We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “Did anyone else worry about whether or not you looked weird?” asked Kendra.

  “I was freaking out the whole time about my outie,” confessed Girl Cory. We all glared at her incredulously. Here was the young Michelle Pfeiffer admitting to the world’s stupidest imperfection. “What?” she said. “I got this wicked crazy belly button and I didn’t want him to see it.”

  “But you guys are gorgeous,” whined Carrie.

  “No, Cindy Crawford is gorgeous,” corrected Kendra Lorde. “I made Mikey keep the lights off.”

  “That is some fucked-up shit,” said Little Smitty.

  “And don’t get me started about dicks,” said another JV girl.

  Boy Cory was desperately tearing through his duffel bag, a man in the desert digging for water, trying to find a new set of batteries to replace the ones that had just died.

  “Ugh. Dicks,” someone said.

  “What’s it look like?” said Carrie.

  “I dunno, what’s a dick look like?” said Kendra. She turned to all of us, her teen sisters, for help.

  Nice move, thought Heather Houston, the Socratic method, throwing the question back in our faces the way teachers do when they don’t know the answer.

  “Dicks are gross,” someone said.

  “Veiny,” someone else offered.

  “Plus they taste bad,” said Jen Fiorenza.

  “Eeew,” said Carrie.

  “I dunno,” said Kendra, in an effort to swoop in and save the day. “The whole thing kinda made me feel strong.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s like I have this invisible power. Just a few minutes of in and out and then he loses his shit and it’s all because of me.”

  “But you yourself don’t feel good, right?” said Carrie.

  “Not physically,” said Kendra. “Besides,” she added. “Is sex supposed to feel good for girls? I thought only real sluts liked it.”

  Heather Houston didn’t even know where to begin, but Little Smitty beat her to the punch. “That’s some fucked-up shit,” she repeated.

  “Well, at least the very first time around you feel relieved,” said Kendra.

  “Relieved?” said Carrie.

  “Yeah, when it’s over, it’s over—you never have to worry about it again.”

  Carrie nodded. Now that she could buy.

  “The first time I did it was in a hammock at Hampton Beach,” said Abby Putnam. “It was nighttime, there was a campfire.”

  Did we know this about our intrepid leader? She was always on again, off again, with Bobby Cronin, who played shortstop and was maybe going to get recruited somewhere Division 2. It made sense. They’d been on again, off again, since junior high.

  “Sounds romantic,” said Carrie.

  “It wasn’t,” said Abby, in her usual upbeat give ’em hell voice. “I didn’t want to do it, but he was like, ‘Come on come on,’ and what are you going do? Fight him off? He’s your boyfriend. You’re supposed to love him.” There wasn’t any bitterness in her tone. She took another bite out of the raw beet she was eating, her lips stained a deep red. None of us thought to feel bitter on her behalf. What did our mothers call it? Bad sex. Thirty years from now what would our daughters call it? Rape. Both our mothers and our daughters had their points.

  “My first time was in a drained in-ground swimming pool,” said AJ Johnson. “The end of one of my cornrows got caught in the filter.”

  “I didn’t know you were dating anyone,” said Sue Yoon.

  “I’m not,” said AJ. “I just wanted to get it over with. I’m eighteen, goddammit. I just didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. After a certain age, it starts to get weird.”

  Sympathetic heads nodded in agreement.

  “Are all you guys on the pill?” asked Carrie.

  It didn’t seem possible, but somehow the infestation of crickets we’d been suffering from for the past few months at Danvers High had managed to find their way on board. Wistfully we sat and listened to them as we said a silent prayer for the dark swamps of our insides. May our uteri (Heather Houston pluralized it for us) always be fertile yet empty when we wanted them that way!

  “How do you not get pregnant?” said Carrie.

  “I douche with Dr Pepper,” said one girl.

  “Doesn’t that burn?” asked Carrie.

  “That’s the whole point,” the girl retorted.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to just use a rubber?”

  “Yeah, but then he says he can’t feel anything,” the girl said.

  “I just have guys pull out,” said Jen. The Claw gleamed like a harpoon. Woe be to any boy not quick enough on the outtake.

