Volleyball

I am driving the school bus to a volleyball tournament forty minutes away at Little Wound School in Kyle, South Dakota. It’s only me and eight middle school girls on the trip. They are sitting in the very back of the bus laughing about things that are none of my business. I decide not to keep an eye on them, or I don’t want to, and so I watch the buttes and the badlands whip by in the autumn heat.
At the volleyball game I watch the games from the bleachers. Some of the parents have driven up separately, and they are here wearing the school colors, shouting at their girls to hustle. There is some coffee in the cafeteria kitchen for the chaperones and bus drivers. I drink it.
On the way to the bathroom, I find one of the girls from our school in an alcove with a boy I don’t know. His hand is inside her sweat pants, caressing whatever she has between her legs. All three of us jump, but it is half dark, and though I can see them clearly, I pretend and I walk past. When I come out of the bathroom, they are gone.
I think about them that night, when I get back to my trailer, trying to sleep. I lie awake, thinking in the darkness. And somewhere there is a deep ocean full of salt and empty spaces big beyond my com- prehension. There are huge arctic forests and deserts and there is the fist of night and the sound of the highway behind my trailer.