I used to be in the Cub Scouts; the prepubescent version of the Boy Scouts.

We used to have our weekly meetings at Holy Angels, the Catholic grade school I attended.

Being at school at night was an odd feeling; darkness crept in through the windows, to clash with the fluorescent lights. Maybe - just maybe - you would see a teacher still lingering around, ready to go home, acting like a completely different person. Every time you walked the halls, it felt forbidden.

It was an entirely different world waiting to be discovered.

After a certain while, our Cub Scout meetings were moved to a junior high in Wilmington. It may have been a "too old to meet at the grade school" thing, it may have simply been a free space thing.

I can't remember the exact reason why we moved, but whatever perverse thrill we had in re-discovering the night-time world of our grade school, was overwhelmed by the eerie quiet of teenage intimidation, that this new location possessed.
This place was huge and weird and there was something in the air that we weren't able to articulate.

There was one meeting that ended early. While we waited for our parents to show up and take us home, the den-master let us go do whatever we wanted, free to roam the halls.

So our pack of Webelos wandered down the empty halls. The darkness crept in through the windows, clashing with the fluorescent lights. We hit upon a long stretch of corridor, when we heard... a sound.

We traveled down a long, dimly-lit corridor following a sound that seemed familiar and yet completely new.

We peered into an open doorway, bundled together in our brown shirts and sashes, to see a sight that was pretty much the most fantastic sight of 1995.

The Holy Angels' Girls Volleyball Team.

Sharing the same, giant empty teenage space as our den of scouts. A squadron of girls that were familiar, but looked completely alien in this night-time world. Practicing and shouting and laughing in this giant gymnasium, their voices echoing all the way down a teenage hallway.

We slowly lingered in to say "hi" to girls we would see in a few hours of elementary school, but really we went in to digest these new surroundings. Our pack of 11 year old boys was witnessing something special; it was like seeing a comet shoot across the night sky. If you didn't just shut up and take it in, you would probably never get the same set of circumstances ever again.

It was an odd clash of off-the-clock boy and girl interaction.
The girls laughed and played and talked to us and tried to find out what we were doing in that junior high school and why we were walking in on their practice. We stood there and (probably) awkwardly said something.

Their coach came over and shooed us away. We ran out into the hall hearing the girls' laugh echo after us in that long, dimly-lit corridor.

I made my way back to the official Cub Scout meeting space, to see my dad waiting for me. "Ready to go?"

So I left the meeting, never discussing what just happened to anyone. My 11 year old adrenaline was pumping in a way that left me completely bewildered.

But I'm pretty sure on that night in that intimidating junior hight school... that my entire 90s adolescence exploded in my head.