  “That doesn’t work,” said Heather. Eight weeks of Unitarian Sex-Ed were bubbling up in her.

  “Yessir,” countered Jen. The way she said it, we expected her next response to be, I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

  “Okay, I’ll admit it’s better than nothing,” said Heather, “but there’s sperm in pre-cum. You could still get pregnant.”

  “Pre-cum?” asked Carrie.

  “It doesn’t all come out at once,” explained Heather. “There’s stuff before the stuff.” One of the freshmen girls visibly gagged.

  “That’s some fucked-up shit,” said Little Smitty.

  “Plus, teen boys can’t necessarily control when they finish,” continued Heather.

  Boy Cory hadn’t found new batteries, but for the sake of his emotional well-being he was pretending he was still listening to Disintegration. True that, he thought.

  “What?” said Becca Bjelica, who’d been strangely quiet the whole time.

  Nothing, replied Boy Cory.

  “Aren’t you guys worried about AIDS?” asked Carrie.

  Boy Cory’s ears perked up.

  “Only gays get that,” said Kendra.

  “Untrue,” said Carrie. “What about Ryan White?”

  We all knew Ryan White as that kid our age with some rare blood disease who was dying of AIDS but got to hang around with celebrities like Liz Taylor, not that that made up for dying.

  “Ryan White’s a hemophiliac,” said Heather Houston. “But yeah, anyone can get AIDS.”

  Then Carrie pushed her luck. The ring of truth could only hold so much; Wonder Woman’s golden lasso only had so much juice. “Anyone ever gotten pregnant?” she said.

  The cricket roar was deafening. We all looked around at one another suspiciously. Last year there had been that junior girl, what’s-her-name, the one who was forever sitting on the sidelines in gym until even her big baggy Bruins sweatshirt couldn’t hide it anymore and then POOF! We never saw her again.

  Le Splotch broke the silence. Tin roof, It yelled. Rusted! Instantly those of us Emilio-fied all thought of the B-52’s song “Love Shack,” the part where the guy goes, “You’re what?”

  “I’ve never understood what that means,” said Julie Minh.

  “What what means?” said Carrie.

  “Tin roof, rusted.”

  “It means preggers, knocked up, bun in the oven,” said Jen Fiorenza. While she was speaking, the Claw began doing the math on Its fingers, trying to figure out how many days it’d been since their last period. “But even if you did end up tin roof rusted,” Jen continued, “there’s stuff you can do about it.”

  “Like what?” asked Carrie, but then suddenly Pat Benatar was blasting through the bus speakers. Hit me with your best shot, Pat implored over and over, almost achingly, her words at once a wish and a command. It was a weirdly apt closing to our conversation.

  Before I put another notch in my lipstick case,

  You better make sure you put me in my place.

  At the front of the bus Marge pumped her fist in the air. “Ladies,” she yelled, “let’s fi
re away!” Little did she know what kind of firing away was on our minds. Good Lord! Little did any of the grown-up women in our lives know, though they should’ve known, having been teen girls themselves once upon a mattress.

  * * *

  —

  Unfortunately for Little Smitty, there was indeed a boy among the Minutemen. #11 was pretty nondescript, kinda like our own Boy Cory, just some skinny kid in a kilt who had yet to fully fill out across the chest, his face probably smooth even days after shaving. The kid did have one discerning feature. He was a ginger with long red bangs, which he pulled up off his face in a short ponytail that shot straight up out of his forehead like a unicorn horn. If he’d worn his hair down, it might have taken us longer to realize he was a boy. Surprisingly, many of our own parents seemed to forget that we also had an extra helping of testosterone on our team. Boy Cory’s own mother, Mrs. Young, was the first to point and titter.

  “What is that?” she said to Mrs. Kaling, nodding toward #11.

  Now that we were in the playoffs and on the long march to the state championship in Worcester, more of our parents had slogged out to Lexington to show their support, even though the game started at 3:30 on a workday. It was mostly a smattering of moms in attendance, though Girl Cory’s stepfather, Larry, was there (albeit without Mrs. Gillis), his gargantuan camcorder humped on his shoulder, all of us trying to act natural despite the feel of the camera’s lidless eye panning over us, quietly waiting for us to do something miraculous.

