We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “Don’t worry about it,” Girl Cory responded. With her knuckles she rapped lightly on the Mercedes’ trunk, our signal to the driver that we were finished. With a sprightly toot of its horn, the silver convertible pulled out and sailed down Locust, its side marred like a tree that’s been blasted by lightning.

  It was only later we found out the Mercedes belonged to Girl Cory’s mom.

  And in less than a week, her mom was seen floating around town in some fancy new red contraption called a Lexus.

  They say a high tide lifts all boats. Guess it all depends on where you’re standing in relation to the water. Still, we should have seen it coming. Girl Cory had her license plate officially transferred from the Fiero. Now the silver convertible with the huckleberry scar was all hers. APPLE 16. Her stepdad Larry offered to get it fixed, but Girl Cory said no, she liked the Mercedes just the way it was. Ruined. We wondered if her parents ever suspected what really went down. In some ways it was a win-win. Mrs. Gillis got new wheels. Girl Cory got new wheels plus a chance to air some under-the-radar aggression.

  Either way, at the end of the day the star of the car wash was Becca Bjelica. The girl didn’t even have to try. She could spit on someone’s hood, and the man would slip her a twenty. “This is for you,” he’d say, then he’d hand her a fiver and say, “and this is for the wash.” Such was life. Just to be mean, every now and then Little Smitty would holler, “Bee!” and Becca would freak out, running under the nearest hose, the front of her T-shirt soaked clear like an observation window at a hospital. All over downtown, cars would make illegal U-turns to get in line, everywhere hands waving money in her face.

  Ah, good ole Becca Bjelica! More so than the rest of us, bee or no bee, there was way more going on under her hood than met the eye.

  * * *

  —

  Listen up: Becca Bjelica was the female Sean Saunders.

  Ever since fourth grade, Sean Saunders had a five o’clock shadow by three o’clock in the afternoon. By sixth grade the kid reasonably looked old enough to rent a car. With facial hair and actual muscle definition came great responsibility. It was naturally expected that Sean Saunders would be a bully, tossing other kids to the playground ground in a testosterone-fueled rage where’er he trod. He did his best to accommodate our expectations, but in reality, he didn’t have to do much. When playing capture the flag, some kid would inevitably just hand him the red handkerchief along with a smile. At lunchtime, weaklings willingly forked over their 15¢ milk money along with 5% interest. Sean tried to cultivate a taste for Camels unfiltered, but the truth is he preferred More, a brand marketed to women that looked like a sophisticated cigarillo Alexis Carrington might light up on Dynasty. It wasn’t until years later that we heard he was living with a man and a Pomeranian named Mrs. Butterworth in a condo somewhere down near Key Biscayne. With this news, there went the theory that early puberty was a predictor of character.

  Like Sean, Becca Bjelica developed early and beyond Mother Nature’s wildest dreams, but unlike Sean, she suffered all the subsequent trauma accompanying early female development, trauma that the rest of us flat-chested mortals envied. In a nutshell, starting when she was just ten years old, the whole wide world assumed Becca was a nymphomaniac and utterly depraved at heart. The standard male thought on such matters seemed to be, why would a girl grow a rack like that if she didn’t want to be ogled? Everywhere she went, men heard porn music playing, guitar riffs and drums boom chicka chicka boom–ing where’er she trod. Imagine coming out of Toys “R” Us at the Liberty Tree and clutching your brand-new Cabbage Patch doll only to have some grown-up pass you by in the parking lot, the guy doing some weird gesture where he balled his tongue up in his mouth and rapidly moved his hand up and down in front of his face as if he were joyously playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on a trombone. Seriously. For Becca, every day was a gaggle of men suggestively motioning how much they wanted to be in that number. It was some kind of inverse mathematical equation—the less appealing the man, the harder he worked the slider. Wah wah wah wah!

  On the other end of the male spectrum was Becca’s dad, Bogdan, easily our favorite father. While the adults in our world politely called him Dan, behind his back we referred to him as “Bogs.” We didn’t see Bogs as much as we would have liked, as he worked two shifts at a factory over in Gloucester that made corporate swag, stuff like coffee mugs that said LIBERTY FAMILY CORPORATION or THREE TREES HEATING AND COOLING. They also made cool stuff like the swag you could send away for if you collected enough cereal box tops or candy wrappers. Becca had a Snickers pup tent she used to drag with her to sleepovers. She also had two Skittles pencil cases where, starting in Mrs. DiFranzo’s fourth-grade class, she kept her mammoth stash of feminine hygiene products. If you were ever in need of a pad, chances are she was carrying your brand.

