The Greatest Game of All.
The paintball mask came over my face when I heard the referee, Brian, address my painfully exposed face. “Some of you don’t even have your masks on,” he said in his accent that wouldn’t have been out of place in the most redneck part of Texas. The mask was flipped down, much to everyone’s relief, and the barrel sleeve was off my gun in a second. The safety followed. Brian’s speech about safety during a paintball game fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t until he got to an explanation about the objective of the game that I finally started listening. I was to take a fortified space in the middle of the course. I was to hold that position until the whistle was blown, and the team that had a man in “the fortified position” when the whistle blew was to be the victors. Easy enough.
I took a look at my team. Around me were my classmates. Their familiar faces were all hidden behind protective masks. Everyone wore blue bandannas. I looked at the other team. They wore no bandannas. Neither was close to The A-Team, but I reminded myself that I didn’t need the The A-Team. I just needed enough people to pull enough triggers at the same time, to scare the other team so that they would keep away from me, doing all the important stuff.
In that moment, on that field, I felt like Captain Ronald Speirs, who I had read about in the World War Two history, Band of Brothers. He was the real-life-Rambo from the 101st Airborne Division that ran through the German line in some godforsaken town in Ardennes to deliver a message, and then ran back to his men once the message was delivered. He made a name for himself by starting a rumor that he shot a bunch of German prisoners after giving them a pack of Lucky Strikes to share. He was who I wanted to be right now.
So, I did what the good captain would do right now. I looked at the field and I made a plan. “Alright,” I said to my fourteen year old soldiers and the young math teacher on my team, “I want Reed and Ollie over on the right side, I want Sabrina and Nina and Mr Hathaway on the left side. You guys are going to cover me while I go and get into the objective, everyone got that?”
Everyone did. The whistle was blown,and I sprinted through the spool covers placed to block paintballs until I reached one at the right of the entrance to the “fortified position.” I got a good look at what I’d be squatting in for the rest of the game. It was a tall wooden spike, defiant of the flat dirt around it, surrounded by fences made of two by fours with slits of space in between their protective bodies. There were smaller spools in the middle, all lined up to make a knee high barrier that would serve as my protection. Right now, the discomfort to come didn’t bother me. All that bothered me was the movement on the other side of the field, as the other team worked to reach the same goal as me.
Four paintballs fired from a boy on the other end of the field exploded all over the spool cover that was all that stood between Max Halbruner and a bunch of .43 caliber welts. I shouted, “EVERYONE IN POSITION?” A chorus of yeahs graced my ears. “THEN SHOOT!”
Everyone did, and the other side of the course was colored with a beautiful conflagration of ugly green and orange paint. As this happened, I slid like some player from the Yankees who wanted a few photo ops before he went home, inside the fences, and into the objective. I looked around at my glorious plan in action. All my good friends on the other team and my science teacher were shooting at me now, all the good times we had together forgotten as we played the greatest game of all time.
I spotted my science teacher, a red spot ducking behind cover, eager to get out of my eyesight. Soon though he popped out, and with the condescending attitude he had given me all year fresh in my mind, I yelled, “NICE SHIRT MR. DAGLISH!” and pulled my trigger six times, giving him six welts on the chest, and staining his red polo shirt beyond recognition. I savored that moment, thinking of that age old saying, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”
Laughing to myself, I shot two other classmates, who were so foolish as to poke their heads out of their covers. For a very small time, squatting behind those knee high spool covers, I felt invincible. People say that when you’re a teenager you feel like that all the time, but I guess I miss that memo most days. Not this day though.
It wasn’t until the game was nearing the end that I was really in trouble. The other team realised that they needed to step it up, and they did. My teammates went down like saplings before a gale. Soon it was just me. I stayed low, body almost touching the ground. I rotated my gun from one opening of the fence to the other. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. On that last left, I noticed the gun pointed at me. “Surrender,” said a girl’s voice. It was already triumphant, already tasting that sweet victory.
My mind flew back to the safety video that was mandatory viewing before our game. “NO BUNKERING.” A voice had come out of the small television, about three hundred times louder than it should’ve been in the small angular room. It said, “IF YOU ARE IN A POSITION TO SHOOT SOMEONE AT POINT BLANK RANGE, ASK THEM TO SURRENDER FIRST.”
My right index finger acted in the absence of any signals of my brain. It moved half an inch back three times, sending three balls zooming towards the girl at a million miles an hour. Three orange stains appeared on her white shirt. It was like slow motion, reminding me of the staged gunshot wounds that Justin Beiber received on CSI, to the roars of approval of men everywhere.
After the girl was down, I looked over the low row of spool covers I had, giving my back a much needed reprieve from imitating Quasimodo, A mere yard away from me was a masked face looking at me between the two by fours in the fence. I yelled something unintelligible, firing my weapon wildly, but hitting only the boards as I fell backwards.
I was on my back now, painfully exposed to the guns of the other team, with my own pointed over the spool covers. My heart grew faster as I considered which way the boy would come from. I had just decided that he would come from the left when the whistle blew. I stood up, to the relief of my aching back. The boy stood up too. Seeing the boy that had been a yard away from shooting me, I restrained my index finger. “BLUE TEAM WINS!” yelled Brian.
