We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “Right,” said Jen. For an instant, Boy Cory imagined her floating down the Nile on a royal barge, shirtless men hand-feeding her grapes. “Tell him we’ll see,” she said. From Its majestic perch atop her head from which It could survey the health of Its realm, the Claw said, “We’ll be there. With bells on.”

  It was settled. They both knew she’d go. It was Boy Cory’s job to read the inscrutable tides that were Jen Fiorenza. Often he could tell how her day was going just by the state of her hair. If the Claw looked ragged and sagging, he knew to stay away until better times appeared on the horizon, the Claw once again at full mast. He was her left-hand man. He had been ever since freshman year, playing the wing just beyond her left forward. It was the wing’s job to take the ball upfield, then feed it back into the middle. Through the years, they hadn’t met with nearly as much success as Abby Putnam and Girl Cory over on the right side of the field, but all that was about to change. Today against Rochester, Boy Cory had scored his first goal in forever, plus he’d made an assist.

  “Okay, I’ll tell him.” He stood up to clear his tray. A girl from Melrose sailed by and almost ran into him, the girl obviously believing he should step out of her way. Boy Cory kept his cards close to his chest. It was the late ’80s. There was only one openly gay kid at school, the portly Sebastian Abrams, who flamed so hard you could light a cigarette off his fumes. What Boy Cory was or wasn’t wasn’t something we discussed much. It seemed obvious he knew what the score was, but for the time being he wasn’t saying. It was probably a good strategy. Vive la différence wasn’t anyone’s motto at DHS. Mostly he said he wanted to play field hockey because it would make his college applications stand out—being the only boy in an all-girls sport was sure to be unique. It was true. Just before Christmas he got into Vassar early admission.

  But that Thursday night at dinner just before the Crunch Berries ran out, Boy Cory stepped out of the Melrose Red Raider’s way as was his usual MO. For him, signing his name in the book wasn’t all about goals and wins. Secretly, he was hoping Emilio might make his life marginally better in other ways, ways he couldn’t yet say out loud. When Jen had tied the thin strip of sock around his arm, he’d felt a light turn on inside him.

  He wasn’t the only one interested in more than a state championship. Earlier at noon before heading to lunch, Heather Houston and Julie Kaling stopped by Mel and Jen’s room. Mel had spent morning practice enticing the two halfbacks with tales of largesse both on and off the field. “It’s not just about field hockey,” she said, sounding like a late-nite infomercial. “It’ll make you better in all kinds of ways.” Who didn’t want that? Both girls eagerly took up the pen.

  And after we beat Rochester 5-1, AJ Johnson, Little Smitty, and Becca Bjelica made the trek up to the second-floor dorm room. For them, it was mostly about team spirit, but if you pressed them on it individually, they’d admit that maybe there were other hopes at play, things like student council elections and 4-H competitions and even finding the right bra. Now we were eight. Only Girl Cory, Sue Yoon, and Abby Putnam left to go. It was just a matter of time. Field field field. Soon enough all three would yell hockey hockey hockey.

  Later, after signing her name in the notebook, Little Smitty wrote a postcard home. She knew it wouldn’t arrive before she was back in Danvers, but some inner whim was telling her to send it anyway, so as the rules required, she did what the urge wanted. Her arm itched a little where the sweat sock rubbed against her skin. Little Smitty was the sweetest of the eleven of us. In junior high she’d been voted “Best Personality.” Amy “Little Smitty” Smith was called that because she was little, barely 4'9". She had an even littler sister, Debbie. Both girls were as sweet as maple syrup on cinnamon French toast. They never argued or gave their parents any trouble. Never an unkind word passed their lips. They did what they were told by one and all, and from all appearances, they liked it, derived genuine pleasure from pleasing others. “Camp is good,” Little Smitty jotted on the back of a postcard featuring New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain. “Be home soon. We’re actually winning!” she wrote in her big loopy handwriting.

