In the garage at the end of Marigold Court, hung on the wall beside the community fire pit, there’s a rack of roasting sticks.
It’s a plain wooden rack, painted green, with nine pegs in a row, and on each peg hangs a long stick with a pointed steel tip and a handle of smooth, dark, hand-polished ash. You’d walk right past it, if you didn’t know. It looks like any other piece of camping equipment, the sort of thing a family might keep in a shed.
But if you take down a stick and turn it over in your hands, you’ll find something on the handle.
A name.
Burned into the wood, in careful, slightly wobbly capitals, about a hand’s width below the grip. GERALD. EXCALIBUR. DOLORES. BISCUIT. SIR TOASTS-A-LOT. THE SPEAR OF DESTINY. MR. PICKLES. LIEUTENANT FORK. KEVIN. Nine sticks, nine names. They are not the names of the people who own the sticks. Nobody owns the sticks. They belong to the block.
They’re the names of the sticks themselves.
I’m thirteen. I’ve lived on Marigold Court my whole life, and I can tell you the history of every one of them. The kids of the block have been naming them for twenty years, ever since the pit was dug, and the naming has always been done with a seriousness that would startle an outsider. A stick isn’t named at random. You don’t just pick a name that sounds funny. You wait until a stick has been used, and loved, and has roasted a few hundred marshmallows, and then, at a fire, a child will stand up and say, “I’d like to propose a name.”
The other kids vote. It takes a majority. If anyone objects, there’s a hearing.
There have been two. I’ll tell you about them. They took place at the pit itself, under the stars, with a Chief Justice and a prosecutor and a jury of eleven children, and both were fiercely contested. The adults sat on the lawn chairs and held their drinks and tried very hard not to laugh.
The rack has a sign, painted by hand, in white letters on a board above the pegs.
BORROW FREELY. RETURN PROMPTLY. NAME THEM WITH CARE.
Those are the three rules. Anyone on the block can take a stick, any evening, for any fire. You just have to put it back. And you have to respect the names.
In twenty years, as far as anyone knows, nobody has ever broken the third.
Then, this past July, my cousin came to visit.
He was twelve. A tall, thin, pale boy from the city, with glasses and a pair of enormous headphones, who’d been sent to spend a month with his aunt, my neighbor, Mrs. Okafor. His name was Dylan. He’d never been to a fire pit. He’d never been to a block like ours.
On the eighth night of his visit, he took a pocketknife to a stick.
And the whole of Marigold Court nearly went to war.
Part 2
I should explain the names, because nobody believes me about them.
GERALD is the oldest. He’s a stick of pale ash, a little crooked, with a charred tip and a handle polished almost black by twenty years of palms. He was named in 2006 by a four-year-old girl named Maya, now twenty-four and a nurse in Seattle, who announced at a fire that the stick looked like her goldfish. Her goldfish was named Gerald. It took the block about forty seconds to agree.
EXCALIBUR came in 2009. He’s the longest, a handsome stick with a bit of a bend near the tip, and he was named by a seven-year-old boy who’d just read a book about King Arthur and who, to this day, refuses to say a single word about it. SIR TOASTS-A-LOT was named the same summer, by his younger sister, in what the block remembers as a “retaliatory naming.”
BISCUIT is small and round and sweet, and was named after somebody’s dog. MR. PICKLES, for reasons no living person can explain, was named after nothing at all. LIEUTENANT FORK is, in fact, a fork, welded to a stick by a retired machinist named Hal, and has never been allowed to forget it. KEVIN was named by a toddler who couldn’t say any other word. THE SPEAR OF DESTINY has a famous history, which I’ll leave out.
And there’s DOLORES.
I’ll come to her.
The registry is a school composition book, black-and-white marbled, kept in a gallon freezer bag in the garage drawer, below the wood-burning tool. It’s been kept by the kids since 2006. Each entry has a date, a name, a sponsor, a vote. The handwriting changes, over the years, as the children grow. At the back there’s a list of what we call “Hearings,” in a series of increasingly formal hands.
The first hearing was in 2012. It’s called The Matter of the Second Gerald. Two brothers, Tobias and Wren, had both claimed to have named a stick. It turned out they’d both proposed “Gerald,” on different nights, forty-eight hours apart, for different reasons, in ignorance of one another. The hearing took three hours. A nine-year-old girl, acting as Chief Justice, in a bathrobe, with a roasting stick for a gavel, ruled that the stick had two names and would be called “Gerald” regardless, since the pit has never recognized the concept of a second Gerald.