A triumphant yell burst from my throat. I had done it. I had won. I thought that those European soccer players celebrating after a game must feel something like this. I could feel the resentment coming from the other team, mainly from the girl I had shot from about an inch away, but that only made the victory sweeter.
I chose to revise this piece because the memoir was created with all of the lessons we had done in class in mind. It is also my favorite thing that I have written all year. I focused on grammar while I revised mostly, reading it critically while I searched for errors. I also tried to make my voice more evident in the piece. I also chose to revise the piece because out of all the genres that we have done besides fiction, memoir is my favorite. The paper has not changed very much, aside from the fact that it has less grammatical errors. I made an effort to clean up my sentences and make them clearer. Other than that, it has not changed.
The House on the Hill
The house has stood on the small hill since 1939, when World War Two started and the world was turned upside down. Until six years ago it was owned by a woman named Ethel. It was purchased by Bob and Aimee Halbruner in the spring of 2007. That was when I moved in. It wasn't much of a move. We lived in an apartment that was only a small commute up the road, and up Upper Kingcrest, where people have huge two story houses and two Cadillacs parked in their piece of the street. Apartment Twenty One of Malvern Manor was finally abandoned by us when we moved our two queen size beds over to the house.
Beyond the front door, there is a spacious living room. To the right, there is a door that leads to a hall that has three doors. The door at the front of the house is my bedroom. The door in the middle is a small bathroom, and the door that leads to the back of the house is my parent’s room. To the left of that hall is a second living room which gets used a lot more than the one where the front door is. To the left of that is a kitchen made entirely of stone except for one wooden table leg put under a granite counter top. It looks weirdly out of place, even though it was haphazardly painted white. If you go out an empty door frame, it leads back to the dining room, and you can begin the circle again. "What do you think of it, Max?" my mother had asked me after the tour.
"It's perfect," I had said.
"It's perfect," I had said.
Seven year old me thought that the ceiling looked strange and unfamiliar. It was a different shade of white than our old apartment, if there is such a thing as shades of white. The moon sent strips of light shooting through my windows, like water spewing out of a crack in a fish tank. Well, the bed’s still nice, I thought, and fell asleep instantly.
Living in that house, I began the task of getting letter grades. The tests were easy, school seemed like a pushover. Rather than focusing on school, I focused on climbing the tree in our front yard. The lowest branch vexed me to no end. My small seven year old body could not pull itself up over the branch. Every day of every month of every year, I stood on tiptoes trying to reach the branch, as it seemed to laugh at me from up there. One day though, the tree branch seemed to get come lower, and I finally hoisted myself onto it, and scrambled up the rest of the tree like the monkeys on Animal Planet. That was the first time where I could really see the sunset beyond the trees of the house across the street. It lit up the sky with a glorious conflagration of fiery hues of red, orange, yellow, and everything in between.
Oftentimes, the house would become decorated with souvenirs from trips. Driftwood, gemstones, shells, and clothes are in my room, imposing my personality on the space. The one souvenir that I could not keep was a compound bow that I had so wisely chosen to bring back to the tight suburbs and shoot off. Arrow after arrow landed into the target, until my parents told me to stand at one end of the backyard, and fire the bow at the target on the other end. My arm jerked upwards with the sudden lack of tension, and the blunt tipped projectile soared over the fence towards the road. Maybe, some settler in the sixteen hundreds saw an arrow flying towards him fired from some Indian from this very same spot.
I dashed around the house to the area beyond the low fence, terrified of what I might have shot. As I turned the corner I saw that I had killed only the neighbor’s driveway. I grabbed the arrow with a quiet, "Thank God," and tried to hide it by my side like the way they did on the movies as I walked calmly as you like back to the backyard. I walked straight backed and leisurely. Nobody would know I had done anything, but I still decided to put my bow away for the time being. To this day my neighbors remain oblivious to that day’s events, and I have not played in the backyard since.
The desk in my room and I have become old friends. The rolling chair is familiar to me, as are the decals covering the shelves and the magnetic surfaces where papers are supposed to be put on display. The decals carry all the memos and images like: life is good, a smiling fish with sharp teeth and a jolly roger with a dog’s face. This desk is where all the writing happens.
At the age of ten, ideas for long and detailed movies, and books came into my head. They were all fleeting, except for the really good ones, which were thought about when boredom reared it’s ugly head or when I was in the mood to daydream. Mysteries and thrillers have been written on this desk, all by the boy in the house, who is the only one ever to sit at the desk. That is why there is a space in the desk where all the clutter has been pushed to the sides. This spot is for a computer to sit at, and stories to be put into word documents, and out of my head. This is the spot where this memoir was written.
The upstairs is a messy home theater which comes from me spending time up there watching reruns of everything from James Bond to NCIS. It is most likely where you will be able to find me. Behind the futon where I lounge for hours at a time, a treadmill sits unused since my cross country season ended. A twin bed is shoved into a corner, under a piece of low hanging ceiling that outlines where the roof begins it’s steady incline.
The house on the hill is where I live. This place has shaped me into the person I am now, who talks about stories like a professional critic, who hides what he has done wrong from the public, who can come up with an idea for a full length novel with a night’s preparation, who is capable of extreme persistence, and who can assimilate into a new school or new town or new country so very easily. All that is thanks to the house on the hill.
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