  She glanced at the blue scrap of fabric tied around her arm. She liked looking at it. Already she could feel her insides shifting in the dark like a caterpillar in its cocoon. There was still some space left on the postcard, so not wanting to be wasteful, she proceeded to fill it up. “Tell Debbie not to go in my room or I’ll rabbit punch her hard in the face. Love, Amy.” Somehow she sensed Mel Boucher would approve. It was only beginning to dawn on her how little she knew about our burly goalie, who was always hiding behind a mammoth helmet. For starters, Little Smitty never would’ve guessed in a million years that Mel even knew who Emilio Estevez was. Come to think of it, it was pretty surprising.

  * * *

  —

  Here are the relevant stats: Boucher, Melanie Evangeline, goalie, #5, of the Weeks Road Bouchers, who lived just off Centre Street and were not to be confused with the Bouchers on Holton or the Bouchers down near Riverside or the billions of other Bouchers scattered around Boston’s North Shore, every one of them having trickled down from Maine and the northern border and constantly intoning, “It’s Boo-shay, not Boo-cher.” Mel Boucher of the Weeks Road Bouchers was the youngest of seven and the only girl. You would’ve thought Mrs. Boucher, who worked as a cafeteria lady at Highlands Elementary, would’ve been stoked to finally have a daughter, dressing little Mel in pink ruffles and frills, but no. As a kid, Mel wore hand-me-down Wranglers and Toughskins, the knees patched, the crotches hanging deflatedly on her non–boy crotched body. She had the same curly black mop of hair all the Boucher men sported, including Mr. Boucher, which they all wore in the same bowl cut Mrs. Boucher freewheelingly sheared into their hair like topiary after downing a couple glasses of cooking sherry.

  It turns out Mel wanted it this way. Put her in a dress and she howled, a vampire in sunlight. Secretly, Mrs. Boucher was cool with it. She often thought of herself as having seven boys. She liked the way it sounded. Seven sons. Plus it was the ’80s, the salad days of Jordache, Benetton, Esprit. It was all about living the glamorous life. If Mel wanted to run around in her brothers’ old sweats, so be it. The family budget was all the happier.

  With six older brothers, early in life Mel got stuck in goal. When the Boucher boys wanted to play three-on-three street hockey, they padded up their little sister and told her to put on her mean face. Mostly it worked out. The Bouchers only had one net, so she goalied for both sides when possession switched. By age eight she could move the goal herself anytime someone yelled “car” and they all had to scoot over to the side of the road and wait for whoever was inconsiderate enough to interrupt their game to pass.

  The Town of Danvers was seventeen miles north of Boston. Though the Bouchers weren’t Irish, it was basically same same. All over town were hordes of families with five or more kids who ate fish on Fridays and on Sundays floated over to St. Richard’s in fake-wood-paneled station wagons. The only real difference between the ethnicities was in the swearing. The dark-haired Irish kids f-bombed their way through the world. The dark-haired Québécois kids blasphemed a path through existence.

  From kindergarten to eighth, Mel went to St. Mary of the Annunciation over on Otis, where none of the nuns knew why a small child would yell viarge after stubbing her toe. St. Mary’s was directly across the street from Great Oak, one of five public elementary schools in Danvers (Abby Putnam, Jen Fiorenza, and Girl Cory were all alums). The eponymous oak was gargantuan. Ten first graders holding hands couldn’t string their arms around it. It had been the geographical center of town back in the bad old days. Kids liked to claim that the youngest of the witches had been hung there. At three-hundred-plus years old, it was on its last legs. Toward the end of her time at St. Mary’s, Mel would watch the public-school kids run around its exposed roots in neon-orange shirts that said FRANKIE SAYS RELAX. Some of the girls at St. Mary’s
tried to trick out their uniforms to look like something Madonna might flounce around in on Friday Night Videos, but the nuns weren’t having it.

  Lucky for Mel, when eight years of St. Mary’s came to an end, her parents agreed to send her to Danvers High for the start of ninth grade. Her brothers had all gone to St. John’s Prep, so naturally it had seemed like her parents would send her to the all-girls Our Lady of Nazareth, which was way over in Wakefield, but at the end of the day, Mr. Boucher, who serviced MBTA trains for a living, decided free was good.

