We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  Marge told us not to bother carrying out the goal nets. We wondered what was up. Hauling the nets out to the field was a part of our everyday existence, something we did on autopilot same as that funny little guy on TV (Michael Vale, according to Sue Yoon) who dragged ass everywhere he went because it was forever “time to make the donuts.” Abby Putnam often dreamed of lugging the nets hither and yon, like the children of Abraham, Abby and her descendants cursed to spend forty years endlessly wandering the barren vales around Danvers High searching for a level spot. It was the honor system, though secretly we kept track of who wasn’t pulling their weight. Being a good citizen meant hauling the nets out of the storage locker where they lived next to the field house your fair share of the time. They were each 7' × 12' with lightweight aluminum bars, but still cumbersome as hell. You needed at least four people per net, one in each corner, though it was easiest if you had six. We would throw our gear inside, making it all that much heavier. Once, for various reasons, Abby Putnam and Jen Fiorenza got stuck carrying one all by themselves. Abby seemed happy to be saddled with the challenge, the sweat on her brow bathing her in a soft glow, but the grimace on the Claw’s face made It look like It was having a baby while simultaneously pulling an 18-wheeler down a long stretch of highway using only a rope in Its teeth.

  So yeah, no nets was good news. Overhead it looked like rain anyway. If the wet stuff did decide to fall, we’d move our operation into the field house, run some drills on the rubber floor, the white ball a plastic torpedo gunning for the softest parts of your legs. After stretching on the cold hard ground, we were actually happy when Coach Butler told us to warm up with ten laps around the field. It was a chance to get the blood moving so that we didn’t end up a frozen popsicle like Jack Nicolson at the end of The Shining. Just before we took to the field, Girl Cory unwrapped herself, throwing her fur down on the ground, a $5,000 pile of hair.

  “Okay,” said Marge, once we’d finished our warm-up. “Line up on the end line.” We looked around, confused. “Line up on the end line” meant wind sprints, and wind sprints were something we usually did at the end of practice, not at the start. It was like downing a spoonful of codfish oil before eating your liver. It just seemed cruel. Regardless, we didn’t have time to puzzle it out. “On my count,” Coach Butler said. Sticks in hand, we lined up, soldiers before a firing squad. None of us could remember the good ole days of Double Sessions, the August sun like an overseer. Did such a time ever exist? Marge blew the whistle and we were off.

  The first wind sprint we ran was normal. You sprinted to the twenty-five, then jogged back; to the fifty, then again with a light jog back; then on to the seventy-five et cetera; and finally you hauled ass the full length of the field before jogging back to the end line. Each time Little Smitty passed the fifty, she thought of Marilyn Bunroe buried deep in the earth, the rabbit’s blond mane of hair magnificent, pin-up worthy.

  The cold was hard on the lungs. The wind made it difficult to catch your breath, your whole body resistant to loosening up, everything feeling brittle, our insides like an old car on a frosty morning, something just aching to crack, a piece of old tubing deciding not one mile more. We ran a second set, wondering what Marge was trying to prove. Before she blew the whistle, she delivered a little speech, the tone of it similar to a closing argument at a trial. “Tomorrow after Winthrop it’s on to the playoffs,” she said. “Three games take us to Worcester, ladies. Two north sectionals, then the Eastern Mass championship.” The first drops of rain began to fall. “It’s been an unusual year,” she said, “starting up at Camp Wildcat with Masconomet blowing us out 9-1.” We were still doubled over, trying to catch our breath. Only Abby Putnam had the energy for a rebuttal.

  “8-1,” said Abby. We all looked at her. “What?” she said. “That one ref said it was eight.”

  “And now here we are, about to go 13-0-1,” continued Marge. It was definitely raining, each drop an ice cube sliding down your back, only they were sliding down all over the place—your back, your neck, the ends of your hair starting to freeze. Marge pulled out an umbrella. The thing was shaped like a duck with an orange bill acting as a personal canopy. We were incredulous. It meant despite the elements, she wasn’t going anywhere. She was digging in.

