We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  —

  We hopped on Route 128 South for a hot second before getting on Route 1. It was only ten miles to Lynn from Danvers, but it took thirty minutes to get there. We kept the boom box going the whole way. AJ Johnson had a tape she’d made off the radio from a few years ago that had a bunch of our favorites on it, stuff that wasn’t still in heavy rotation, like Jody Watley or Howard Jones or the Phil Collins’ super-oldie “In the Air Tonight.” Man, that one always got us riled up. Well if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand. Talk about cold! That song always put us in the mood to bust out a can of whup ass on someone. True, the sound quality was sketchy. Sometimes you could hear the DJ talking, plus the transitions from song to song were abrupt, but unless you had a double-cassette boom box, listening to the radio was the easiest way to make a mixed tape.

  When we pulled off the highway, you could tell we weren’t in Kansas anymore. It wasn’t Boston, but to us, Lynn was a city city. It was probably the same way the kids from Topfield would come to Danvers and think Danvers looked like Lynn. There was a lot of concrete and not as much green as we were used to. The fact that Lynn was big enough to have two high schools, Lynn Classical and Lynn English, said it all. We piled off the bus with all our gear. “Go get ’em,” said the bus driver, Harriette. She was an older woman with a tight perm and one of the cool drivers who would take us to McDonald’s after a game if it was on the way.

  We dropped all our stuff on the visiting-team side of the field. It was a great day, low seventies, lots of sun. As we circled up to stretch out, Jen’s Claw swept the scene like a periscope, noting which players looked good, which could possibly be weak links. This is how the Claw made Its determinations: anyone with glasses was a potential soft spot; anyone brown was an all-star. “This is gonna be our toughest game yet,” reported the Claw via Jen. For the rest of the time, It sat atop her head like a field marshal surveying Its troops.

  AJ Johnson sighed. She knew the score. Lynn Classical was the only town we played where a third of the team was composed of brown girls. She could feel us, her fellow Falcons, her friends, running the numbers in our heads and coming up with a level-10 threat assessment. She knew because other players from other schools did it to her all the time, girls from Hamilton-Wenham or Marblehead, assuming she was better than she was because she was black. She couldn’t decide if this worked for or against her. She thought of the earlier discussion she’d endured about Huck Finn, how white people just didn’t seem capable of simply seeing black people as people. It was the true stain of slavery. A nation founded on racial difference and now, more than two hundred years later, all anyone ever saw when they looked at her was Darcel. Standing there with all of us around her stretching our glutes, she felt less like an Oreo and more like a fly in a glass of sour milk.

  The ref blew the whistle and it was time to get the show on the road. We won the toss and circled up one last time. “Field field field,” yelled Abby Putnam.

  “Hockey hockey hockey,” we responded.

  “Light as a feather,” Jen yelled.

  Silently we all just stared at her. For the second time that hour you could hear the sound of crickets. “Ixnay on the ightlay as a eatherfay,” whispered Heather Houston, dropping some watered-down Pig Latin. Only young kids did stuff like Light as a Feather, usually at slumber parties. What was Jen trying to do, embarrass us?

  We took up our positions. AJ was our center. As such, in every game, she was always the first to touch the ball. There was probably a metaphor there. She was the hub from which the whole team radiated outward. How had this country been founded? Whose blood and tears built the White House? AJ stood in the middle of the field, her braids swaying in the breeze. The whistle blew. As required, she passed the ball back to Abby Putnam, our team captain, and then Abby officially began the process of leading us forward, through what? Did AJ have cooties or something?

  * * *

  —

  When the ref blew the whistle after sixty minutes of regulation plus fifteen of overtime, Jen’s Claw looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off in Its downtown financial district. In a way, one had. The final score was 1-1. We were shell-shocked. Abby Putnam stood rubbing her eyes. How could this be true?

  Both teams lined up single file and began delivering our high fives and good games. There were no shenanigans. No snarky remarks. Truthfully it had been an afternoon of field hockey at its best, two stellar teams at the height of their powers. “Hey, Althea,” one of the Lynn girls said to AJ. “What’s going on?”

