We are on the bus home from an all day volleyball tournament. Morale is low. Frustration hangs in the air, and awkward humor to fill the tension is kept to a minimum. Our quick tempered coach spent the day patrolling the sidelines, shouting, pointing and stomping his flat duck feet back and forth to no avail. We lost all of the games, and I hadn’t play for a single second in any of them.

I am handed a sheet of paper from the girl next to me. We all have one, and the coach stands at the front of the bus. Against the rules, I think, wanting nothing more than for the 80 year-old bus driver to ask him to, “take a seat.” It doesn’t happen.

“What was that?” A rhetorical question.
“Seriously, where were you all today? Haven’t I taught you anything? Volleyball isn’t that hard!”

He looms over us like a limp cornstalk. “Bump, set, spike!” he slaps the paper with the back of his clammy hand for emphasis, “Bump, set, spike! Bump, set, spike! That’s all there is to it!”

My friends are looking at the floor of the bus, ashamed at themselves. How dare we have the audacity to lose a high school volleyball game? I look at the paper in my hand and see that it is filled with little cartoon people with words underneath them. DISSAPOINTED, FRIGHTENED, HAPPY.

“Now,” he leans over the back of a bus seat, “I want you to look at that paper, and consider your performance today. Pick a character that describes how you feel, and we are going to talk about it.”

I study the characters. Is there an INVISIBLE one? USELESS? No.

One by one he calls on my teammates; the first word that is taken is REGRETFUL. Followed by ASHAMED. Someone chooses SAD and I roll my eyes. It will be my turn soon. Looking back at the paper, one of the cartoons catches my eye, and I wait.

Bump

“Lucy?”

Set

“How would you describe your contribution today?”

Spike

I point to a character on the corner of the paper with narrowed eyes, and read the word beneath it.
“Observant.”

Luciana, 27