We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  I don’t believe in witchcraft. I signed my name in Emilio because I believe in the placebo effect. At Camp Wildcat, we’d just been demolished 8 or 9 to 1. I thought, why the hell not? It’ll just be fun and a way for me to bond with my teammates. I didn’t want to be the know-it-all standing there on the sidelines explaining why it’d never work. But these past few months things have happened that I can’t explain.

  Nicky Higgins never signed her name in our book. One thing led to another, yadda yadda yadda, and by morning when we all sobered up, she said the story was too juicy not to write. I think we’d been expecting her to say that all along. There were no hard feelings.

  Don’t worry—Emilio’s got it covered, Mel Boucher told us telepathically, but she turned to Nicky and said, “You’ll win a Flamie anyway because Emilio’s generous like that.”

  “Really?” said Nicky. Le Splotch winked.

  I remember watching her walk back down the drive with her sleeping bag under one arm and her chin proudly forward like the prow of a ship. It turned out she lived just one street up on Adams.

  That Friday morning at school Nicky got called out of homeroom. The doctors had decided. It was now or never. They sawed off half her chin the very next day. But that’s not the miracle. Get this: three days after her surgery as she was coming home from Mass General, her eighty-six-year-old grandfather, who suffers from dementia, accidentally slammed the car door shut on her dominant hand as she was getting out, breaking three of her fingers.

  I’m happy to report Nicky was on so many pain meds she didn’t feel a thing. Also, just let me say that I sincerely hope when the bandages come off in a month and a half, the New and Improved Chin is everything she’s ever dreamed of. Either way, I now have no doubt there’s more to the world than meets the eye because just like that! our problem was solved. Nicky Higgins can’t write or speak a word for the next six weeks. There will be no story about Emilio and us and the state championship in Falcon Fire.

  Oh. And one more thing:

  That night on the grounds of the Rebecca Nurse house, the flow of secrets went both ways. We told intrepid Falcon Fire reporter Nicky Higgins all kinds of things about Emilio and our winning streak, and in return Nicky Higgins said something that made our ears perk up. At one point in the night she pulled a small baggie out of her pocket; in it were what looked like pink tufts of feathery fur. “Coach Mullins won a giant stuffed pig at the Topsfield Fair. A few days later I found this in your locker room,” she said, then polished off her Light Berry wine cooler. “He gifted that pig to one of you,” she concluded, waving the baggie in our faces. “Who was it?”

  We all just stood there frozen in the moment, the world closing in on us, the die cast, the Rubicon crossed. Then of all people, Julie Minh burped, a long loud wet one, and we laughed and laughed, some of us raising our faces to the sky and howling with abandon as AJ Johnson turned the radio up on Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” overhead the full Beaver Moon finally every bit as naked and lascivious as she wanted to be.

  DANVERS VS. LEXINGTON

  The day Little Smitty broke her face we found out someone on JV had become a woman.

  Like an overripe pumpkin, by B period word had hit the street, said word a gelatinous mess of sticky seeds. In a nutshell: sometime over the weekend an as-yet-unnamed junior varsity player had put away childish things in exchange for decidedly adult things, things like the latest hot-pink thong from The Limited. For most of us, the very thought of adult things was pretty exciting. Hubba-hubba! We couldn’t wait to find out the messy gelatinous deets later that afternoon on the bus to Lexington, our first playoff game. We were hoping the girl’s, uh, woman’s description of this rite of passage would line up with what Hollywood had been teaching us about sex, that if we stayed within the lines but were naughty in all the right ways, maybe someday we too might land the right boy (C. Thomas Howell) in the right place (beside a roaring fire) as the right song played in the background on KISS 108 (Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Sign Your Name”). Wasn’t that what every good American girl dreamed of when fantasizing about her own deflowering—a healthy glob of Vaseline smeared around the lens, Terence Trent D’Arby crooning slowly we make love as slowly we make love?