  We must’ve looked like a herd of wild horses, the breath steaming out our nostrils. What was going on here? We felt the Claw shiver, le Splotch wipe the ubiquitous smirk off Its face. Marge meant business. She rubbed her right arm as if she’d just gotten a flu shot. “We have no choice,” she said quietly. “It’s all the way or nothing,” she added. The rain began to do its worst, tiny beads of ice scouring our cheeks, Marge’s voice as if reading a last will and testament. “Everything’s on the table, ladies,” she said. “We will do whatever needs doing.”

  The sound of crickets gently freezing, their legs stiff mid-rub.

  “Everything?” asked Abby Putnam. We began to imagine what might happen later that night at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, the possibility of faceless bodies falling out of trees.

  “Everything,” said Marge, suddenly upbeat again. It was like a different person was speaking from just ten seconds ago. “Winner takes all,” she counseled. “Every coin toss, every goal, every game. Everything.” It was the everyday speech of a coach uprightly exhorting her team on to excellence blah blah blah.

  Abby sighed, relieved as the old Marge reappeared, the one who drove a beat-up Subaru and looked like a kindly horse.

  “Okay ladies, we in for one last set?” said Marge. Nobody moved. “This is it,” she offered. “For all the marbles. No jogging. No easing off the throttle. Gimme everything you got. Balls to the wall.”

  Later in the locker room, we couldn’t agree on whether or not she’d actually said that last part. Either way, Heather Houston threw up a little bit in her mouth. In a weird way it was almost comforting.

  “Field field field,” Marge had shouted before the last wind sprint. Again, there was something in the look on her face. A darkness, a twisting. Something we had seen before. An impishness. What exactly was Emilio up to? She rubbed her arm just like we used to after we first got tied up.

  “Hockey hockey hockey,” we yelled. The whistle blew.

  Sometimes you do things because everyone else is doing them. The force of the herd keeps you moving forward. If you stop, then whatever’s lurking on the edge of the savanna will jump on you and break your back, leaving you unable to move as it feasts on your innards.

  Finally, the last of us came stumbling over the end line. Heather spit whatever was in her mouth out onto the grass, where, upon hitting the earth, it instantly froze. We headed for the field house. Maybe Impish Marge was onto something. All that sprinting had its effect. We were all warmed up and hungry to start smashing stuff.

  Inside we didn’t bother running any drills. Coach Butler had bought a chocolate sheet cake with white frosting at DeMoulas. Written on the cake in blue letters was the message LOOK OUT FOR #1! She didn’t plan it out or anything, but when Julie Minh was handing the pieces around, Mel Boucher got the #1. Le Splotch grinned.

  See you all at midnight, It sneered. Rain or shine.

  We played our song on AJ Johnson’s boom box—Set your sights on the stars and the sun!—ate some cake, reminisced about the season such as it was. The one thing we definitely didn’t talk about was what the hell had just happened. How during the wind sprints, more than one of us felt like we were running for our life. As if the thing we feared most in the whole wide world was nipping at our heels. Wolves. Spiders. Cockroaches. Snakes. Opprobrium. We ran and ran and we didn’t stop as if we were crossing a frozen river and the ice was cracking just beneath our feet, the icy waters yawning wide. And the whole time we were running helter-skelter with utter abandon, Coach Marjorie Butler stood on the sidelines rubbing her arm as if either comforting herself or just getting going.

  3. Discuss a situation in which you
had to make a difficult ethical choice. How did you arrive at a decision? Was there peer pressure involved? If so, how did you deal with it?

  Let’s see. En brève, my field hockey team is using witchcraft to win games. Now the big question is how far will we go to bring home a state championship? For example, midnight tonight at the old Rebecca Nurse Homestead we’re supposed to meet up with this girl who has the world’s most extraordinary chin (really, it’s worthy of Ripley’s) plus she writes for the school paper and is maybe going to do an exposé on us (she hasn’t said either way), so we’re trying to figure out how to stop her and keep our winning streak going.

