Commander Cream: She is my Friend

She is smoking. I hate the smell of tobacco smoke. I hate how it lingers in my hair even after I shower. I hate looking at a friend smoking and imagining what her lungs look like. But she hadn't smoked for three months. She gave it up for me. Well, not really for me, for all of us.

We all gave up drinking and smoking for the season. It really wasn't hard for me. I don't drink and I don't smoke. Some of my teammates had been smoking for years. They wanted to win, so they gave it up too.

What am I doing here? Spending a Friday night surrounded by drunk high school girls is not really my cup of tea. I am much more the "catch a movie" or "stay home playing video games with friends" kind of girl.

Five hours earlier:

State finals.

There is something dreadful about being a goalie. None of the glory, all of the blame. It was sudden death overtime. No one had scored on me yet. It was my first state finals game. I would eventually lose three times in the finals. But I didn't know that yet. All I knew was that Ashley Choren was racing at me. Ashley, who scored the very first goal against me when I was pulled up from JV. Ashley who really was very nice, but at that moment, I hated her. Ashley, who put the ball past my left hand. I can still feel it whistling past my glove. I can still hear the sound of it hitting the net.

Five hours ago we had lost the state championship 1-0.

I am here because I lost the game for us in overtime. I am here because my teammates never blamed me. I am here because when I was pulled up from the JV team, no one made me feel like I was the second choice. The least I can do is make sure that none of them spontaneously decide to drive home. It was a good thing, too.

Katie. Katie could pose for a statue of a Valkyrie or an Amazon. She looms over a foot taller than my barely five foot frame. She is a big girl too. Not fat, just huge- big bones and big muscles. She eventually went on to play lacrosse for Yale. I bet she's kicking ass there. But at the moment she is a bit more intent on kicking my ass. Cigarette in one hand, my shirt in the other, she wants to know where her keys are. She really wants to know. Somewhere in her alcohol-fogged mind, she remembers that I have the keys. So I tell her a rather useful lie that I use when friends are drunk. I tell her that she dropped them out in the backyard. Usually that line sends people out into the grass to search for the missing keys.

Not Katie.

Instead Katie literally picks me up and throws me into the wall. Now, to be honest, this is partly my fault. I've had enough training that I could have gotten out of her hold. But she is a friend: I never thought that she would hurt me.

Flying through the air, it occurs to me that I was very much mistaken. When Katie's fist meets my face as I struggle to rise, I realize just how mistaken I was. The second punch splits my lip. Through the blood I whisper a lie and a truth, “I don’t have your keys Katie. Even if I did, I wouldn’t let you have them.”

At this point Katie collapses and starts sobbing. Great. Not just a belligerent drunk, a maudlin one too. Wiping the blood from my upper lip with my thumb, I try to decide what to do. The rest of my teammates are scattered around the room. Most of them are far too drunk to stand, let alone intervene. I don't want to fight back. Katie is a friend, even if she's a friend that could be convicted on assault charges. So I kneel down next to her.

She throws her arms around me and sobs into my chest. It's hard to maintain my balance.

"Katie. Are you okay?"
"I missed three shots. Three. We would have won if I had made even one of them."
"It's too late to worry about those shots. We have next year."

She keeps crying. It’s not about the game. I still don’t know what it was about. But I stay kneeling, my knees protesting. My shirt is plastered to my body, wet with tears. Eventually she falls asleep...or she passes out, I can't tell which. I quietly remove her arms and go and check on the rest of my teammates. No one has alcohol poisoning, I'm amazed. I hide their keys. In the morning, I will call them and reveal their location.

The next day I see Katie. She notices my black eye, my split lip. I'm wearing my arm brace for the first time in a month. She doesn't know how it happened. Katie is my friend. I tell her that I tripped going out to my car. She laughs, exclaiming, "I didn't do anything, and I was drinking! What's your excuse?"

Katie is my friend. I laugh along with her. It hurts my lip.