  The line came to a halt. AJ could feel her face burning, though she was thankful her skin didn’t show it. “Hey, Isha,” she said.

  “You coming to the hair show Saturday?” the girl asked. Her own hair was done in a series of small knots that dotted her head like the burls on a tree. Secretly we each wondered if we could get our hair to do the same thing. It looked awesome.

  “Dunno yet,” said AJ.

  “Cool,” said the girl. She cast a long look down the line at the rest of us. For a moment it seemed as if Jen’s Claw tried to pump Itself back up, but then threw up Its hands and admitted defeat. “By the way,” the girl added. “My mom done good. Your hair looks fresh. Like that chick on Solid Gold.” AJ nodded. “Later,” said the girl, then turned and moved down the line, slapping hands as she went.

  After collecting our stuff, we piled on the bus and slugged back to Danvers. We did not pass GO. We did not collect $200. Didn’t stop at McDonald’s either, the golden arches just a mirage in the distance. On the radio, there was nothing coming in the air tonight. Althea. It had never occurred to any of us that AJ’s name was anything other than AJ. Gosh, what else didn’t we know about her?

  * * *

  —

  “Meet up now,” screamed the Claw as we slouched off the bus. No exaggeration but the Claw looked like a golden pile of dog shit, a turd laid by an especially big dog. We wondered if It was working like a radio transmitter, beaming Its peroxided thoughts directly into our brains at 109.3 megahertz. Really, nobody had to call a meetup out loud. It was obvious we needed to talk out what had just happened.

  “What the hell just happened?” yelled Jen Fiorenza. Anytime she spoke, it was like there was feedback roiling around inside our heads. AJ wanted to tell her to turn the Claw down, but she didn’t even know what that meant.

  “We lost,” said Sue Yoon.

  “We didn’t lose, we tied,” pointed out Abby Putnam. Already she was digging around in her locker looking for a banana.

  “Same thing,” said Little Smitty.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Heather Houston. She slid the string off that kept her glasses on her face during play. As she was wearing her old pair, the black frames made her look like that guy from the Lakers, Kurt Rambis, the dude who always looked like a big out-of-place geek. “We’re still leading the conference.”

  “It’s a wake-up call,” said Boy Cory, going all He-Man, though we could tell it was an act. “Somebody needs to get arrested.”

  “A rad idea. Why don’t you?” said Girl Cory. On the bus ride back from Lynn she’d found yet another present from “Philip” in her bag—a Tic Tacs box filled with cigarette ash.

  Becca Bjelica was peeling off her second sports bra. “Let’s just graffiti the Rock,” she said. The Rock was a large boulder on the edge of the school grounds that you could see from the cafeteria. Each year when school started in the fall, the new class would paint it with the year of their graduating class, then out of laziness it usually stayed that way for the next 180 days.

  “We did that last week,” Mel Boucher pointed out. It was true. Last Saturday Little Smitty and Mel had taken a can of royal-blue Rust-Oleum and written FALCONS GONNA RAM IT (Lynn Classical was the Lynn Classical Rams), but it started raining pretty hard as they were doing it, and the whole thing got bleary and ran so that all you could really read was ___CON_
GO___ _AM I_.

  Then we all started talking at once, the sound like monkeys in an ape house. What were the larger life lessons adults said we were supposed to learn from playing a team sport? Better communication skills?

  Suddenly Julie Kaling stood up on the locker room’s only bench. She didn’t say a word, just held something up high in the air for one and all to see, waving the object around as if the thing was the answer to all our problems. Eventually we quieted down and looked.

  It was an egg.

  We looked closer.

  It had a small face drawn on it in Magic Marker. Two blue eyes with long lashes, a pert little pink mouth, some yellow curlicues for hair.

  “What is that?” said Jen Fiorenza.

  “Priscilla,” said Julie.

  “It’s her baby,” Heather explained.

  “What?”