  Currently there seem to be two schools of thought on this: Force versus Non-Force. I don’t actually know what Force would entail. Probably just trying to scare her into keeping her big fat trap shut, but honestly I don’t think she’s afraid of anything. I mean the worst thing that could ever happen has basically already happened to her, i.e., she was born with a deformed chin in an era when women are supposed to look like the redhead in the Whitesnake videos. Other aspects of Force might include trying to bribe her, but that takes work, no? like finding out what she’s into, what she wants (power? fame?), as does bribing’s near cousin, aka blackmail, which involves digging up dirt on her etc., and who has time for that? No, in this case, I think the old adage, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, is best.

  In conclusion:

  “How did you arrive at this decision?” Common sense.

  “Was there peer pressure involved?” Yes.

  “How did you deal with it?” To be continued.

  * * *

  —

  The full Beaver Moon sat in the sky like a woman who’d just had a face-lift, the patient concealed behind a bandage of gauzy clouds. Still, there was plenty of light to be had and actually it was just what the doctor ordered, the light diffused and suitably eerie, as if some sort of special effect created on a movie set. In order to even be there on a school night, running pell-mell around the twenty-seven acres of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, we’d all used permutations of the same lie, telling our folks that the team was camping out in the field house on the eve of our last regular season game. When Mrs. Kaling said she was going to call the school to ask for more details, Julie Minh told her mom it was a secret senior tradition and totally under the radar. Something about the word “secret” made Mrs. Kaling put down the phone. Either that or it was the sudden emergence of the Prophet in the kitchen doorway, Julie Minh’s little brother, Matthew, looking at their mother and shaking his head the way one might look at a dog hungrily eyeing you as you eat a piece of bacon.

  Happily, it had stopped sleeting outside. The beauty of the frozen world wasn’t lost on us. When we first stepped out of the woods and into the clearing, Little Smitty pulled out her Phillies cigar but then thought better of it as she looked around, the trees coated in glass, each one twinkling, a tree-sized icicle. We could all feel it, a sacredness in the cold clear air. The Rebecca Nurse house was located at 149 Pine Street. It was visible from the road, a red saltbox with a lean-to slanted off the back. Nobody knew what had happened to the original house, but this one was said to have been built in 1700. There was also an old-timey shed on the property that had been constructed only a few years ago for the costume drama Three Sovereigns for Sarah starring Vanessa Redgrave as Rebecca Nurse’s sister. The guy from that weird British ’60s TV show The Prisoner, the one with giant white balloons bouncing menacingly through the air, was also in town for the filming, though nobody seemed to see him or, probably more accurately, know who he was (except for superfan Sue Yoon).

  Rebecca Nurse was one of three sisters from the Towne family, each of whom was arrested and accused of witchcraft by the teen bad girls of the day. Rebecca and her sister Mary Eastey were both found guilty thanks to the girls’ spectral evidence claims that the elderly sisters were pinching them, poking them with needles, then somehow graduating from pinching and poking to infanticide. Rebecca Nurse was herself the mother of eight. Perhaps the health of her own babies made those less fortunate in that regard suspicious. Either way, both sisters maintained their innocence, though confessing probably would’ve saved their lives. Consequently, Rebecca was hung on Gallows Hill in July of 1692, Mary in September. Their third sister, Sarah Cloyce, was jailed and later released as the hysteria gradually petered out.

  Three hundred years ago the bodies of Rebecca and Mary were said to have been cut down in the dead of night from Gallows Hill and brought here for burial. To this very day nobody knows where on the homestead the sisters were buried. Rebecca Nurse was in her seventies when executed. She was one of the matriarchs of the Salem Village Church. When she was first accused, forty of her neighbors signed a petition in support of her Christian character, even though at the time it was dangerous to side with anyone under suspicion of witchcraft. It all makes you wonder what you would’ve done had you been kicking around back then. If a teen girl, would you have followed the herd? If the mother of eight dead babies like Ann Putnam Sr., would you have given yourself a few hard bruises and then gleefully joined in the accusing because what else could explain your misfortunes? If you were a judge and “It” Puritan Cotton Mather, would you have ridden all the way out from Cambridge to see for yourself just what in the heck was going on in Salem Village? Would you have allowed into evidence proof from both this world and the invisible one into which only the purest of heart can see?