The second hearing was in 2018. Excalibur v. The Spear of Destiny. I won’t go into it. There were tears. A seven-year-old was held in contempt.
Both were resolved with great solemnity. And both ended with a vote, and a handshake, and the passing of marshmallows.
That’s how the registry works. It isn’t written down anywhere, except in a handful of rules scribbled in the margins. A name is given with care. A name is voted on. A name, once given, is never changed.
It’s the oldest law on the block.
In twenty years, nobody had ever broken it.
Part 3
Dylan came on the first Saturday in July.
He was sent by his mother, a tired, brisk, kind woman who’d just started a new job and who didn’t know what to do with a twelve-year-old in August. Mrs. Okafor, her sister, was happy to take him. She’s a retired teacher, big-hearted and bossy, and she lives next door to us, in a yellow house with a porch swing.
He was not what the block expected. He was thin, and pale, and polite in the stiff, careful way of a child who’s been told to behave. He wore the headphones around his neck, all day, and a gray hoodie with the hood up, and he carried a paperback in one hand like a shield. He didn’t know anyone. He didn’t want to. He stayed in Mrs. Okafor’s guest room, for the first two days, and came out only at mealtimes.
On the sixth evening, when the smoke started to rise from the pit, and the laughter drifted across the backyards, Mrs. Okafor knocked on his door.
“Come on,” she said. “It’s Friday.”
“I don’t really…”
“Nobody’s asking you to do anything.”
He came. He sat at the very edge of the circle, on an overturned bucket, with his hood up and his book on his knee. I was across the fire. I remember watching him. He looked, I thought, like a very small boy pretending to be a very old man.
The kids were doing what they always do. Roasting marshmallows. Arguing about the best way to get one golden without setting it on fire. A six-year-old named Pim was explaining, to anyone who’d listen, that her stick, Biscuit, was “a little bit shy.” A boy named Rufus had just been caught trying to roast a hot dog on Lieutenant Fork, which was, I’ll note, a crime.
Dylan watched. He didn’t say a word. At the end of the night, when the fire had burned down and people were packing up, he stood, and walked over to the rack, and ran a finger along the handles.
“Why do they have names?” he said, to nobody.
Rufus looked up from the ground.
“Because they’re ours,” said Rufus.
Dylan just stood there. I saw his lips move, like he was about to say something. Then he turned and walked back to his aunt’s house with his hood up.
I didn’t think about it again.
Two nights later, at the next fire, Pim came running up to me with a stick in her hands.
“Junie,” she said. She was crying. “Junie, look.”
It was Dolores. The long, slender, silvery stick, hung on the third peg. The handle was smooth and dark and familiar.
And across the handle, cut deep into the wood with a knife, in sharp, careful capitals, covering the burned letters entirely, was a different name.
DYLAN.
Part 4
I’d like to tell you we handled it calmly.
We didn’t. The whole block came to the pit that evening in a kind of low, simmering hush. Forty people, in lawn chairs and on blankets, with the smoke rising straight up into the darkening sky. Nobody had their marshmallows. The children sat in a tight, silent clump on the grass, and the adults, who’d come to act as bailiffs, sat behind them, trying to look neutral.
I was the Chief Justice. It’s an unofficial title. I’d been Keeper of the Registry for two years, since I turned eleven, and when something goes to hearing, it falls to the Keeper to preside. I’d never done one. My hands were shaking.
I’d put on my father’s old bathrobe. I’d brought Gerald, as a gavel.
“This hearing,” I said, in the loudest voice I could manage, “is called to order.”
The defendant stood at the edge of the firelight. Dylan. His hood was down. His face was white and wet, and his hands were clenched at his sides.
The prosecutor was a ten-year-old named Theo, who took to it with a ferocity I found slightly alarming.
“On the evening of July twelfth,” Theo said, “a stick named Dolores was desecrated.”
“I didn’t know,” Dylan said, in a high, shaking voice.
“You carved your name over hers.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I…” He stopped. He looked at the ground. “I just wanted…”
“Wanted what?” I said, as gently as I could.
He raised his head. Tears were running down his face.