  Bogs had been in the country for more than twenty years but only became a citizen in early ’88 so he could vote for Dukakis, whom he lovingly dubbed “little tank man.” He’d been calling the governor that even well before Dukakis ill-advisedly strapped on the helmet and crawled in the M1A1 Abrams. On the day of Bogs’ swearing in, the Bjelica family drove over to the courthouse in Salem where Bogs raised his right hand and ended up crying in front of his wife and daughter and mother, Borislava, whom he had brought over just a few years before and who spoke only Serbian. At the ceremony, Borislava cursed out the judge in her native tongue, as it was obvious to Borislava, herself a big-breasted lady, that the judge was trying to calculate her granddaughter’s bra size in his head.

  “I throw my pubic hair on you, you rectal worm!” she shouted, tossing invisible hairs from her pelvic region.

  “My mother, she says this day her dreams are out in all the daytime,” translated a blushing Bogs through his tears.

  Bogs had emigrated from Belgrade in 1968 and somehow landed in North Conway, New Hampshire. Shortly thereafter he met Mrs. Bjelica, née Cassandra Jones, on the ski slopes of Mount Attitash when he was twenty-nine and she was only seventeen. True, it sounds sketchy now, but keep in mind it was the seventies. People were doing coke off of any flat surface. A twelve-year age gap between a man and a woman was practically considered mandatory. How else would a girl know what was good for her without some bald guy telling her what for?

  Bogs and Cassie stayed in New Hampshire for much of the rest of the decade through the building of the Alpine Slide, which Bogs considered the single greatest architectural feat ever accomplished, a concrete trough that ran down the mountain and down which summer folks could speed along in individual plastic sleds without a helmet, assuming they were over three and a half feet tall.

  The Bjelicas moved to Danvers in 1980. Bogs had once come across the name of the town in a Stephen King novel, though he couldn’t remember which one. Becca was their only child and happily took to Danvers, her childhood filled with M&M hats and Apple Jacks backpacks. Sadly, her childhood abruptly ended in fourth grade after she was run out of local Brownie Troop 611 when the uniform no longer fit. From then on, life became a series of constant backaches and cramps and multiple bras worn at once. When she first got her period, she bled for seven straight months, most of it just a rusty sludge that never seemed to stop. There was talk of putting her on the pill, but she was only ten years old, so they waited until she was eleven. The doctor said that young girls who develop early often suffer from erratic periods, their hormones out of whack, their brains not fully getting the endocrinal signal that, after seven days, it’s time to “shut off the waterworks” (his exact words).

  Amazingly, while Mrs. Bjelica dressed her young daughter in somber stain-resistant blacks, in addition to developing a size FF cup, Becca also managed to develop a light and pleasant personality. In a way, she had to. When men passed her on the street with their tongues balled up in their cheeks while blowing away on their air trombones, she pretended it was all harmless fun. It was a defense mec
hanism women have been perfecting since the dawn of time, to act breezy and light like the fuzz on a dandelion gone to seed. To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous. Nobody had to teach us this lesson—it was just something we knew from the earliest days on the playground. If a boy liked you and you didn’t like him back, you had to smile and laugh or else he might put a spider in your desk. If a boy pulled your hair, the adult playground monitor would coo, somebody likes you. If a boy bit you and left a scar, that was the price you paid for being a cute little girl made out of tasty things like sugar and spice. If a man pumped his fist in front of his face when he passed you on the street, you had to smile and blush and act like you were seriously considering it but, Lordy Lord, you just didn’t have the time, thank you very much for thinking of me and have a lovely day.

  For the most part, it wasn’t until she was fourteen that Becca found out what these fist-pumping men were even suggesting, not until her grandmother pulled her aside and explained to her in Serbian about the birds and the bees and the other birds and bees that men wanted that technically speaking wouldn’t get a girl pregnant but also which really weren’t all that fun because they generally weren’t reciprocated and the age-old adage in this case was wrong—it’s not always better to give than to receive.

