We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  We take stock. Jen Fiorenza’s coming up from the Cape later this afternoon with Cory Y. The two of them decided to spend a few days down in Wellfleet getting reacquainted. Little Smitty’s probably out at Smith Farm along with Mel Boucher putting the finishing touches on everything wedding related. Between the clear skies and the total eclipse plus the fact that we could all make it in last minute, Mel is one lucky duck.

  “No worries,” says Cory G. “Everyone’ll be here.” She powers up a pair of Bluetooth speakers and puts on 104.1, the ’80s station. Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is playing.

  Today little by little we’re pouring in from all over. Sue Yoon’s flying in from Vancouver where Detroit Red is filmed. Yeah, the show’s definitely seen better days, but most of us still watch it. Becca Bjelica, who’s an actual ER doctor down in Cranston, Rhode Island, is looking forward to razzing Sue about the authenticity of Detroit Red. Like all TV medical dramas, Detroit Red is beyond ridiculous. Take the episode where Dr. Yi can’t stop having spontaneous orgasms after a particularly grueling SoulCycle class, yet she somehow still manages to make it through a heart transplant without accidentally severing the vena cava, all the while while quaking with indescribable pleasure.

  You know life has been abnormally good to you when you have to stop and think: Which is crazier? That Sue Yoon is starring on a top-rated TV show or that Becca Bjelica is an ER doc?

  Ah Life! Ah 2019!

  “How come Abby’s not here?” asks AJ.

  We look around. Nobody’s quite sure where Abby is, but it’s Double Sessions over at the high school and both her kids are in the running to be team captain. Maybe she’s off somewhere keeping the peace.

  “She’s probably on her way,” says Cory G., but just then her phone dings.

  “Is that her?” asks Heather.

  Cory G. studies the tiny screen, frowns before polishing off her champagne. “Ladies,” she says. “Chug.” In unison, we all feel our stomachs drop. Maybe it’s the early afternoon booze. Or maybe it’s that sinking feeling you get just when you think it’s safe to finally let your guard down. What we should all know by now: never let your guard down. The past has a way of catching up to take a nice big juicy bite out of your ass even thirty years on. It’s called karma. We down our champagne, try not to think about the ’89 season and all the sketchy things we did that paved the road to Worcester and beyond.

  But for the moment here we are, intact and thriving. Just look at Cory G. She’s divorced and living happily right here in Oniontown. Her beauty is still outrageous despite the fact that her five kids (yes, five!) are nevertheless embarrassed to be seen with her. Who would’ve guessed all those years ago when she was our resident It Girl that Cory G. was born to be a mum? Teens aside, she can’t get enough of motherhood. She’s president of the PTA, and now that her youngest is ten, she’s thinking about fostering a child. Lucky for her, she doesn’t need to work, thanks to the fact that her ex is a former professional athlete (a Patriot). And ever since Larry and Mrs. Gillis got divorced after Larry got caught cooking the books at the bank more than a decade ago, Cory G.’s unequivocal best friend has been her mom.

  “What’s going on?” asks Heather. “Who was that text from?”

  “My oldest,” says Cory G. “It’s nothing serious,” she adds, “just a little unfinished business from yesteryear.” She begins collecting our glasses, seemingly unperturbed though some of us are beginning to dread just what this afternoon might have in store. “It seems we’re needed down on the ole field hockey field to clear something up,” she says breezily. “Shall we?” Our empty flutes clink in her hands as if toasting themselves.

  “Gosh, I can’t remember the last time I saw Danvers High,” says Heather.

  “June 13th, 1990,” says AJ.

  “You remember the exact day we graduated?” says Becca.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” replies AJ.

  “I’ll get us an Uber,” says Cory G. “Trust me. When you see the place, it’ll make you feel old.”

  “We are old,” points out Julie Minh.

  “Tempus fugit,” says Heather Houston. Even though she’s agreeing with Julie Minh, somehow it still sounds like she’s arguing. She looks around, but none of us needs her to translate the Latin.

  One by one we pull ourselves up out of our lounge chairs as if up out of the grave. Sadly, each and every one of us can feel tempus fugit–ing in every square inch of our bones. The problem is we just can’t seem to make it stop.

