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Trey: i’m in!
Nabil: Me too!
Brooke: sure
Text Message:
Jesse to me: Why are you doing this to me?
Me: Because I like to torture you?
Jesse: I think I’d prefer the Witchfinder General
Me: OMG was that a witch joke?
Jesse: Not if you had to ask.
Jesse: What time should I pick you up?
Me: You’re going to come?
Jesse: I think I have to now. You called me out in front of the entire group.
Me:
The stadium smells like Philly cheesesteak and beer and popcorn and the kind of desperate hope pheromone that only baseball fans can secrete. The cheesesteak smell somehow turns my stomach and makes it growl at the same time, a Pavlovian response after eating far too many of them in this very stadium in my lifetime. The beer reminds me of the one and only time I saw my father drunk. It was during extra innings the summer before I started high school and he had a second beer rather than his usual one, nursed over the entirety of the four-hour game.
Dad has always been a baseball fan, since the first day he immigrated to Pennsylvania from east London. He wanted to assimilate to his new home and between the choices of baseball and American football, my quiet, book-loving father chose the option that didn’t involve traumatic brain injuries. When I told him this morning that I was going to a baseball game—leaving out the not-so-important detail that the event was organized through my friendship study—he’d perked up. Any of the frustration we had held for each other last week burned off in the face of a ballpark.
“Who are you going with?” he’d asked.
“Some friends,” I’d lied. Really it’s only Jesse who’s my friend. Everyone else is a fellow study participant.
A fistful of cash is shoved in front of my face and I lean out of the way as Jesse reaches for it on my other side, passing it to the food vendor, who exchanges it for a bottle of water. The water goes back down the row.
“Thanks for driving me,” I say, leaning into him.
“It’s no problem.” He shifts in his seat, his shoulders hunched.
“Can I buy you a beer to say thanks?”
He shakes his head. “I’m driving.”
“Not for another, like, three hours.”
He makes Grump Face and I immediately want to wipe it from his facial vernacular.
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “For peer pressuring you.”
His shoulders relax. “I think it’s only peer pressure if I crumble under it,” he says. Then, quieter, “Safety is really important to me.” He rubs his palm up and down his thigh, an unconscious movement, and duh. Of course he’s concerned with safety, especially when he’s driving.
“Hey.” I grab his hand, squeezing gently. “I really am sorry.”
He squeezes back. “It’s fine,” he says. But is it? This is just like me, the type of gaffe I always make, exactly the kind of foot-in-mouth moment that’s the reason I’m here in the middle of an adult friendship study.
More money is hand-passed in front of me in exchange for a lemon-flavored water ice in a soggy paper cup. The Phanatic shakes his belly to a medley of pop songs; the sun beats down on us and the outfield is a gorgeous green, the mower’s lines striped in a crisscross pattern, and I feel like I might suffocate. Each breath gets harder and harder to catch. Sweat rolls between my shoulder blades. I close my eyes and try to picture the optimal route to the closest exit, how many people’s feet will I have to step on as I stumble for the stairs, how many times will I have to shove my butt in someone’s face as I shimmy down this line of tightly packed baseball fans so I can find a public bathroom that is inexplicably damp from top to bottom to cry in until this anxiety passes. Because I have undoubtedly hurt my only friend with my insensitivity.
“Lu.” Jesse’s hand is a warm and sudden weight on mine. He pulls my hands apart, where I pick at my fingernails until the skin around them is raw and red. “I promise, it’s really, really fine.”