  Little Smitty and Sue Yoon were in Civics taking a test on the judiciary. It was one of those tests that made you think: when in the hell am I ever going to use this crap again? Even before Mel Boucher’s sweaty blue tube sock got knotted around any of our arms, Little Smitty had never been what you might call a scholar. She’d never been listed in the Danvers Herald as making honor roll, never gotten a test back with a gold star spit-fixed on it or even a hand-drawn smiley face like the kind Heather Houston garnered when the teacher ran out of stickers. Pre–tube sock, Little Smitty’s peaches-and-cream self simply sat in class like the Cheshire Cat, a vapid grin plastered on her face, never giving the teachers a hard time, never hassling anyone, always turning her shoddy homework in by its due date, and subsequently racking up a string of low Bs with the occasional C+ for variety, no harm, no foul.

  Now that she was the new but not necessarily improved Little Smitty, the one most likely to drop an f-bomb in front of a nun, it was something of a surprise that her grades weren’t also in the crapper just like her mouth. Given her newfound bad attitude, her teachers simply assumed something cataclysmic was shaking the marital foundations of the Smith family household. They’d seen that script before. Mom and Dad started chucking plates at each other, and with every plate smashed, the kid’s grades went down a half step. The Smiths and Smith Farm were a Danvers institution. In Merriam-Webster, you’d find their family tree beside the word “townies.” The older teachers at Danvers High, like ancient Mr. Humphreys and Mrs. Bentley, had witnessed Bob and Jennie Smith (née Armstrong) lightly pecking in the hallways a generation before. Everyone in town knew the Smiths were good eggs, the kind of good eggs you could count on not only for good fresh eggs but also for a healthy dose of moral probity.

  Consequently, having completely misdiagnosed the situation, the teaching staff at Danvers High gave Little Smitty the academic benefit of the doubt. None of them would’ve ever dreamed in a million years that everyone’s favorite lil’ peanut had signed her name in the Devil’s spiral notebook. So despite her plummeting test scores and her growing longshoreman’s vocabulary, she was somehow on track to bring home a string of B+’s sprinkled with the occasional pity A–, the Danvers Herald honor roll at long last in her sights.

  Little Smitty believed her change of fortune was thanks to Emilio. Ever since interring lion-headed Marilyn Bunroe at midfield, things had been going her way. Truthfully, maybe it was just her own personal reserve of sinister energy that was keeping her afloat. If she stayed the course, she could possibly land somewhere like Framingham State, maybe even UMass if the cookie crumbled just right. Being a sweetie pie for 16⁄17 of her life had its privileges. It meant people were willing to look the other way.

  How many justices are on the Supreme Court?

  For a brief moment, Little Smitty considered concentrating really hard in an effort to raise Heather Houston on the internal line, but the school was a big and circuitous place with a lot of nooks and crannies, and she didn’t know where Heather was at that exact moment. There was also the fact that ever since we’d all gotten good at communicating without words, Heather had made it clear we should only ring her up as a last resort.

  Luckily, Sue Yoon was just two rows away. Little Smitty gave her a telepathic poke in the ribs.

  Hey, what’s the answer to #16?

  This is the dumbest test ever, replied Sue. When was the last time Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote gave two shits about habeas corpus? Today Sue’s hair was plain old Tropical Punch. Compared with all the other flavors she’d run through, it was the most natural looking, though honestly it was still a shade of Ronald McDonald. Nine, Sue finally answered. And Sandra Day
O’Connor is the only chick.

  Don’t go full brainiac on me, thought Little Smitty. Just gimme what I need.

  Like I said: nine, plus the answer to #17 is Rehnquist.

  Cool.

  Since she had Little Smitty on the line and had already breezed through her own test, Sue kept the connection open. Hey, you hear the news, she asked.

  Yeah, I heard. It’s no biggie.

  Really? You’re not curious to know who it was?

  What are you talking about?

  Someone on JV lost their virginity this weekend.

  WHAT?

  I thought everyone knew. What are you talking about?

  I heard the Minutemen have a boy.

  Really?

  Yeah, but who cares about that? Who got boned?

  Beats me.

  Why now? The prom’s a week from Saturday.