  And thanks to Borislava’s mixture of Serbian sprinkled with English, Becca developed not only a healthy fear of sex but also melissophobia, a lifetime fear of bees. Despite such misgivings, she always had a steady stream of boyfriends on hand, boys happily simmering on the back burners while one was boiling on the front, boys with patchy mustaches who were underweight and pale and into motorcycles, with whom she could always be seen locking lips in the hallways in between classes, the boys’ tongues balled up in the side of her cheek, their hands grabbing fistfuls of her hair, leaving the rest of us to assume that the birds and the bees were always flourishing where’er Rebecca Petra Bjelica went marching in. And yeah, sometimes we were just as guilty as any man for assuming Becca knew exactly what she was doing when she grew that bitching rack.

  * * *

  —

  Monday Coach Mullins was all over school. It was all we could talk about. That’s really all we could do—talk. Clouds of secondhand smoke were billowing out of Principal Yoff’s office like smoke from St. Peter’s Basilica as we waited for word about what in the holy hell had happened. One thing we did know. Poor Principal Yoff was back on the nicotine. You could smell it pouring down the hall. It was 1989. Adults were still allowed to fire up in any and every public space—banks, hospitals, planes, the teachers’ lounge next to the cafeteria. On TV, the pastel shirts of Miami Vice’s Sonny Crockett must have stunk to high heaven from his two-pack-a-day habit, his stubble smelling of an ashtray. And always following in the Lucky Strike cloud that was Principal Yoff was intrepid Falcon Fire reporter Nicky Higgins and the Chin, determined to elbow their way to a Flamie, small-cell lung cancer be damned.

  AJ Johnson managed to grill Nicky during third period TV Production. It was no easy task. They were filming a soap the class had written called All My Kittens. In that day’s episode, Angel, the working-girl lawyer who is constantly fighting off her building superintendent’s advances, learns that the kitten Jack gave her, bringing her feline posse to six, is actually a baby bobcat. Hijinks ensue.

  “Any leads?” asked AJ, trying to look as bored as possible while adjusting her headset. All My Kittens was a two-camera show. Both she and Nicky would be acting as camera operators, though it was hard for Nicky to use the viewfinder, as the Chin prevented her from getting too close to the camera. AJ and Nicky could speak to each other through their headsets, but it also meant the technical director and certain miked cast members were listening in. Up in the control booth the day’s TD was none other than Log Winters. The guy seemed to have his finger in every pie.

  “What have you heard?” said Nicky. She was practicing the manual zoom she’d have to perform once Angel realized the kitten was a bobcat.

  “I dunno. Did someone really type up a note and slip it under the main office door?”

  “Negative,” said Nicky. “It wasn’t typed. It was handwritten in purple ink on white notebook paper, the same size paper you find in a blue exam book.”

  “I heard it was written on a postcard. In blood,” said the disembodied voice of Log Winters.

  “Negative, that was a note someone dropped in the cafeteria suggestion box. And it wasn’t in blood,” added Nicky. “It was Tabasco sauce. Plus it was just a complaint asking for turkey fricassee at least once a week.”

  AJ tried to steer the conversation back to Coach Mullins. “How do you know it was purple ink?” she said. “Did you actually see it?”

  “Negative,” repeated Nicky, “but the whistle-blower also put a copy of the letter in the Falcon Fire anonymous tipster box. Guess he or she wanted to make sure they covered all their bases.”

  “How do you know it was an exact copy?” asked Log. AJ wondered why he was so interested.

  “Because it said, ‘This is an exact copy of the note slipped under the main office door.’ ”

  Exact copy my ass, thought AJ. She wondered just what Jen Fiorenza and her stupid purple pen thought they were doing.

  “Can’t argue with that,” Log replied, before putting on his technical director hat. “Places, everyone. Angel, hold the bobcat in your arms like you would a baby.”

  “Scene three, take two,” called the second assistant, slapping the clapper board shut.

  Angel was sitting on the sofa in her Manhattan loft surrounded by a bevy of stuffed animals.

  “Yeah, it was pretty wordy,” whispered Nicky. “The note said Coach Mullins couldn’t help himself, that he was madly passionately in love with her, the most beautiful girl in the senior class, that he fell madly passionately in love with her because of her hair, that he wanted to marry her once she graduated, but that she’s seen the light and wants to date boys her own age, so if someone could please tell Coach Mullins it’s over, it’d be muchly appreciated.”

