We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “He’s probably waiting for us to leave so he can beat his meat,” Brian said, turning off his showerhead and grabbing a towel.

  “Lay off,” said Log Winters. “Jeez, what do you care?” Log was that rare breed of teen boy, one with no stomach for cruelty. He was handsome enough in an all-American kind of way that most times all he had to do was give someone a look and the bully would back down, waiting for Log to vacate the immediate vicinity before resuming the attack, often leaving Boy Cory enough time to skedaddle, but with Brian Robinson a little more effort was frequently required to get him to stand down, a fact directly proportional to how big Brian’s peanut gallery of an audience was.

  “Fine,” said Brian. “Let’s give the dame her privacy.” Dame, thought Boy Cory. Damn. That was new. It had a nice ring to it. Maybe he’d underestimated Brian’s inventiveness. He watched as Log and Brian and his handful of followers filed out, Brian turning in the doorway to blow him a kiss. For a moment, Boy Cory imagined himself catching it in his palm, then mashing it hungrily to his lips, but he knew even Log Winters couldn’t save him from the consequences of openly countermocking Brian Robinson.

  Finally the coast was clear. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest. Boy Cory bent down and pinched the hairy clump in his fingers. Like an iceberg, there was more to it than met the eye. Gently he tugged, a magician endlessly pulling scarves from his sleeves. More hair began to materialize, hair on and on without end. By the time the clump came free, it was the size of a soggy kitten lying docile in his palm. Boy Cory was finding it difficult not to retch. With his index finger he rummaged through it, being careful not to breathe in through his nose, the clump somewhat gelatinous and slick with unidentifiable gunk. When the bell rang, he was still standing there naked poring over a wad of material excreted by a plethora of adolescent bodies.

  It was time to admit defeat.

  Boy Cory tossed the spongy mass back on the floor. It hit the tile with a satisfying splat! the sound of a hard-won turd hitting the bowl. He was screwed a million ways to Sunday. It wasn’t in there. He had lost it. Fifty minutes ago at the start of gym there had been a piece of blue tube sock tied around his arm, and now fifty minutes later, there wasn’t. He wondered how long it would take for the rest of us to notice. Already he could feel the Claw with Its fiery eye searching the halls of Danvers High, wondering what the dealio was.

  Monday, 1st week of November

  Greetings and salutations!

  As I am quite sure YOU are well aware, ever since Halloween the ladies and I are now in the business of casting spells and brewing potions. Heather says that according to the Artois Book of Shadows she bought in Salem, as long as our intentions are “true” and “pure of heart,” we should feel free to improvise. Improvise indeed! Ever the careful researcher, Heather also says that we should keep a detailed record of our efforts and their results. All I can say is here goes nothing. WORLD, wish me luck!

  IRRESISTIBLE POTION #1

  ½ cup water

  A dollop of honey (the ultimate attractor)

  Pinch of sugar, cinnamon (for taste)

  One of my baby teeth from Mom’s keepsakes box

  A mirror from a makeup compact

  Put everything in a pot and bring to a boil. When cool, transfer to a mason jar. Each night before bed, light a candle and visualize what you want. Fill a thimble with IRRESISTIBLE POTION #1 (trademark pending (heh!)) and down the hatch. Obviously before drinking, strain out the mirror and tooth, which are only included because (a) once I sink my teeth into the INTENDED, may I never be forgotten and (b) when I am gazed upon, may the INTENDED see all the things they like best about themselves reflected back at them. Repeat for at least three nights.

  Oh. Maybe this is not the place to mention it as I do not want YOU to think any less of ME, but it would seem I have misplaced my blue armband as of this morning’s gym period. Things often turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out. True, I could simply find another length of athletic sock and tie myself up, but that would be disingenuous. Instead, I will make my own destiny. To irresistibility! Bottoms up!