  For the first three years, things were fairly copacetic for Mel at Danvers High. She still dressed boyishly, though in clothes of her own, the Boucher family hairstyle now less of a bowl cut and more of a mullet. Among the Class of ’90 at DHS, Mel wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, but she was sweet and quiet despite the occasional cussing out of the Virgin Mary. People who didn’t know her would have described her as a wallflower, just some husky girl trailing through the corridors. Boys didn’t even look once. Through field hockey she made friends, which was no easy task among those of us who’d known one another since birth. She wasn’t the fastest runner, so it made sense that she would don the heavy pads and the Darth Vader helmet.

  Mel’s downfall began in study hall, of all places. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Maybe it wasn’t a surprise, which is why good Catholic Mr. Boucher sent his only daughter to Danvers High and not the all-girls Our Lady of Nazareth. After all, isn’t that how tragedy always starts? With a girl named Lisa MacGregor, her wrists slathered in Love’s Baby Soft?

  As far as we knew, Mel was still a “viarge” that July night when UNH coach Chrissy Hankl handed her a flimsy piece of paper with the word “excellence” inkjetted on it and shook her hand. Nothing changed over the next few days as one by one we began to sign our John Hancocks under Emilio’s smoldering gaze. We had every reason to think Mel had never even kissed anyone. Things only went off the rails after the all-star game. That’s when the higher power that we simply called “Emilio” began to kick into gear.

  We want to say that it all came from that old reference book Mel and Lisa MacGregor found in the school library shelved under the Dewey decimal system at 133.43, but that wouldn’t be true. The book might have started it, but books don’t lift some people up and knock other people down, way down so that they never get up again. Or do they?

  * * *

  —

  The all-star game promptly fired up at 8:00 p.m. on Memorial Field. Admittedly, there was no palpable excitement hanging in the air. In our eyes, it was already a done deal, like when the Harlem Globetrotters take the floor against whatever poor saps have signed on to play them. After all, the counselors were collegiates. The only question was, would the Wildcats run up the score or would decorum prevail, causing them to rein it in, scoring just enough to prove a point? In the annals of the all-star game, the campers had never won, though in 1986 we came pretty close, losing just 1-0, which in some ways was as good as winning. Back then there was a rumor that most of the UNH players, including the assistant coach who manned the helm that night, had been hungover, all game long the college players lining up to drive and whiffing hard instead. Tonight, three years later, the Wildcats looked hangover-free except for our interim coach, Pam, who sat on the bench with her entombed knee, her blissed-out gaze fixed on the night sky as the stars began to emerge. It was also possible the Wildcats were looking particularly astute this night because Chrissy Hankl was coaching, her sun visor unusually low on her face, the thing perched just above her eyebrows, a blue wall positioned to keep the world out.

  We were sitting together in the stands. Jen Fiorenza was gassing us out as she used AJ Johnson’s mosquito spray like it was Aqua Net. Boy Cory had gotten a longer piece of sock tied around his arm and was all smiles. Heather Houston had smuggled a ziplock of Cap’n Crunch out of the cafeteria and was having one last sugared-cereal orgy before heading home tomorrow and back to the Houston household with its zero-tolerance sugar policy. Mostly it was just nice not to be sitting indoors in the crumbling auditorium with the shredded seats. Every once in a while you’d pick a chair and sit down only to discover that the cushion was damp, the thing having sucked the humidity right out of the air. At least that’s why you hoped your bum was wet and not for some other less savory reason.

  We watched as the campers won the coin toss. This meant we would start with possession. Although it wasn’t dark yet, the big overhead kliegs were on, casting otherworldly shadows on the field, each player ten feet tall. For most of the week we’d been scrimmaging on grass. Memorial Field was artificial turf. It meant the ball traveled rocket fast. Any hit could deliver enough force to send it speeding upward of sixty miles an hour straight for your head.

  The postings for the all-star game had been taped up in the cafeteria the day before. It was no surprise Mel was in goal. Since the ignominy of Masconomet, each day she had set a new camp record. What was surprising was Abby Putnam’s being listed on the roster to play right forward. Never in the history of Danvers High field hockey had a player from Danvers been named to the all-star team, and now suddenly there were two. More than fifty towns were represented at Camp Wildcat. Only twenty-four girls total got picked for the A and B teams. Having two players selected from the same town was unprecedented. Field field field. Hockey hockey hockey. Here was even more proof that 1989 was destined to be our year.