  “Time,” said Mrs. McNally. “Pass your papers to the front of the row.” We put down our pens and pencils, let out the mandatory groan every class lets out at the end of a test when time gets called.

  So, thought Little Smitty to herself, as Mrs. McNally powered up the overhead and placed a transparency of the judicial branch on the projector. We got a live one.

  Indeed indeed. It had finally happened. Someone had officially become a woman on our watch. Let the twenty questions begin! True, it wasn’t one of us proper, and yeah, a handful of folks had probably already been bumping uglies for a long time, but someone just this weekend had taken the Nestea Plunge and gone all the way. It was nuthin’ to sneeze at. Little Smitty spent the rest of the class period in a daze, gazing out the window.

  Mrs. McNally shook her head and felt a pang of grief for the poor little thing who would probably be shuttling between two households within a few months’ time. She made a mental note to give her a few extra points on the judiciary test. Little did Mrs. McNally know Little Smitty was actually spending her mental energy trying to commune with her teammates in an effort to find out who on JV was walking around like John Wayne, a bowlegged pilgrim from what Little Smitty imagined were endless hours of being ecstatically ridden around like a horse.

  Sadly, when we learned the orange gelatinous deets later that afternoon on our way to square off against the Lexington Minutemen, a Penthouse tale of ecstasy it was not.

  * * *

  —

  Shortly after getting on the bus, Coach Butler pinchered her head with her headphones and hit PLAY on her Walkman knockoff. It was a Samsung, some cheap Korean brand that would probably bust by the end of the year. We knew Marge was listening to Pat Benatar. She had a thing for the singer born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski and was some kind of savant about all the particulars of Pat Benatar’s life, like that she’d once worked as a bank teller and that she adored Liza Minnelli. Yeah, it was a little fetishistic, but hey, whatever floats your boat. Marge had even made a special mixed tape that wasn’t mixed, just “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” looped over and over six times on a side so she never had to rewind. Now she sat at the front of the bus poring over her game plans, Pat Benatar her lieutenant at arms.

  Harriette the bus driver was also sporting headphones, a dinged-up yellow Walkman lying in her lap. We had no idea what Harriette listened to, maybe country, stuff like Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five.” The whole setup was probably illegal at the very least and death defying at the very worst, as not being able to hear a tractor trailer blast its horn at us as we cut into a rotary arguably wasn’t the safest way to transport a busload of kids from point A to point B, but whatever. OSHA aside, we welcomed the privacy the adults’ headphones offered us, especially today. After all, we most definitely had things to talk about.

  One of the freshmen got the ball rolling. Carrie Demopoulos tore open a fresh pouch of Big League Chew. She was our favorite frosh, her whole demeanor like a puppy’s—a mix of pure unadulterated enthusiasm sprinkled with a healthy dose of goofiness, her long unfinished legs like a baby giraffe’s as she was still growing into herself. Nothing embarrassed Carrie. She didn’t even know the word. She was just a little kid at heart, someone not afraid to sing along to WHAM!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” with her eyes closed. She turned right around in her seat and put it out there. “Who did it and what was it like?” Then she popped a huge wad of Big League Chew in her mouth and sat back to learn from a master.

  Boy Cory dug his own battered Walkman out of his duffel bag and walled himself off behind the tormented stylings of The Cure. His four AA batteries were running low, but he just hoped they’d last long enough to get him to Lexington.

  The bus grew deathly quiet, a morgue on wheels. That afternoon it was full, as both the freshmen and JV teams were on board. Though their seasons were officially over, we brought them along as our cheering squad, all of them suited up in game-day uniforms, faces painted, sticks in hand. Later, when we poured off the bus, we would be legion in the biblical sense, an endless cavalcade of blue-and-white banshees streaming over the horizon, a scourge. From time to time all season long we’d draw on players from the junior varsity squad for substitutions, basically anytime one of us needed a breather. Now here we were at season’s end, turning to someone on JV to find out the skinny about her first time, whether or not going all the way was everything it was cracked up to be.

