We Ride Upon Sticks

To be anything but kind in the face of male desire was dangerous. Nobody had to teach us this lesson—it was just something we knew from the earliest days on the playground.

Remember that darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light. And just like that, you’ll find yourself everywhere instantly.

[E]ach of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.

We danced all night. We danced the length of one song. We danced for just a moment. May we be so lucky as to still be dancing under the light of the Harvest Moon three hundred years on!

Maybe that was their magic. Having fun and enjoying one another’s company. Being lifted up even when you were being beaten down.

We were teen girls. Look up the word “blasé” in Merriam-Webster’s and you’d find a picture of us, our eyes burning through your soul from the page.

What would you yourself do to remain forever young? What would you confess to the great and silent god that watches in the dark?

We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.

Third Year German was the only class where she felt vaguely human. They spent the period listening to "99 Luftballons" and trying to work out the lyrics back into English. Hielten sich fur Captain Kirk. When you found German comforting, you knew you were in trouble

It’s like looking through a time machine at ourselves thirty years ago. While the hair is smaller, the hunger is still outsized. Hunger is what gets anything done. Stay hungry, ladies, we think.

Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.

A sea of adolescence streamed by, each of us in our own way trying to both fit in and stand out.

We were taking one step for jocks, one giant leap for jock-kind.

Sooner or later, her daughter would find out for herself what it meant to live in a world that pulled the plug on the Van Peebleses.

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.

all of us naked as the day we were born, each of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.

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.

I love him, but he’s unfaithful,’ ” she lamented. “ ‘I hope, but he’s cruel—will he let me die?

False in one thing, false in everything.

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 heart can see?

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.

Fact: like a telephone booth or a pair of size 6 Sasson jeans, the teen brain can hold only so much. This is doubly true when said information does not pertain to it. That’s why teenagers are the original narcissists. It’s not even in one ear, out the other. Truth is, 95% of stuff never wriggles in in the first place.

Darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light.

We are no one’s reflection— we shine in dark places by the light of our own being

There are so many things to say in the language of our kind, but really, nothing more needs to be said.

In the last year of the 80’s, Chi-Chi’s had just opened a restaurant on Route 114, in our eyes the Mexican fried ice cream a divine dessert conceived of on Mars. We were living in a world where up until Chi-Chi’s, Italian food was considered ethnic.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. —JOHN UPDIKE, The Witches of Eastwick