A high school in the desert, the few times during the year it rained, the coaches took us into the gym and we played Upstairs Volleyball. The game was not played upstairs, it was played on the hardwood basketball court, and it was exactly like bombardment with one key difference: the coaches turned off all the lights. It was totally dark in there except for lines of white that slivered about the cracks in the double-doors and the red glowing from the exit signs. Only the faintest outline of the opposing players could be distinguished moving about their half of the court. This scenario gave the thrower a distinct advantage because they could see the form of the thing they were aiming for at least, but that screaming volleyball wouldn’t appear until it was only a few feet away. Obviously by then, it was much too late.

The coaches stood together on the bleachers. Some trick of the light made it possible for them to see everything more clearly up there and anytime a particularly violent throw made contact, you’d hear them laughing joyously. They’d bellow things out too, things like “You’re out, Johnson!!” or, “Nice try, pussy!”, or “Take off mommy’s panties, Stidham!!”

A disproportionate number of curious events occurred whenever we played the game. For instance, the time with Kenny Dowling and Gunslingin’ Left. Kenny was a freshman, Gunslingin’ Left a senior, a tall, lanky senior too with a cannon of a left-arm that was feared by anyone who’d faced it. Happened to be the case that Kenny had his face broken in a joyride he’d undertaken at the beginning of the school year. The kid was still wearing a plastic face mask for Christ’s sake, yet there he was, playing upstairs volleyball in the dark and what’s Gunslingin’ Left know about who he’s aiming for? He plugged Kenny directly in the face like a bomb went off and the kid dropped to the varnish wood floor, flopping around there like a soon to be dead man. When the lights came on, you could see little bubbles of mucous coming out of the plastic nose-holes, and then his face swelled up so we could barely get the mask off of him. The coaches pleaded with Kenny to skip the trip to the nurse, told him it would all be fine but it was not fine: one of the bones in the freshly assembled eye socket had re-dislodged. Luckily he’d signed the obligatory waiver. That and the fact that Kenny’s parents decided to look at this as yet another lesson Kenny would be forced to endure, the price he had to pay for his ill-fated adventure with the family auto, or else Upstairs Volleyball might have come to an end.

Then there was the incident involving the new student, Sabeen Sabaan. He was the only Iranian in the whole of the state much less the high school, and what do you know, it’s a flash flood his first day. A skinny dark-skinned kid with a shy but toothy white grin he couldn’t press back if he tried, we decided to welcome him to the country in our own unique way. Conspired in the locker room and once the game began, Sabeen’s team hung back and allowed the other side to pick up every ball in the gym. Then his team isolated him, they ran to the one side of the court and left him all alone on the other, the lone shadow form visible, the only thing to throw at. With a shout we let those half-flat volleyballs rain down upon him like he was Osama Bin Laden himself, and he took more than a few bruising shots to the face and body. The coaches still laughing, they flicked the lights on to find a sobbing, terrorized Muslim boy who hadn’t the first clue what was going on, a group of thrilled white-boys pointing and laughing and screaming things at him, much of which was not so nice. The kid might have told and that could have been the end of it but he didn’t, instead he stopped crying, grinned that big, shy grin of his, asked the coaches if he could please just play the game again. Won more than a few friends that day.

And then there was Andy Bender. A senior football player with a weakness for steroids and human growth hormone, he lead some of the bloodiest, most legendary charges seen in Upstairs Volleyball. Came a day we were playing, we were several games deep in fact, when a set of the double doors at the back of the gym came busting open. Two boys could be made out through the blinding glare of new light moving fast and yelling, “Is Andy Bender here?! There’s been an accident!! It’s his sister, Andrea!” Come to find out, Andrea’d pulled out into the intersection never seeing the bullet of a motorcycle moving near double the speed limit, he cut her and her car in half, landed himself some eighty feet down the road like a punted football, the two of them only having just advanced beyond the boundary of their learner’s permits, dead. Andy must have known, must have seen it in that glare of new white light that surrounded the two dark figures, their voices. He must have felt the fear radiating from the ghost-faces because he went psychotic before any of the rest of us had even begun to digest the news, broke straight from the dark court into the light of the outside. It took four policemen to subdue him after he’d run all the way to the site of the accident, and only then after several punishing rounds of mace.

Funny thing: the coaches loved Upstairs Volleyball, but so did we, we who got pummeled and bruised by the game. We couldn’t wait for a rainy day. Whenever the light-switch was flicked off, the excitement moved through us as a vibration, like a feeling or a sound or a scent maybe, who knows, and then it was those feet slapping against the dark, hard-wood floor, a periodic shout, laughter, the whizzing trail of a white ball.