  * * *

  —

  The Claw was the first of us to notice. Almost a week had passed since our Halloween shenanigans. We were still riding high on the feeling of omnipotence, the sound of glass shattering in the dark, desire and moonlight and furious vengeance, the faceless night a malleable space we made to fit our needs. We still had two regular season games left to go. Coach Butler was walking a fine line. She wanted us to remain focused on the business at hand, the Peabody Tanners and the Winthrop Vikings respectively, while also trying to shift our thoughts into playoff mode.

  “We’ll be up against the best of the best,” she said at least twenty times a day. “This won’t be like playing Gloucester,” she added. (Ah, the poor Gloucester Fishermen! As we liked to chant anytime we tussled with the good folks from Cape Ann: Squish the Fish, and make them into tuna fish! (and yes, Heather Houston was always disturbed by the laziness of rhyming “fish” with “fish,” but as we convinced her, sometimes simplicity is best.))

  Monday at practice Marge’s exhortations about cranking our game up a notch were lost on deaf ears. We were beyond not listening. We were off in a universe far, far away under the banner of the Claw and le Splotch as we tried to puzzle it out. Coach Butler in the center of our circle blathering on about the Rotating Rhombus and taking it to the net and deflections and penalty shots but internally all of us trying to casually give Boy Cory the once-over, figure out what indeed the dealio was.

  Did he look this good Halloween?

  Negative, said the Claw.

  What’s different?

  His jaw’s squarer.

  No. His hair’s finally long enough he doesn’t look like a local TV weatherman anymore.

  I think it’s the new stubble he’s sporting.

  Nope. It’s his teeth.

  Can he hear us?

  I got us covered, said le Splotch.

  You can do that? Filter people out?

  I said I got this, huffed le Splotch.

  Whatever it is, it’s working for him.

  Maybe it’s just confidence.

  You kidding? Who could be confident with all the razzing he gets at school?

  That’s my point. My mom says confidence is attractive.

  In a man. You try it and see how far it gets you.

  Who’s he going to prom with?

  You mean who’s his beard?

  Crickets as the conversation came to a screeching halt, a pair of skid marks metaphorically burned on asphalt.

  Shoot. I’ll bite. What’s a beard?

  Thanks for asking, Becca.

  I didn’t think that, thought Becca Bjelica.

  I did, thought Julie Minh.

  A beard is when a gay guy dates a girl so that he looks straight.

  More crickets as we slowly worked out the math on this.

  Hmmm…

  It seems like that could go really wrong really fast.

  And why would he even want to go to the prom?

  Yeah, it’s obvious Boy Cory’s, er, special.

  Don’t do that.

  Do what?

  Pigeonhole him.

  Don’t worry. Nobody puts Boy Cory in a corner.

  I hated that movie.

  Which one?

  Dirty Dancing.

  Then why did you vote for it for prom song?

  Who says I did?

  I can read your mind! You totally voted for “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”

  It’s a sucky prom song. You can’t slow dance to it. “Purple Rain” should’ve won.

  Why can we never stay on topic?

  We had a topic?

  YES! WHY DOES BOY CORY SUDDENLY LOOK H
OT?

  Hormones?

  Who? Him or us?

  I dunno. Both?

  Who here’s on their period?

  Internally we all raised our hands.

  Wowzer!

  Can I sign out of this conversation now? I wanna hear what Marge has to say about the playoffs.

  It’s a free country.

  Yeah. Do what you gotta do.

  You ain’t missing much. It’s just the usual bull feces she spouts a gazillion times a day.

  “Focus focus focus, ladies, and keep your sticks on the ground.”

  No sir. She doesn’t say that every day.

  “…focus, ladies, and keep your sticks on the ground,” said Coach Butler. She was standing in the middle of our circle, bent over with an imaginary stick in her hand making imaginary contact with the imaginary earth.

  Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

  Aunt.

  And with that, we were transported back to the present moment, the November air brisk and gray, the leaves off the trees, the woods to the west of the playing fields ragged and bare. Nothing had been learned for sure from our silent Gathering except that we were all on the rag and that in a few weeks’ time at the senior prom over at Caruso’s Diplomat in Saugus, dancing to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” would indeed prove challenging.

