The school gym smelled of warm buttered popcorn, damp wool jackets, and fifty years of floor wax cured under high-bay mercury lights.
All around the hardwood, paper streamers in maroon and gold rustled whenever the double emergency doors at the far end cracked open against the biting October wind. It was the annual fall senior night for the West Branch Warriors volleyball team. Six girls were lined up in the auxiliary entrance tunnel behind the home team bench, their jerseys spotless, their knee pads pulled up, each girl holding a long-stemmed red rose wrapped in green florist foil.
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I sat in the second row of the bleachers right behind the scorekeeper’s table. I wore my maroon booster club sweatshirt with Kaylee’s number seventeen embroidered over the heart. Beside me sat my husband, Travis. He had his fleece work vest zipped tight to his collar, his thick forearms resting on his knees, his cap pulled down low. He smelled of dry corn dust and the diesel fumes of his grain truck.
Travis didn’t look at the tunnel. He stared straight ahead at the center circle where the painted warrior crest was scarred by decades of rubber sneakers.
