ESSAY
FA LLING IN LOV E ON A GIRLS’ HOCK EY TEAM Remember that feeling of falling in love for the first time By Emilia Schmidt
I was 13 when I first fell in love with a girl; just like any 13-year-old, I had no idea how to handle such emotion. The girl, let’s call her Carol, was one year my senior and scored the most on my hockey team. She was the run-of-the-mill, black-skinny-jeans-and-plaidshirt type of pubescent lesbian. I was infatuated with her. Every time I passed a recycling bin, I would fantasize about writing “I love Carol” on a piece of paper and tossing it in – my declaration lost forever, yet still existing. Once, Carol said she was upset, so I made her a stress ball out of a disposable latex glove and baking flour. In order to cover up my want to ease her pain, I also made a candle for another girl on the team…who, as it turns out, was secretly dating Carol.
MARCH / APRIL 2021
Later in the hockey season, at a tournament in London, I found myself laughing in the rain with Carol as the two of us ran through the unfamiliar town in search of soy sauce. We planned to pour it into a Coke bottle and trick our teammates into drinking it. The fun of our adventure seemed promising; I thought it could be the start of something. When we returned to the hotel, Carol went straight to Candle Girl’s room. In that moment, I finally understood my insignificance to Carol. It was the first time I had felt the sensation of knowing someone doesn’t love you back. It was excruciating. The following year, I started high school. I had stopped fantasizing about gifting Carol the soy sauce bottle as a romantic gesture and convinced myself I was straight. On my second day, I saw Carol’s bike locked up to the school’s perimeter fence. I knew it was hers because I had once stood in her sunroom for 20 seconds and absorbed everything the space contained. Including her matte black fixie bike. When I recognized it, I got so overwhelmed that I ran home and cried. I had lost autonomy over my body. I was 17 when I fell in love with a girl for a second time; just like any other 17-year-old, I thought she was the one. The girl, who I’ll call Marianne, was born 13 days after me, to our hockey coach and her husband. We’d been on the same team for four years but didn’t become friends until the third. That year we were always the last to sleep and the first to get up, often drinking coffee together, talking, at six in the morning. In moments like those we grew 20
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slowly towards inseparability. By the beginning of the 12th grade we were calling each other and talking for hours most weeknights and having drunken fun every weekend. One Friday in October we met up, bought spray paint and vandalized trains. As we walked along the tracks, Marianne told me she wanted to be a psychologist who specializes in helping teenagers with eating disorders. She said her personal experiences made her passionate to help kids who struggled with similar issues. On the way back to my place, Marianne gave her change to a homeless woman standing outside a 7-Eleven, and the woman kissed her on the cheek as a thank you. Marianne pretended she didn’t mind, but after we left, she obsessively wiped the left side of her face with the wrist of her sweater. A few minutes later we decided to buy a pumpkin, and carved it when we got back to my house. The noise that came from cutting the hollowed orange shell was so absurd that we laughed so hard that we both peed. That night I realized I was in love with Marianne. In mid-November, Marianne, two teammates and I got drunk and high before watching the Frozen sequel in a theatre. Marianne and one of the other girls – call her Bobbi – laughed obnoxiously throughout the whole movie. I was embarrassed to be associated with them. After the movie we went back to Bobbi’s place and drank more. Bobbi felt up Marianne, whose body language seemed to encourage the attention. I lay three feet away pretending to be asleep. I wanted to run home and puke. I felt the same sensation from years ago in London, only amplified.