  * * *

  —

  Fifteen minutes later we pile out of our Uber into the parking lot by the tennis courts.

  “Fudge,” says Cory G. (after all, she’s now a mom five times over). The August afternoon is already awash in red and blue lights.

  “Second that,” says AJ Johnson.

  Yeah, fudge. We’re too late. The parking lot is crawling with cop cars. On the field hockey field, an officer has just finished cordoning off a 10' × 10' section right smack on the fifty-yard line in the middle of everything, the resulting yellow square like some kind of animal pen. A group of girls stands on the sidelines, their shin guards still on, sticks in hand, some of them holding each other and crying.

  “Shit and crackers, people,” bemoans Heather Houston. “This cannot be about what I think it’s about.”

  “I wish Little Smitty were here,” says AJ Johnson. “She won’t be too happy about this.”

  “I just wish Sue were here,” says Becca Bjelica. “This is gonna be some mighty fine theater.”

  And with that, a shiny black Navigator pulls into the parking lot. The back passenger door swings open. A hush falls over the world. We watch as the most fit-looking man we have ever laid eyes on exits the vehicle and scans the area. Before the man can even finish his assessment, she slips out of the car under his arm.

  “Mi amigas!” Sue shouts, and we’re all shrieking and hugging and jumping up and down as if on pogo sticks. Sue does a cartwheel. The hipster sundress she’s wearing patterned with various fruit pies flies up around her neck and we can see her upside-down boobs, we can basically see everything, for that matter, Sue Yoon completely underwear-less. And just like that, whatever fears we had that our world-famous friend would be different melt away—with the inverting of a dress, we’re all teenagers again.

  “Would you look at this place?” Sue says, smoothing her pies and tucking a preternaturally glossy strand of hair the color of tomato bisque behind her ear. Sue’s the “Red” in Detroit Red, her hair color all the rage in salons across the country.

  Yeah, the time-space continuum and the human brain are not always on the same wavelength. Just as our bodies have changed, our knees now rusty hinges, from time to time so too the physical world will transform as if the world itself has gone under the knife. In this case, it’s Danvers High that’s unrecognizable. The old school’s gone, the one we all remember with the red brick and Falcon-blue steel doors where we spent 180 state-mandated days a year, the old building mostly windowless in the front except for a column of glass running up the left side of the façade, the effect like a face with eyes only on one side of its head. But now the new and improved DHS is a face that’s nothing but eyes, windows up the ying-yang, a space that obviously has things we never had, things like air-conditioning and a lack of asbestos.

  Despite the cop cars circled up in the parking lot, there’s an ice-cream truck beached in among the mayhem just as in the days of yore, only it’s not our beloved Mr. Hotdog. Instead it’s some outfit dubbed Sweet Treats. We run our eyes over the plexiglass board advertising its offerings. Sweet Treats still sells things like red-white-and-blue Bomb Pops but it also hawks an ice-cream cone shaped like SpongeBob SquarePants. Heather wanders over and gets in line behind a couple of girls in tennis whites. When her turn comes up, she’s relieved to discover she can still buy a frozen Snickers, only
now it’s two bucks instead of 50¢, which feels usurious. Still, she lays down her cash and buys one for old times’ sake.

  “How can you think about food at a time like this?” says Julie Minh.

  “Why not?” says Heather. She nods toward the field hockey field. “In the next fifteen minutes this case will be solved.”

  From the parking lot, the playing fields that stretch out before us look healthy and green. We can practically smell the Bengay on the wind, remembering how our own quads and glutes burned long ago after a solid week of wind sprints and stairs. The lushness of the grass stands in stark contrast to the stillness on the fields, everywhere athletes in red pinnies standing around in the August sun gawking at all the hoopla. In addition to Abby Putnam’s twins, two of Cory G.’s girls also play—one’s on JV, the other on varsity. Cory G. spots her oldest, Hazel, standing in the scrum of shell-shocked players. She wonders how they’ll play it off when they find out what they’re carrying on about.

  “Let’s get this over with,” she says, and we follow her down into the raging sea of teen spirit.