  Overhead a flock of Canadian geese went V-ing across the sky like a divining rod headed due south. We watched as one stray bird struggled to keep up, the bird the last dot in an ellipsis.

  Sad, thought Abby Putnam.

  No it isn’t, thought the Claw. Don’t be that bird.

  Oops, thought le Splotch. My bad.

  Oops what? replied the Claw.

  I’m not sure I did have us covered.

  Crickets.

  YOU MEAN HE HEARD ALL THAT? The Claw felt Itself flushing a deep crimson, a part of the color wheel It didn’t even think was physically possible.

  We all found ourselves in various states of distress. Some of us were mortified by the idea that Boy Cory knew we’d been checking him out, this boy whom many of us had known since Smith Elementary, others were freaked out by our discussion of who might be his beard, which seemed maybe a little unkind plus it was all conjecture—we didn’t know for a fact that he was indeed “special.” The Claw was particularly upset at the potential shift in Its power dynamic. It had real reasons to be worried. Every good queen knows that one day, the beautiful princess will come of age and usurp her, stealing the crown and getting it disinfected and resized. A Boy Cory who knew his true worth was a Boy Cory who couldn’t be made to go get back in line and buy his sovereign a Klondike bar during lunch.

  For the rest of practice, we kept our eyes on the sky, searching for stray birds and other omens that le Splotch did indeed have us covered. He heard, he didn’t hear, he heard, he didn’t hear, like pulling the petals off a daisy, only at the end we weren’t left standing with a naked flower in our fist. Instead, we had introduced a whole new dynamic into our existence, one that at any moment could begin showering us with its spiny seeds. Surreptitiously we tried to read his face for any hint that he was hip to us, but man! Were we ever blinded by his sudden and inexplicable irresistibleness.

  * * *

  —

  Irresistible or not, Boy Cory was in good company. It would seem that since the proverbial dawn of time, mankind’s had a hankering for spending its leisure grappling over sphere-like objects with sticks. Case in point: a marble relief from ancient Greece dating from 500 B.C. shows two opponents intently duking it out over a small ball using animal horns. In the ancient Egyptian cemetery site known as Beni Hasan, there’s a tomb similarly depicting two dudes in an obvious face-off. In Iceland, the Vikings played knattleikr, which took all day and involved both brute force and a penalty box, which was probably necessary given the brute force. For the past millennia, the Daur people of Inner Mongolia have been tussling over a wad of apricot root using tree branches. In our estimation, beikou is easily the best of the stick sports. When beikou’s played at night, the Daur light the apricot wad on fire.

  Flaming balls aside, field hockey probably derives much of its current form from the unfortunately named Irish game of hurling, which is said to be more than three thousand years old and is still going strong. In Europe in the Middle Ages, stick games were mostly played by aristocrats and (try and picture this!) members of the clergy, having evolved from what must have been some really bizarro rituals involving scepters and orbs. In the 14th century, professional killjoy Edward III went so far as to officially ban the common folk from playing games like pilam manualem (handball), pedivam (football), and bacularem (stick sports), plus for good measure, he outlawed everyone’s favorite pastime of gallorum pugnam (cockfighting). Despite the efforts of Edward the Bummer, in the 19th century the British Empire began to export field hockey to its colonies (along with gin and tonics and syphilis), in time making field hockey one of the most popular sports in the world. But the British Army’s proselytizing aside, it’s only in the rebellious former colonies of the United States that women are the predominant players of the sport.

  And so when we say Boy Cory was indeed in good company, we mean it in a global sense. From Ties Kruize of the Netherlands, who in 1975 scored 167 goals in 202 international matches after surviving a terrible car crash, to Jamie Dwyer of Australia, who led the Kookaburras to Olympic gold after a forty-eight-year drought, to Pakistan’s Hassan Sardar, who was named MVP at the 1982 World Cup, to the greatest player of all time, Dhyan Chand of India, whose prowess is forever commemorated in a statue showing him with four hands and four sticks, as opponents claim that’s what it felt like to go up against him; in short, everywhere around the globe the field hockey pantheon is littered with men, so that one rainy afternoon as a small child Boy Cory could stumble on a “Sports of the World” segment on some obscure public television station and see a herd of beautiful beings galloping majestically over a field of green, sticks in hand, and decide that one day he too could play this sport that in America was meant only for girls. Here on TV was the proof that there was room for him in the sisterhood where all might be accepted for the power the stick grants the one who wields it, regardless of what is going on between one’s legs.