  A few minutes to midnight we could see a shadow gliding toward us in the moonlight, the shadow’s face shaped like a paddle.

  “We ready?” said Heather.

  We nodded.

  “Wassup?” said Nikky Higgins as she threw her sleeping bag down on the ground. She said it way louder than she needed to, practically scaring herself. You could tell she was trying to be brave. We had to hand it to her. The girl had guts. We had all arrived together. It was cold and almost midnight, the full moon a kneecap in the sky. Nobody in the whole wide world knew where we were. If we had been in Nicky’s shoes, even with the Chin along as protection, we probably wouldn’t have shown up. “Sorry I’m late,” Nicky added. “Bert and Ernie were cruising up and down Pine. They stopped and asked me if I wanted a ride, so I let them drop me off at Your Market. I had to walk all the way back from there.” The Chin nodded as if to corroborate her story.

  “Those two,” grumbled Little Smitty. “One of these days,” she said, balling her hand into a fist and shaking it in the air.

  “One of these days they’re gonna bust us if we don’t get smart,” said Abby Putnam.

  “Bust us for what?” said Sue Yoon.

  “For being teenagers,” said Heather Houston, and suddenly the night seemed to grow just a little bit darker.

  By now the fire we’d started was mostly just smoke, no flames. In Boy Cory’s defense, everything was damp. The small lemon-yellow pot AJ Johnson had smuggled out of her house looked way too cheerful. Nobody had a black cauldron. “What about a cast-iron skillet?” Heather had asked. Only AJ said her family had one her dad used to make pancakes, but when it came time to sneak it out of her kitchen, it was too freaking big, the thing practically the size of a trash-can lid. Sadly for us, her bag would only fit the small sunny pot her mom used to parboil tomatoes.

  So there we were, oh for three. The fire was out, the pot not nearly witchy enough, Boy Cory’s Docile Potion #3 nowhere near boiling, the whole lot of us looking far from omnipotent, just cold and miserable and maybe a little scared.

  Nicky pulled out her notebook. “So, is this like a coven or what?”

  Mel Boucher did a quick survey of the surrounding trees keeping A Separate Peace in mind. None of them looked big enough for one let alone two people to climb, plus they were coated in ice, which meant you’d probably need those spikes lumberjacks use to get anywhere. It was going to be a long night.

  Abby Putnam sighed. Since we’d all lied
and said we were sleeping at the field house, there was basically nowhere else to go until sun-up. “Well, shoot,” she said, and pulled out her one contribution to the evening.

  We were shocked, to say the least. The Claw’s eyes popped out of Its head the way eyes do on cartoon characters, the accompanying sound effect something like ah-WOOG-ah! It was seriously the biggest-ass bottle of booze we’d ever seen and completely unopened to boot: 1.75 liters of 80-proof Jim Beam Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. Abby had liberated it from her great-aunt Eleanor’s cupboard two months back when they’d moved her out of her house and into the assisted-living facility on Locust. God only knew what Great-Aunt Eleanor was up to in order to need a bottle that gargantuan. Abby had been saving it for prom night, but there was no better time than the present. Sheepishly Becca Bjelica pulled out a dozen Bartles & Jaymes Light Berry wine coolers. Truthfully most of us preferred them.

  The world had lost all its inhibitions by the time Heather Houston put her strategy into motion. Both Jim Beam and Bartles & Jaymes had made their way around the circle countless times. Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” was blasting from AJ Johnson’s boom box. We had twenty-seven acres all to ourselves, and none of us had any secrets left. We’d explained all about Emilio, the blue tube sock, potions and spells, the dead body of Marilyn Bunroe like a lioness protecting our home field. “Waddya say?” said Heather. She pulled Emilio out from the reams of plastic where he was triple-bagged. “You wanna sign?”