  It’s strange to be back on the old field. For starters, aside from the cops, there are zero adults around, which makes us feel like kids again. Later, after the commotion has died down, Cory G.’s younger daughter Olive will explain that the coaches for all of the fall sports teams are off at some mandatory training session run by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association. They’ll be back in a few hours, Olive will say, but until then, they’ve left each team with a set of instructions for the final afternoon of Double Sessions.

  For now we stand and watch the police run through their playbook. One young cadet is thoroughly documenting the crime scene, his flash blazing like a paparazzo. For an instant he stops and stares at Sue Yoon but decides he must be wrong, aims his camera elsewhere. Then Becca Bjelica starts laughing. What’s so funny? we think. As if on cue, AJ Johnson comes down with a fit of the giggles. Before we know it, the rest of us are laughing too. Of course. Only in America!

  The man holding the police tape at centerfield is older and grayer, but then again, so are we. His partner stands next to him beside a growing hole as a handful of junior officers with shovels busily sling the earth here and there like it’s some kind of contest to see who can get to China first. Despite the silver in his hair, the man holding the police tape still has a monster unibrow that looks healthy as ever, the thing a giant pipe cleaner running straight across his face. We try not to stare, but it appears as if something might be caught in it, maybe a piece of dryer lint or a small hairball, though it’s hard to tell if it’s casual everyday flotsam or his actual eyebrow. As he stands by his partner, there can be no mistaking them, their height differential as pronounced now as it was back then.

  Seeing these two triggers something in us. Emboldened, Heather Houston makes the first move. She strolls up and lifts the tape.

  “Hey lady, this is a crime scene,” Bert says. “Clear out.”

  “Don’t you fools ever watch TV?” asks Becca Bjelica as she too slips under.

  “In their defense,” says Sue Yoon. “Fresh gore makes for better ratings than dusty old bones.”

  We line up at the edge of what looks like a shallow grave. The dirt continues to fly through the air pell-mell the way prairie dogs dig in nature documentaries. To our eyes nothing looks very scientific, no little yellow flags to show what was found where, the whole scene more like kids at the beach.

  “Infanticide is no laughing matter,” says Ernie. He wipes his forehead and motions for us to step back out under the tape. He and Bert are obviously trying to stay hydrated in the August heat. Bert takes a long swig from an oversized bottle of something orangish before handing the rest to Ernie. Julie Minh notices it’s an Abby Organics Passion Fruit Detoxing Tea. She winces, unsure if they know they’re both going to need a bathroom real bad within the hour. The last time we collectively saw these two was championship game day ’89. The school had just been trashed the night before, a big green wave spray-painted on the trophy case, toilet paper strewn everywhere as if a mummy had been shot out of a T-shirt cannon.

  That morning thirty years ago we were rounded up for the second time in as many days and grilled en masse. Ernie told us the video surveillance showed two male students being held at gunpoint and forced to vandalize the school. Did we know anything about it, he asked. Coolly we looked around at one another. There were already rumors flying that Brian Robinson and Sebastian Abrams were stooges, plants paid by the Greenfield field hockey team to trash both the school and our team spirit, but that didn’t make any sense and we knew it. We also knew that the chances of Greenfield showing up at Danvers High the night before our championship game and tagging our trophy case with a big green wave were slim to none. Greenfield was a two-hour drive one way. We had to admit the wave looked good—Sebastian Abrams was a helluva artist. Whoever had forced him to graffiti the school had gotten some of his best work out of him. Kudos.

  There were no Dunkin’ Donuts that day in Room 138. Our stomachs growled plaintively. Amid the silence and the hunger we could feel waves of dark energy wafting off Little Smitty, smidgens of green still visible under two of her fingernails. She was cool as ice on ice. She didn’t even try to hide the evidence.

  “You got guys out in Greenfield giving the Waves the once-over?” she asked, nonchalantly drumming the side of her face with her stained fingertips.

  “Our western Mass counterparts are doing what they need to,” said Bert. His unibrow stuck straight out of his face like an accountant’s visor.