“Everyone has one,” he said. “Everyone’s got a stick. They all have a name, and a person who named it, and a story, and I didn’t. I’ve been here a week, and I’ve never had anything.” His voice broke. “I figured if I put mine on one, then I’d have one. I didn’t know it was a rule. I didn’t think anyone would care.”
There was a long, terrible silence.
I’ll never forget the sound of it. Forty people, and the crackle of the fire, and a boy standing alone at the edge of the light.
Then Pim stood up.
She’s six. She had a marshmallow stick in one hand and a smear of chocolate on her chin, and she walked right up to the center of the circle, and turned to face Dylan.
“Do you know who Dolores was?” she said.
“No.”
“She was a lady.” Pim spoke with great seriousness. “Mrs. Pike. She lived in the blue house. She was really old. She used to come to the fire every Friday, and she’d sit in the big chair, and she’d show us how to hold the stick so the marshmallow doesn’t fall off.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “She died when I was a baby. But the big kids named a stick for her. So she’d always still be at the fire.”
Dylan stared at her.
“They told me,” Pim said. “So I’d know.”
I saw something go across his face. He sat down, very slowly, on the grass, as though his legs had given out. He put his face in his hands.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Part 5
The jury deliberated for eleven minutes.
They did it in a huddle, behind the garage, in whispers. I could hear the murmur of voices, and the occasional outraged squeak. When they came back, the foreman, a solemn twelve-year-old named Rufus, stood at the edge of the circle and cleared his throat.
“We find the defendant guilty,” he said.
Dylan flinched.
“Of carving,” Rufus went on. “Over a name. Which is the worst thing you can do.” He paused. “But we also find that nobody told him.”
There was a ripple of murmuring.
“It’s on the sign,” said Theo, from the prosecution table. “‘Name them with care.'”
“It doesn’t say don’t carve,” said Rufus. “It doesn’t say it’s a memorial. It doesn’t say anything.” He turned to me. “We don’t think it’s fair to punish somebody for breaking a rule he didn’t know. We think the rule’s incomplete.”
I looked at the registry in my lap. It was true. In twenty years, no one had ever written down the most important part.
“So this is what we want,” said Rufus.
He ticked it off on his fingers.
“One. He has to restore the name. Dolores gets burned back on. He has to do it himself, with the tool, with Mr. Okafor watching. It’ll take all night.” A pause. “Two. He has to stand up at the fire next Friday and tell everybody about her. In his own words. As if he knew her.”
Dylan stared at him.
“Three.” Rufus took a breath. “We’re adding a rule. It’s going in the registry. It’s the first one that’s ever been written down.”
I took out my pen.
AMENDMENT 1, I wrote, in my best handwriting. A NAME IS NEVER COVERED. A person who restores a name may burn their initials on the underside of the handle, where it can’t be seen but is always held.
“That’s the mercy part,” Rufus said, a little embarrassed. “So you can have a mark. But not on top. Underneath. Where the hand goes.”
For a long moment, nobody moved. Then Dylan lifted his head.
He looked at the circle of faces. At Pim, with her chocolate chin. At Rufus. At forty strangers on lawn chairs, in the firelight, watching him without a single trace of contempt.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
It took him three hours. He sat at the card table in the garage, under a single bulb, with Mr. Okafor beside him, and the wood-burning tool hissing in his hand. He sanded down his own letters until they were nearly gone. He burned DOLORES back into the handle, one capital at a time, slowly, with his tongue between his teeth. When he finished, he turned the stick over. And on the underside, small, shallow, almost hidden, he burned two letters.
D.K.
The next Friday, at the fire, he stood up.
He had no notes. He told the story of a woman he’d never met, an old lady in a blue house who’d come every Friday, and sat in the big chair, and taught the children how to hold a stick. He told it from what he’d learned. He got a few details wrong. Nobody corrected him. He spoke for six minutes, in a high, shaky voice, with his hands in his pockets, and when he sat down, an old man named Hal, who’d known Mrs. Pike for forty years, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
Dylan went home at the end of August. He took Dolores down from the rack on his last night, and held her for a minute, with his palm closed over the handle.
His name is still on the stick.
It’s just not where he put it. It’s underneath, where his hand rests when he holds her.
And he’s holding her, now, in a way, whenever anyone does.