  Mrs. Young was standing on the sidelines. Unlike the other parents, she hadn’t brought a camping chair along, as she must have figured she could burn extra calories by standing the whole time, maybe even popping a few squats now and then.

  Mrs. Kaling had her knitting out, though none of us could tell what she was making. It was a project she’d been working on all season long, a monstrosity that had grown to look like trousers, but who had ever heard of a pair of knitted pants? Julie’s little brother, Matthew, was sitting at his mom’s feet, the Prophet surreptitiously involved in a complicated soap opera with the entire Smurf village that was weighing down his pockets. Mrs. Kaling was trying to act like she hadn’t noticed that Mrs. Houston had just arrived with her deluxe camping chair in tow, the chair some kind of fancy contraption that had its own canopy and looked more like a throne. In a moment of irritation, Mrs. Kaling ended up pricking herself with a needle.

  “I guess they have a young man playing for them,” she said to Mrs. Young as she sucked her finger.

  Mrs. Young began marching briskly in place. It was cold but not as cold as the speed of her movements would have implied. “There should be rules about these things,” she said. “We can’t just have a girls’ sport overrun with boys.” It was obvious she was somewhat put out to discover her son wasn’t the only one. She lifted her knees a little higher in an attempt to work off both her anger and her four-hundred-calorie lunch.

  By the time the ref blew the whistle for the start of play, both of AJ Johnson’s parents had arrived along with Bogs Bjelica and Mrs. Boucher, whom we hadn’t seen in forever. You could still see the indent around her forehead from the cafeteria-mandated hairnet she wore eight hours a day. She sat with a small notebook in her lap, planning menus and mentally rationing tater tots. When it came to yelling encouragement, she was the loudest of the group, though we couldn’t understand most of what she was saying, as it was predominantly in Québécois.

  On the other side of the field, the Minutemen had turned out their boosters. One grandmother-aged woman sat on the sidelines wearing a three-cornered hat. From the looks of it, it might have been an original 18th-century heirloom. A student sat in the portable bleachers wrapped up tight in a tuba, the thing like a waterslide twisting and turning all around her, which the girl blasted whenever the spirit moved her to do so.

  There wasn’t much to blast about the first half. Things were pretty evenly balanced. The ball went back and forth, neither side dominating the other. At the end of thirty minutes, we were tied 1-1. Jen Fiorenza scuttled off the field and slipped on a pair of spandex leggings. She’d been trying to be tough, but Thanksgiving was a little over a week away. It wasn’t warm enough for just a kilt.

  “Okay,” said Marge, as we huddled up by the Gatorade cooler. “I like what we’re doing. Let’s just keep doing it and it’ll pay off.”

  “Great!” said Becca Bjelica, adjusting the strap on the third bra she was wearing. “But what exactly are we doing?”

  “Keep your sticks on the ground, your eyes on the ball, and stay with your man.”

  “Got it,” said Abby Putnam. Her lips were still beet red. “Field field field,” she yelled, hitting the ground three times with her stick. It was hard to imagine she’d ever let a boy push her around, but then again, there were a lot of things about sex that were hard to imagine. Hell, the very act itself was both comical and appalling.

  “Hockey hockey hockey,” we screamed.

  What time is it? yelled le Splotch.

  Our time! answered the Claw.

  What do we want? yelled le Splotch.

  Blood! thundered the Claw.

  Heather Houston remembered the night at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, the Ouija board’s call to sacrifice. H-U-M-A-N. Though she wasn’t one of us proper, maybe Kendra Lorde’s weekend sexcapade had been enough. After all, most ancient sacrifices involved virgins.

  Sadly, it turned out:

  Kendra’s sexcapade wasn’t what pulled us through.

  There was blood, lots of it, though it remained unspilled, instead just pooling under the skin.

  All this meant the Ouija board’s call for sacrifice still had yet to be fulfilled.