  The referee blew the whistle for the start of play. Schools of bats swirled overhead, the Full Thunder Moon on the edge of the world. For the first thirty seconds, we had control of the ball, then POOF! For the next twenty-nine and a half minutes, we didn’t. As expected, it was just like watching the Harlem Globetrotters, the way the counselors moved the ball around, like a bully at recess playing keep-away with some kid’s lunch. The only thing preventing it from being a total blowout was Mel. After the first five minutes, we each began to realize we were watching one for the record books, perhaps one of the greatest field hockey performances ever delivered on Memorial Field. Time and again she came up with new ways to stop the ball. With her foot. With her stick. With her glove. With her helmet. With her butt. It was like watching a ballet dancer in heavy padding. The counselors couldn’t sneak one past her to save their lives. Chrissy Hankl stood on the sidelines, most likely glowering under her visor. In the stands, us campers were going nuts, our cheers filling the night sky, overhead the bats freaking out even more than us.

  This was sport at its best. One person can make a difference. And those of us with blue scraps cut from a ratty sock tucked under our sleeves could feel ourselves being lifted up into the heavens, e pluribus unum, one for all and all for one and all that assorted crap, as Mel took her place in the field hockey pantheon of gods. Truthfully, that’s how we felt. We were her and she was us. We were connected, tied together by some mysterious force. At halftime, it was still 0-0, anyone’s game. We watched as our French Canadian goalie trotted off the field to the maddened screams of fifty teams.

  Jen reached into the enormous faux-crocodile purple purse she always lugged around and pulled out Emilio. You couldn’t argue with results. Girl Cory sighed and held out her hand. Her twenty-four-karat claddagh ring winked in the stadium lights. Girl Cory was the ultimate tastemaker. She wasn’t used to following the crowd; ninety-nine times out of a hundred the crowd followed her. Still, there might be something to all this dungeons and dragons crap. Impatiently she made a gimme gesture with her fingers. Jen laid the purple Bic like a scalpel in her palm. The Claw stood at attention, a notary ready to stamp Its seal. “We’ll tie you guys up later in the room,” Jen said. When she was finished, Girl Cory handed the pen to Sue Yoon. When the breeze blew just right, you could smell the grape in Sue’s hair.

  And then there was only one name missing from Emilio’s list: Abby Putnam.

  Twenty-three minutes into the second half, a miracle occurred, though the next day as we were slugging
back down to Boston’s North Shore through the weekend traffic, each car in our flotilla debated among its passengers as to whether it was a miracle or something else. Boy Cory, acting as Jen Fiorenza’s proxy, claimed it was the power of Emilio. A high tide lifts all boats, he argued. Because the rest of us were a network, by extension, Abby was part of it too, he said. She was covered, whether she liked it or not, even though at that point she hadn’t officially signed on yet. Others, like AJ Johnson, said it happened thanks to hard work and belief in oneself, that that’s how anyone gets ahead in the world.

  “See? We don’t need this,” said Julie Kaling, tapping her part of the sock. “The Lord will find a way,” she added, fingering the pewter crucifix hanging around her neck, and then sweet Little Smitty summarily told her to shut up.

  This is what happened that Friday night at the all-star game: Twenty-three minutes into the second half, Abby Putnam, our once and future captain, connects with the ball off a corner. She winds up, takes the shot. The Full Thunder Moon shines its silvery applause on us all, enchanted and unenchanted alike.

  In the stands, our individual arms as if collectively burning.

  It would be futile to wonder what would’ve happened if we’d never signed our names in that notebook. We did. It was the ’80s. In a few months, the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down. We signed our names and we lived with it. The rest is history.

  * * *

  —

  Willoughby Boulder was pocked full of mica. There were grottoes of mica scattered throughout New Hampshire, the whole state sparkling that night under the light of the Full Thunder Moon, the Willoughby Boulder as if studded with rhinestones. We could see a million blurry approximations of ourselves reflected in its facets. Some girls from Arlington showed up stoned and couldn’t take their eyes off it. Heather Houston ran her hand along the surface and flaked off a few thin pieces, then licked them and stuck them on her glasses. The effect was both comical and macabre; where her eyes should be were just small scraps of silver.