we supposed to keep saying it?”

  “Just lift.”

  “I’m lifting.”

  “Is everybody?”

  “We’re all lifting.”

  “Maybe the story wasn’t good enough.”

  “We should’ve had Heather tell it.”

  “It needed more details about how she was wronged by the town.”

  “Well, I started giving details and then was told to move it along.”

  “The bus is waiting.”

  “Sacrament!”

  “We done here?”

  Suddenly the lights snapped on. “Ladies!” Coach Marge was standing in the doorway. “Lynn Classical awaits,” she said.

  We jumped up and grabbed our stuff, the sound of our cleats clattering on the tile floor. Only AJ Johnson noticed that Julie’s lips looked darker, a shade of purple, as if she’d just eaten a blue snow cone, or like she’d plummeted down to the cold and shadowy bottom of the Danvers Reservoir with a ten-pound weight clenched in her fist.

  “Thanks for playing along anyway,” said Heather Houston, patting her friend on the back.

  Julie cast a knowing look at Heather. She’d always wondered what it would feel like at the end of all time to come back from the dead. Now she knew it was as simple as getting up off the floor.

  * * *