  “Health class,” Heather said. “We each got an egg we’re supposed to take care of for a week. It’s supposed to show us how hard it is to be a parent.”

  “It just makes me hungry,” said Little Smitty.

  “How is Priscilla supposed to help us get to States?” said Abby Putnam.

  Julie was now cradling the egg in her palm, patting it soothingly on the head. “I’m willing to sacrifice her,” she said in a small voice.

  We all stood there dumbfounded. Finally a spark caught.

  “Ah, you’re saying we should egg someone,” said Mel Boucher. “Not a bad idea.”

  Julie made a face. “No. Three hundred years ago the Salem Witch Trials started when a bunch of girls cracked an egg in a bowl of water to try and see the future. They wanted to find out who their husbands would be.” Gently she kissed Priscilla on the top of her eggy head. “I’m saying we should crack Priscilla open and have her tell us what to do.”

  We all stood around internally deliberating it. To prognosticate by egg, or not to prognosticate by egg, that was the question.

  “Anyone got a better idea?” Heather asked.

  “Yeah, we throw Priscilla at the door to the teachers’ lounge,” said Boy Cory.

  “So what?” said Girl Cory. “They wash it off. Big whoop.”

  “What’s an egg in water gonna tell us?” said Jen Fiorenza.

  “Who knows?” said Sue Yoon. “If it doesn’t work, no harm, no foul.”

  “Not really. Julie gets a zero on the assignment,” said Heather.

  “I’ll bring her a new egg,” said Little Smitty.

  “Mrs. Tilson signed the bottom of each one,” said Heather. Julie tipped Priscilla over. There it was, Mrs. Tilson’s handwriting scrawled on the shell like a bar code.

  “Julie, you up for this?” said Abby Putnam.

  Julie nodded. “It’s Julie Minh,” she said. For the third time that day, we could hear the sound of crickets in the deafening silence.

  It took a while for what she was telling us to click. “Oh, okay, Julie Minh,” Abby finally said. “Your call.”

  With her free hand Julie Minh Kaling undid her braid, letting her long black hair fall down her back like a superhero’s cape or maybe a villain’s.

  * * *

  —

  The best we could do was a clear plastic sandwich bag filled with carrot sticks. Heather Houston never ate the healthy lunch her mom packed for her, instead each day buying two bags of sour cream and onion chips and a Suzy Q from the school store and tossing the healthy lunch on her way home. We threw the carrots in the trash and filled the bag with water. Julie Minh did the honors. It was hard without a bowl. She cracked Priscilla on the edge of the bench and did her best to hold back the yolk. We watched as the white slid down into the bag, the thing like a big slimy booger.

  “It’s kinda like a human sacrifice,” whispered Sue Yoon.

  “Cool,” said Little Smitty.

  We watched as the egg white took on new form in the water. “We’re supposed to look at it by candlelight,” said Heather. Julie Minh had been lighting votives at the beginning of each day in her locker. She pulled one out of her bag. We turned off the lights and lit it. Then we looked long and hard. We looked harder than we’d ever looked at anything.

  Maybe it was all in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, it probably was. We all saw the gist of the same shape, but that’s where the similarities ended. This is what we saw:

  Jen Fiorenza: a tail.

  Girl Cory: a car key.

  Boy Cory: a stamen and pistil.

  Sue Yoon: a TV antenna.

  Becca Bjelica: an erect penis.

  Mel Boucher: a fang.

  Little Smitty: a rabbit’s foot.

  Heather Houston: a candy bar.

  Julie Minh: a thumb.

  AJ Johnson: a pen.

  Poor Abby Putnam didn’t see anything at all. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell the difference between the egg white and the water. She worried that maybe now she wasn’t getting enough beta-carotene.

  “Well, that was a whole lot of nothing,” said Jen Fiorenza. She poured the bag with the dregs of Priscilla down a drain in the middle of the floor. The Claw chuckled to Itself. More and more the Claw was having Its own thoughts. “All will be well,” It said. “Go forth and make what you have seen so.”