  Little Smitty nodded and sat back with an air of satisfaction. She cracked her knuckles, then began picking at something between her teeth, the whites of her nails green as if packed with spinach.

  Nice one, thought le Splotch, catching on. Danvers 1, Greenfield nada.

  Really, thought Abby Putnam. A gun?

  Sebastian and Brian loved every minute of it, replied Little Smitty. Besides…

  Don’t tell me, Abby thought. You could feel the pique coming through even in her thoughts. Emilio made you do it.

  Little Smitty smiled sweet as canned peaches.

  “Listen up, Cagney and Lacey,” said Sue Yoon. “According to Night Court, we can still walk outta here anytime we want.” She stood up fast, her chair toppling over same as last time. “I assume you still have our lawyer’s number,” she said. Boy Cory gulped, his Adam’s apple springing up and down like a yo-yo. “Ladies,” Sue concluded, as she marched out the door. “We’ve got a championship to prep for.” We got up and followed, a few of us also toppling our chairs.

  Today Ernie steps into the hole his minions are digging at midfield and slips on a pair of latex gloves. “Take a look at this,” he says to Bert. He bends over and comes up with a tattered orange awards ribbon that simply reads PARTICIPANT.

  “Careful with that.” We turn and see Little Smitty materialize out of the crowd. Mel Boucher is with her. Aside from Mel’s neck, they both look exactly the same. The rift in Little Smitty’s face where the Red Unicorn broke her zygomatic long ago is softer, though still visible, giving her a slightly piratical look that she embraces, like now, popping under the police tape and snatching the orange ribbon out of Ernie’s hands. “Marilyn should’ve won the blue,” she says. “Participant my ass.”

  Then Little Smitty’s old Ford truck screeches into the tennis courts. The driver hops out and slams the door, begins booking it our way. We’d know that run anywhere, her ponytail still streaming in the wind like a battle standard. “I got here as fast as I could,” says Abby Putnam. There’s an Abby Organics Peanut Butter Protein Bar in her hand.

  “Mom,” howls a freckled girl. “August found a baby’s rib cage at midfield.”

  “It was just sticking up out of the ground,” a freckled replica of the girl wails in the exact same voice.

  “Baby?” says Little
Smitty. “Marilyn was my baby, but she wasn’t a baby.” She drops to her knees and begins scratching through the loose dirt. Thirty seconds later—bingo! In the late-afternoon light, Little Smitty holds up a set of teeth, the two front ones long and fused together. Though yellowed, they still appear razor-sharp. From the looks of it, if Marilyn Bunroe, our guardian angel, were ever to rise up from the grave, she’d still pack a helluva bite.

  “Marilyn?” says Bert. “Who’s Marilyn? What the hell is going on?” From this angle it becomes apparent that there is indeed something fuzzy caught in his eyebrow and that, whatever it is, it’s moving.

  “See?” says Heather Houston. She’s polishes off her Snickers and jams the wrapper in her pocket. “That didn’t even take five minutes.”

  Actually, it takes another ten to sort it all out. After their team packs up and vacates the area, Ernie and Bert are the last to slink away, the two of them marching off stiffly like men suddenly in need of a toilet. At that moment our mystery is solved. A fuzzy caterpillar decides it’s time to jump ship. It frees itself from the camouflage offered by Bert’s unibrow and sails off into the wind.

  * * *

  —

  “So,” says Abby Putnam’s daughter Elle. The freckles bespeckling her and her sister, August, call the night sky to mind, for the moment their vast and suspicious faces pigmented with stars. Elle grips her stick in her right hand while tapping it menacingly in her left, the way a woman might stand biding her time with a baseball bat before going to town on her cheating husband’s car.

  “You guys are the ’89 team,” says August, presumably finishing her twin’s thought.

  “That is us,” says Sue Yoon, dropping a curtsy. As she’s wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and aviator glasses, nobody seems to recognize her. On the other hand, her body man Evan is sitting in the parking lot on the hood of the Navigator eating a Minions fudgsicle and looking utterly delish, a hot-fudge sundae with jimmies sprinkled on top. Him you can’t miss. Each time we glance in his general direction we catch ourselves drooling.