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100facesof.me

Day 20 of 100

Extreme black-and-white close-up of a man's eyes, intense gaze, skin texture and faint scar visible, dramatic shadow across right side.
Day 20 / 100 Weight 358.1 (-3.1 lbs) Stable but worried about Sydney Sony A7R5 50mm f/3.2 2.0sec ISO 100
0:00 —:—
Narration

“You broke my nose.”

At least I think that is what I said to my high school crush as I tried to capture all the blood flowing from my nose with both of my hands.

My best friend in high school, John, was part of a youth group that played broom ball on Wednesday nights in the winter. It was California, so we played on an indoor ice rink at the local shopping mall. If you have never played broom ball before, it is a ton of fun. You wear your sneakers on the ice, and cut down a broom to about 3.5 feet and wrapped the bristles in duct tape until it made a paddle.

The rules were the same as ice hockey, but there was no body checking and we didn’t wear pads.

John’s youth group was associated with his church, which as a Jewish kid, already made me awkward, but it was Valerie that turned my awkward shyness into a full blown coming of age comedy. She would say hi, and letters came out of my mouth. Not sure they collected into words, but she was nice enough to never make me feel too stupid. Or at least never add to the stupid I felt about myself.

We broke into two teams, and I was sad to see Valerie on the opposite team. I agreed to be our goalie as I had perfected the art of laziness even in high school, and I walked down to the goal. Of all the players, only the goalie got some pads, and I pulled them on over my jeans.

As I finished putting on the pads I looked up to see Valerie standing right in front of me smiling. “I’m going to score a goal on you!” She giggled. I’m pretty sure I uttered sounds in response.

The game went on and I sat there thinking about a thousand things I could say to Valerie that would make her immediately more interested in me than the game, and in the midst of coming up with yet another not quite perfect sentence, the ball settled down right in front of me.

I dove down to grab it and as I did, I looked up to see Valerie surrounded by light throwing her stick over her shoulder like a baseball and then swinging like she played for the SF Giants.

Lights exploded; my eyes watered; I grabbed the ball and threw it to a teammate.

“Oh. My. Gawd.” I saw Valerie pointing to the ice where a pool of blood was quickly forming.

“Well,” I thought. “At least she will never forget me.”