Emma

“Sebastian is even worse than when he was a kid,” I said to Sophia as we both sat down and grabbed some dinner at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge. I’d been in town for a couple of weeks, and we’d planned to meet up tonight in East Village. It was as if we were reliving our college days. One thing I loved about this place was the cocktails; no place beat them. This place was the reason why I went up a couple of dress sizes. The damn cocktails and food were to die for.

“Don’t be like that; it’s been how many years?”

I looked up and saw that the same Christmas lights were hung above the bar. It was as if this place was stuck in time: we’d changed, but the place hadn’t one little bit.

“Can you believe that they still have that?”

I pointed to the lights, thinking about the past.

She nodded, “Sure, it’s the bar’s trademark. They’re not going to get rid of that. It would be like if they stopped serving cocktails.”

She had a point there.

“The atmosphere of the crowd, the music and everything, brings back memories.”

I felt remorseful, even with everyone having a good time. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let my hair down. “What happened to us?”

She held out her hand as I remembered her doing back in college. We were roommates, and we had a don’t-mess-with-us attitude. But that was when we were teenagers and medicine got tougher every year. The next thing I knew time had just swept on by and I was a resident with no friends, apart from the other residents. The course took over my whole life, and I kind of forgot who my friends were, and by the time I did remember it was too late, and they had all moved on.

“Medicine,” I sighed as I smiled back at her.

She stroked my hand for a minute with sadness in her eyes, “I know, but you never called or wrote back. I thought that maybe I did something wrong.”

Sophia hadn’t aged since we left college ten years ago. She looked the same, with her dyed blonde hair, which was totally unnecessary because she had natural beauty. Her high cheekbones and dark eyes made everyone think that she was going to be a model one day. She just needed to be snapped up by an agent or scout, but she was hell-bent on being a journalist. I could never get my head around this, but then again she used to say the same thing about me and medicine.

“Nah, I just got caught up, obsessed with being a doctor. The whole thing was nuts. Before I knew it, you had left college and hooked up with— what’s his name again?”

She rolled her eyes, not wanting to say, let alone think about the guy that broke her heart and had slept with nearly every cheer on the squad. I thought she had moved on, but by the way, she said his name I could tell that she hadn’t. “Anthony!”

I quickly changed the subject, “Anyway, you were in love with that jerk. I had to be a doctor otherwise life was not worth living, and that was it. But I’ll like to think that now that I’m in town we can pick up where we left off.”

She grabbed my hand and said, “You try and keep me away.”

I kissed her hand as I had done so many times, like the time she thought that she wouldn’t make it through college. I had reassured her and promised to be a shoulder for her to cry on and the person she could lean on if she had any problems. Now I felt like a stranger. I never even thought that was possible.

Even my parents used to ask me from time to time if I had heard from Sophia and I always said no. My mom always encouraged me to give her a call. But suddenly it had been one month, then two, then three. By the time it got to a year. I just didn’t know what to say.

‘Hey Sophia, it’s your best friend from college. Do you remember me?’

I kept tabs on her, saw her career blooming and I was proud to know that the shy girl who’d had such low self-esteem when it came to her academic studies had blossomed into one of the top reporters in New York.

“You know Sebastian has got a lot on his mind; you just have to give him a chance.”

She nodded as if she was telling me, rather than asking me, to give him another try. I had already decided that I was going to tell Coach Thomas that Sebastian was jeopardizing his recovery by partying and then let him suffer the consequences. After all, I was his doctor, not his babysitter.

“I need this job,” I pleaded with her, because I couldn’t cover for him as it would be unethical. I had just reconnected with her. Now that we were in the same town. I didn’t want us to fall apart again.

“So does he.” She paused before continuing. “He’s scared that this could be the end of the road for him. He’s been under the doctor’s knife so many times and he’s taken more meds than candy at a candy store. He’s just fucking scared Emma. You know what it’s like to be scared? He may act all tough, but underneath it all he’s a pussycat.”

There were loads of players that had been retiring early over the last couple of years. I knew that the NFL was looking at ways of reducing it, but there was no way around it. Our bodies are delicate, no matter how much we train, and football was a high-contact sport. I’d seen the way the guys were so rough; it was part of the game. There was no way around it. Unless they got robots to play for them, guys would have to accept that three years was the average football career, and that was all they were going to get out of the game.

I didn’t know what to tell her. Sebastian had every right to think that it was the end of the road. I just had to make sure that it was only the end of his career and not his life. There had been a couple of guys killed in a game lately; they hadn’t admitted that they were in pain. A snap of a neck and they were leaving the field in a body bag.

“Mom’s cancer could be back, and I think that’s got a lot to do with it. He’s dealing with a lot of things recently and that’s another one on top of them. He may come across moody…he’s my brother, and you know guys don’t do well with emotional stuff. Just give him a break or at least try? Okay?”

I nodded, thinking about what she had just said. We both had problems, and maybe she was right. I was too harsh on Sebastian. Their mom had suffered breast cancer when Sophia was in high school, and as soon as Sophia said that her mom wasn’t well, I felt a chill down my spine at the idea that it could be back.

“Yeah, I’m kind of going through problems with Dad too. Some scam artist managed to take money from him; I don’t know all the details. Anyway, he’s taken a third loan on the house, and the repayments are through the roof. I’m hoping this job will give me the extra needed to pay some of the money off that they owe on the house.”

“Wow, I never knew banks did that. They’re giving out third loans now?”

She chewed on her fries as the food had been sitting in front of us untouched for a while now. I hadn’t told her the complete story. She was right: it wasn’t exactly that way. I had sold my apartment and was living in a shoe box, and a big chunk of my wages was being used to pay the loan. We both had issues with our parents, and the depressing path the conversation was taking kind of made the pair of us lose our appetite.

“We came here to reconnect and have fun. Not to eat and drown our sorrows,” she reminded me. “God, if they could see us now. Freshman year, we were the party girls.”

She laughed, “And by sophomore we were known as the boring girls.”

I waved a finger at her, “But then we got our reputation back by senior year.”

She nodded her head slightly. “Just because we did one too many dares at one party. That’s when we started to drift apart, but we’re not going to think about that now. We’ll eat get a couple of cocktails and have some fun. What do you say?”

“Sophia, I say that you have a deal!”