  * * *

  —

  The next day at lunch Boy Cory heard himself being summoned. “Hey hey, Lady Cory.” There was only one person at school who called him that, and surprisingly it wasn’t Brian Robinson. Boy Cory turned and saw a figure waving at him from across the cafeteria. It was Sebastian Abrams, he of Caribbean-blue-nail-polish fame, a somewhat-portly fellow who flamed so hard he was basically a human habanero. Boy Cory did a quick scan of the room to suss out his options. It was strange to even have options. Usually it was lunch in the shadow of the Claw or bust.

  Behind Door #1, Sebastian had a table all to himself next to the Coke machine. Really, you couldn’t miss him. It was as if he’d decided to wear every iconic ’80s look at once. There were the acid-washed jeans cinched with a hot-pink fanny pack, the brand-new Reeboks paired with knitted yellow leg warmers, the Keith Haring tee with two geometric figures rocking out as signified by motion squiggles, and the pièce de résistance: his flyaway Howard Jones hair that looked like he’d dug a piece of bread out of the toaster that morning using a metal fork.

  On the other hand, Jen Fiorenza sat behind Door #2 at the field hockey table over by the windows, the Claw rakishly perched on her head like a New Year’s Eve party hat. Even from where he was standing, Boy Cory could see her doing that thing she did (which you couldn’t comment on or she’d explode!) where she ate a cherry Blow Pop while simultaneously eating something else, in this case a rectangular piece of pizza, alternately popping each in her mouth, the meal officially over when at its conclusion she blew a bright pink cherry bubble. From across the cafeteria it was beyond obvious Jen was in one of her mo
ods. The Claw appeared dizzyingly off-center. Her purple faux-crocodile handbag was heaped proprietarily on the neighboring seat, which meant Jen herself was closed for business. Even if he acquiesced to eating with her in silence, in order to do so he’d have to pull up some floor. I’ve fallen, but I can get up, he thought, and hopefully carried his tray over to Door #1.

  Overhead Chow Time Info was playing on the two TVs mounted high up in opposite corners of the cafeteria. On both screens Log Winters was prancing back and forth in some kind of trash bag, his cheeks sucked in in an effort to look gaunt. Chow Time Info was the Saturday Night Live–esque show the TV Production kids aired twice a week at fifteen minutes a pop. Supposedly the gag was Log was modeling the latest in prom fashion. Boy Cory put his tray down on Sebastian’s table. “Log wishes he could pull that off,” Sebastian hissed. “But black will never be his friend,” he concluded. “Can I get an amen?”

  If Boy Cory found himself hungering for originality from time to time, he need look no further than Sebastian Abrams. Sebastian was truly sui generis in the most clichéd ways possible. There was no one else like him at DHS, but there were millions like him in places most of us had yet to discover. Still, in the hormonal world of high school, being viewed as original had consequences, sometimes big ones, so as Boy Cory had discovered the hard way, being invisible was often the better row to hoe. Consequently, he usually stayed as far away from Sebastian as possible. The only thing worse than being a constant target was to double your surface area by standing next to an even bigger, louder target, one with a pink bull’s-eye taped directly on its forehead. The world of 1989 had us all believing there wasn’t a gay person anywhere between Danvers and New York City, but lucky for him, Sebastian didn’t put any stock in the world and its beliefs. Instead, he did what he wanted; he was who he was. And what he was was pretentious and catty and outrageous yet genuine, cobbling himself together from MTV and Rocky Horror and Roxy Music and whatever else seemed transgressive, often at great cost to his personal well-being.