  “You said purple ink, right?” said AJ. She was trying to get her camera to focus now that Jack the super had come through the set door.

  “Purple Rain purple,” replied Nicky.

  AJ could already picture the way Jen Fiorenza drew empty circles over her lowercase i’s, then went back later and filled them in as if she were taking a multiple-choice test.

  “How do you know it’s not a copycat letter?” said Log.

  “What?” said the second assistant.

  “Yeah, waddya mean?” asked Nicky.

  “I dunno. Maybe some lonely girl wants attention, so she pens a letter to make people think the original one’s all about her,” said Log.

  “Is that my motivation in this scene?” asked Laura Lee, who was playing Angel. “Lonely girl thinks new kitten will shower her with affection?”

  “Work it if it works for you,” said Log.

  AJ tried not to smile. Log was actually a pretty good TD and not a bad judge of character. She could practically see lonely girl Jen Fiorenza lying on her bed, the purple Bic in her hand, the Claw a vanilla bundt cake crowning her head.

  “Why would anyone do that?” said Nicky.

  “Find love through cats?” asked Laura Lee aka Angel.

  “No, take credit for a prank they didn’t start,” said Log.

  Because Huckleberry Finn is not an American classic, thought AJ, remembering back to that terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day when she’d slipped the note under the office door. Because sometimes making the world a worse place than you found it can make you feel better. She wondered if someone like Nicky Higgins could possibly understand this. Surprisingly, maybe Log could. Of course there was a downside to every tale of misery loving company. Now Coach Mullins was on paid leave presumably fighting to stay out of the clinker and Jen Fiorenza was only makin
g things worse.

  On set Angel shrieked. It sounded really real. Both Nicky and AJ zoomed in for a close-up. Turns out the stuffed bobcat working-girl-lawyer Angel was cradling in her arms had very real fleas.

  * * *

  —

  AJ Johnson called an emergency meeting at the start of fifth-period lunch. If you were in class, it meant you had to somehow find a way not to be in class. For those of us with impeccable track records, it was easy-peasy. Heather Houston told Mrs. Mannon, the Latin teacher, mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body—and simply walked her 4.2 GPA–earning mind and body out of translating Cicero. Boy Cory had to get a little more creative. He was in shop building a working lamp out of an old Gallo wine bottle. “I think my second testicle just dropped,” he whispered to Mr. Louis.

  Thankfully, Mr. Louis had as poor an understanding of the workings of the male anatomy as Boy Cory did. He waved Boy out the door. “Do whatever you gotta do, son,” he said, a length of copper wire twisted around his arm. “And mazel tov!”

  Within ten minutes of putting out the call, we had all assembled just out of view in the woods on the edge of the field house. It was strange to be outside during the school day. Sue Yoon plopped herself down on a rock and pulled out a Parliament. There were small gnats buzzing all around her head, presumably attracted to her Scary Black Cherry–flavor dye job. You could tell the Claw also wanted a nicotine fix, but on this one occasion, Jen managed to overrule It.

  Though technically AJ Johnson had called for the sit-down, in actuality it just sorta kinda happened. We didn’t have an official bat signal or anything, no intricate system of tapping on the pipes or sending complicated messages through a series of winks and blinks in the corridors. Basically, ever since tying ourselves up with the blue tube sock at Camp Wildcat, in times of weariness or confusion, something inside you just said, hey, we need to talk. Maybe the best way to describe it is to say it was probably the same urge that made salmon drop whatever they were doing and start swimming back upstream past a series of grizzly bears and TV cameras to the place where they were first spawned. Or maybe it was more like the light that comes on when you open the fridge, an internal mechanism that simply turns on when circumstances line up. Either way, when the urge for a Gathering hit, you just inexplicably filled with a sudden sense that you needed to check in with the team, be together, put a face to all the thoughts starting to form an eleven-car pile-up in your brain. Yeah, don’t freak out, but we were starting to think collectively. We had been for a while now, but it wasn’t something we were ready to talk openly about just yet. For the time being, it was still at the novelty stage, nothing too ugly. You could still keep secrets in a manila folder in your heart that no one else had access to. Really, in those first few months it was just team stuff that we shared, though slowly and silently maybe some of us were beginning to slip in and out of one another’s gray matter.