  Like snow settling in a snow globe, after a tremendous flurry of activity, all eyes came to rest on Kendra Lorde, aka Kendra the Beautiful. Nota bene: Kendra Lorde had always been beautiful. You could tell she’d always be beautiful. It was in her bones. Lucky duck. She was only a sophomore but the whole school knew her name. Since the start of the new year she’d been dating Mikey Romano, senior captain of the hockey team, Mikey whose pedigree included Swedes and Sicilians, resulting in his being covered with a thick pelt of snow-blond hair.

  Kendra sat in her bus seat and gave her own small but tasteful claw a pat. “What was it like?” she repeated, as if for the benefit of all those who didn’t hear the question. “I dunno,” she said. “It wasn’t planned or anything.” We leaned in, waiting for her to throw us the key that would unlock the gates to the kingdom, but she gave her claw another pat and shrugged while being the beautiful person she was predestined to be.

  Carrie Demopoulos sighed. This was going to take a little more work than she’d expected, but she was second-generation Greek and not afraid to roll up her sleeves and get dirty. The only question was where to start. She decided to start with the basics.

  “Did he look good naked?” Carrie asked. For a moment, the bus filled with more than fifty girls imagining what Mikey Romano might look like au naturel, his body like an albino bearskin rug. Wherever he was in the world right at that moment, it was likely more than just his ears that were burning.

  Then we felt something shift, a force slowly filling the bus, like water in a bathtub. All of us, even those girls without parts of a sock tied around their arms, could sense it. Maybe Emilio was at work. Maybe it was Carrie’s lack of guile. Maybe it was simply being in what the woke kids of today call a safe space. It was as if we had all entered a ring of truth, Wonder Woman’s golden lasso compelling us to be honest. That afternoon on the way to Lexington there would be no BS. There would be no it-was-the-single-greatest-most-romantic-moment-of-my-life crap. Time was running out, adult-dom just around the corner. We needed real honest-to-god talk, not Hollywood propaganda, not tonight-on-a-very-special-episode-of agitprop. One by one, sex was coming for us, sex and death and taxes. We wanted to make sure it didn’t catch us unaware.

  “Did he look good naked?” repeated Kendra. You could see the highlight reel spinning in her head. “Honestly I didn’t really notice.”

  The Big League Chew pouch was making its way around the bus, the air filling with the scent of Original Flavor. “You didn’t notice?” said Carrie.

  “Nope.”

  “What did you notice?”

 
; “What did I notice?” Kendra’s claw sat domed atop her head like a diaphragm, though only Heather Houston spotted the resemblance. “Mostly I was thinking, ‘Hey, I can’t believe I’m doing it.’ When you’re doing it, you think, wow! This is the thing everyone makes such a big deal about, but really it doesn’t feel like that big a deal.”

  “Did it feel good?”

  “Did it feel good?” Her claw whispered in her ear like legal counsel. “I can’t say that it did,” she said.

  “Did it hurt?”

  This one she fielded herself. “Did it hurt? No, definitely not.”

  “Well, what did it feel like?”

  “What’d it feel like?” Kendra tapped her cheek as if trying to remember, obviously forgetting that her face was painted Falcon blue and white. “It just felt like this thing was going in and out of me—in and out, in and out—like I could’ve been at the doctor’s office, like it was just some kind of procedure, you know what I mean? It didn’t hurt and it didn’t feel good. It was just something that happens to a body.”

  “My first time was like riding the Cog Railway up Mount Washington,” said Jen Fiorenza rather matter-of-factly from her throne at the back of the bus. “For him, it’s like he can’t wait to get to the top.” We waited for her to blow a big cherry bubble before finishing her thought. “But for us”—she popped the bubble with her finger—“the girl is mostly just along for the ride.”

  “Like when he puts both his hands on top of your head,” said another JV girl, “and pushes down on you like he’s trying to climb on top of a pool float.”

  “What’s that all about?” asked Carrie.

  “Leverage,” said Mel Boucher. Julie Minh felt her eyes pop out of her head cartoon-style at the thought Mel Boucher and le Splotch had done it, but the conversation was moving on, no rest for the wicked, so she simply scooped her eyes up and popped them back in.