  * * *

  —

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was still in AJ’s school locker. Mrs. Sears had assigned a question set due the next day, mostly stuff about themes and takeaways, but “all arguments should be supported by textual material,” so AJ needed the book. One by one we were drifting out of the locker room and heading home, our minds filled with visions cast in egg white. AJ thought of the long cylindrical object she’d seen in the bag, the tiny nib at one end. She walked out of the field house and back up through the corridor that connected the sports complex to the rest of the school. A pen. She had definitely seen a pen, maybe even the old-fashioned kind you dipped in ink.

  The hallways were empty, the school deserted. It was almost six o’clock. The cleaning crew wouldn’t show up until ten. There were no evening meetings for school clubs, no PTA. AJ found herself standing at the place in the building everyone called the Crossroads. It was a big open space at the bottom of a set of stairs where the school branched off into different directions; one corridor led to the field house, another to the junior high, a third to the high school, a fourth to the auditorium and main offices. Normally during the day, the Crossroads was filled with foot traffic, students on the move like blood platelets coursing through the body. But tonight there was only silence, the place a mausoleum, crickets in the shadows seducing one another. AJ’s locker was on the third floor. At that very moment her muscle memory should have been carrying her up the stairs and across the walkway toward her locker. But something new was in the air, something alien unfolding in the blood. She could picture the thing she’d seen in the bag, could see it shimmering and morphing into different shapes, places, people. She thought of all the indignities she’d suffered over the course of the day. In the egg white, she’d seen a young lonely girl with cornrows, the girl then changing, sprouting, transforming into a young woman with long loose braids, the woman with her hand on the fire alarm. She watched as the vision changed again, the whole country laying itself down at the woman’s feet. She saw the blood and the pain and the struggle and the long-awaited mountaintop and the young girl standing on the summit in the rays of the rising sun, and then a pen materializing out of everything, as if to say, are you getting this all down?

  AJ nodded. Fuck yeah. It was time to blow this place up.

  She drifted along the corridor toward the main office. A few doors down was the typing room where students since the dawn of time had struggled to master QWERTY and the home row. She put her hand on the knob and entered. The room was in darkness, a field of typewriters sitting silently. She powered one up and slipped in a sheet of paper. With perfect fing
er position she typed out what needed to be said. Ah, the things Emilio made us do!

  She knew what she’d seen in the plastic sandwich bag filled with water. It was a metaphor. Pulling the fire alarm would have been small temporary potatoes. She scrolled the sheet up out of the typewriter and folded it in half. The pen is mightier than the sword. True fires often don’t involve actual flames.

  Back outside in the corridor, she slipped what she’d written under the door of the main office. No alarms went off, but by morning, a ten alarm would be raging. Beside the door was a folding table stacked with applications for students interested in running for student government. LEND A HAND read a sun-bleached poster. She picked up an application and dropped it in her bag. Her brother had been student council vice president. That wasn’t good enough for her. Field field field, she thought as she walked out of the building. In the silence all around her, the sound of crickets like the trumpets of Jericho blowing the walls tumbling down.

  DANVERS VS. MARBLEHEAD

  Thursday at home under steely October skies we eviscerated the Beverly Panthers 8-0. After the massacre Nicky Higgins, a reporter from the Falcon Fire, our school weekly, asked about the lopsided score. Abby Putnam cleared her throat and tried to put her best Model UN spin on things. “Sometimes you can’t help it,” she confessed. “Everything just goes your way.” She realized she was speaking into a carrot as if talking into a microphone, the carrot her fourth that day. Casually she lowered what was left of the vegetable to her side.

  The two girls were standing by the Mr. Hotdog ice-cream truck, “Pop Goes the Weasel” wafting through the air. Officers Bert and Ernie were leaning up against the chain-link fence watching a tennis match that had gone into extra sets. Both officers were in full uniform and eating cherry snow cones, their lips and tongues stained red. Despite the hazy October glare, Bert didn’t need a sun visor, his unibrow a small furry hand forever shading his eyes.