  * * *

  —

  What happened happened ten minutes into the second half. Little Smitty was tearing up the field. Around the twenty-five-yard line, she found herself face-to-face with the Red Unicorn, our new name for #11. We watched the two of them battle for control, each player hunched over, intent, driven. Hit me with your best shot, we thought. Fire away.

  Then we heard a great cry, the sound echoing through all of our heads as if through a limestone cave. We each felt a total shattering at the core of our beings. Julie Minh even dropped her stick and raised both hands to her face. She was afraid of what she would discover if she lowered them, what might spill out, her cupped palms holding her face together. She kept them there even after Little Smitty got helped off the field.

  Later Larry Gillis’ tape would show us the horrific details in slow motion. We had to admit it looked like an honest mistake. For a brief and shiny moment, #11 thought he’d gained control of the ball. In that instant, he reared back, like a golfer setting up a monster drive, and prepared to whack it downfield, his stick rising above his shoulder, which was technically illegal but hey, we all high sticked from time to time. The thing is Little Smitty wasn’t a quitter. When most people would have retreated, Little Smitty got low, then lower still, darting in for the ball and snatching it away at the last minute. Consequently the Red Unicorn ended up whiffing hard, the ball no longer where he thought it was, his stick sailing up and up until it eventually made contact with the next best thing in its path, that thing being Little Smitty’s face.

  Nowadays when girls play field hockey, they wear plexiglass goggles over their eyes. Some also wear half masks to protect their noses and more of the face. But masks are now and no masks was then. Then, “When I See You Smile” by Bad English was the number one song in the land. Now, thanks to streaming services, who can tell what the number one song is? Then, girls all over the Northeast ran around lunging at small white balls with sticks and didn’t wear any form of protection beyond a rubber mouth guard. Then, girls sometimes got their faces smashed in.

  The medical half of the two Doctors Johnson waved a small penlight in Little Smitty’s eyes. She concluded Little Smitty was luck
y. Her vision was fine. She didn’t appear to have a concussion. Unfortunately, only an X-ray could say for sure, but most likely her zygomatic was fractured, the zygomatic being the bone that gives us cheeks.

  Little Smitty sat on the sidelines the whole rest of the game, a giant ice pack on her face. Within a minute after play restarted and Little Smitty had been replaced by the JV girl who douched with Dr Pepper, Abby Putnam thundered down the field and put us up 2-1. Twenty minutes later it was over. Even after we lined up to shake hands with the Minutemen, the Red Unicorn came over to our side of the field to say he was sorry. We formed a circle around him and Little Smitty, the Red Unicorn tugging on his ponytail as he tried to find the right words to express his remorse. Mel Boucher was doing everything she could to hold back le Splotch, which was calling for revenge. Boy Cory wondered if he was supposed to offer to fight the Red Unicorn, but he suspected that he and the Red Unicorn maybe had a lot in common.

  “I’m really sorry,” said #11.

  We thought of veiny dicks, of cog railways, of boys getting what they wanted and girls always being along for the ride, but nobody said anything. We simply stood and watched his face burn and burn. Our silence said enough as did our traveling companions, the DHS crickets.

  Later that evening back in Danvers, Hunt Hospital would confirm that, yes, Little Smitty’s left cheekbone was indeed fractured, half her face swelled up like a beach ball, her cheek blue with unspilled blood. Two weeks later, when her face went back down to normal, there would forever be a three-inch line running down her cheek where the break had happened, the line a tectonic fault, like a high-water mark after a flood, a permanent marring, proof of total badassness. Despite her cheek, the following Tuesday during our next playoff game against Chelmsford, Little Smitty donned a football helmet and managed to play the first fifteen minutes before being replaced.

  We won that game against the Chelmsford Lions 4-3. All the goals we scored happened during the fifteen minutes she was on the field. Things were looking good. We’d bagged both the Northeastern Conference and the North Sectional Championship. The only thing standing between us and Worcester was the Eastern Mass Finals. Oh yeah. And Thanksgiving and sex and the senior prom, but not necessarily in that order.