“You're not supposed to catch it, stupid,” my any-other-time friend but gym hour nemesis Phil Maune taunts. “You're supposed to dodge it. That's why they call it dodge ball.”
        Derisive laughter reverberates through the Yukon High School Gymnasium like the shockwave of a supernova.
        The Artless Dodger; that's me. Nevertheless, as I glare back at him through red-teared eyes, I know I can beat Phil at this game. Not by cocking my arm and faking a throw right back at his buck-toothed sneer, making him commit himself, left or right, before I draw my arm back again and deliver my hardest toss into the center of his own gym hour bully's belly. No, I can beat him by aiming the ball not at him, but in the direction of the El Reno Reformatory, where in the years to come Phil Maune will finally accomplish his lifelong goal: to become a prison guard.
        Come on, the woman in white gently urges. Let's keep the game going.
        For a moment, I am uncertain where to aim. The choices, it seems, are infinite. As I ponder this, the man in the wheelchair's mouth stretches flat and tight across his sunken, sallow face, as if he were trying to smile.
        I lob the world back at him. And why not? Though he did not invent this game, nor even choose to play it, his fading star kindled my own, and set the spheres in motion.
        He catches it the same way he has caught every new world that's come his direction: with both hands, eyes wide open, never pausing to worry about the impact, once the world is already rushing toward him.
        That's GREAT! Why, I can hardly believe—
        Without warning, the man's grip fails. He squeezes one side of the earth too hard. All at once it squirts free, spins out of orbit, plummets toward the hard, flat floor . . .
        What happens next is not a reflex, but an instinct.
        For just an instant, hardly long enough to freeze the image in our separate mind's eyes, all of us—Michael Jordan, Green Day, Superman, the Artless Dodger, the boy in the bleachers, Coal Dust, Silver Hawk, the man in the wheelchair—we all reach for the world in synchronous rhythm, across space and time and memory, with a single pure blue desire: to catch the thing that makes us all boys, who believe the game goes on, forever.

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