Words. Sometimes. Maybe...: I am here.

Raven's taller, broader, and stronger than I am, she keeps her hair in a bun almost always, and her eyes are green. She's got big feet and hands and surprisingly small wrists. She loves shepherd's pie and ketchup sandwiches and her house always has a wide large of cereals. She's a great athlete and really good at math. Other than that, Raven has always been good at making friends. She simply exists around people and they automatically like her. It always confused me, not why people liked her, Raven's extremely nice, likeable, and tolerant, but why people liked and accepted her so quickly and easily, especially when she showed little to no interest in them.

I don't remember meeting Raven, but I remember the first summer we played softball together. She was tall and, in my memory, her eyes, though they had a certain softness to them, were always calculated, though not cold or piercing; she exuded an air of knowing. She didn't need you to talk too much, she already knew what you had to say. This didn't stop plenty of people from oversharing, taking her silence as a reason to continue talking. To me, her quiet air was always intimidating. She was an owl and I was a mouse.

To everyone else, her unmoving mouth was an invitation to run theirs. These people, gathered around her, would spew, blathering on and on, and Raven would stare back at them, unmoving. When they finally braked, slightly breathless, Raven returned with a quip, quiet and quick and if you weren't completely silent, you'd probably miss it, and then the crowd would laugh while Raven's face didn't even crack. I watched this from afar; the girls who liked Raven rarely also liked me.

Raven had a bat on her shoulder, our game was about to start. It was the fall of our sophomore year of highschool and the girls we were playing with were going to be seniors. I had been playing ball with these girls all summer and had made exactly zero friends. It was our third game with these girls, Raven's second time meeting them, and they all jokingly pushed and leaned on Raven, who has a general aversion to being touched. Raven was playing along, sort of rolling her eyes at me in between spastic outbursts from the other girls, who were all trying for her attention. I was sitting on the bench, fiddling with the label on my water bottle.

Don't get me wrong: Raven's one of the funniest people I know. She's hilarious all the time. She brings her own ridiculousness to humor. In 6th grade, I'd sleep over Raven's house all the time. She lives right down the street from where I went to school. We'd come home from softball and eat cereal. Then after we had done a sufficient job pretending to do homework, her parents would make "ziti chicken broccoli" (a bastardized version of chicken broccoli alfredo) because it was my favorite meal and Raven will eat anything. We were twelve so we definitely didn't shower, choosing instead to sleep in our own filth. Usually we were up half the night anyway, so it didn't really matter. Raven hates to read, so I felt obligated to sit there and read Harry Potter, or whatever other books had been sitting on her shelves for years. We would joke and laugh and Raven would actually smile, which she rarely did in front of her father or at softball practice. Behind closed doors or with her brother, Brendan, we would laugh. I'd come to school exhausted the next day, having not done a science project or not studied for a social studies test. (I got a C- in math that year.) My teacher would ask why I was so tired. I would explain that I had spent the night at a friend's house and that we had stayed up until 10pm. My teacher would "tsk tsk" my parents for letting me have a sleep over on a school night and then "tsk tsk" me for staying up so late. (I told my teacher that, and I quote, "Beggars can't be choosers" and wished I had told her what time I'd actually gone to bed: at least midnight.)

I've done a shitty job explaining all of this and I'm really sorry. I just grew up knowing this really great person and I can't make you all understand. She's way smarter than me, a better athlete, and a better person in general. I'm not saying that everyone who wanted to be her friend shouldn't have wanted to be her friend. They just assumed that they knew everything about her and didn't even try to get to know her. All they expected out of a friendship with her was her hilarity, not recognizing the fact that she could be anything besides comedic relief. They tried to supply something funny, she listened and then, out of what seemed like instinct, made something interesting out of it. It felt like a competition: they were all trying to make her laugh and thought that maybe if they laughed louder and harder, she might crack a smile. Raven, unambiguously a wallflower, would be in stitches over some random thing off in the distance, something embarrassing that you're hoping no one would see, that's what Raven's laughing at, that's why she just spit water out of mouth, she's laughing so hard.

I was always so confused as to why these people never had a real conversation with Raven. She's an amazing athlete and I'm sure everyone on whatever team she's playing on wants her to be their friend simply because she's the best player on the team and doesn't act like it. She talks quietly but everything she says is worthwhile, either hilarious or witty or a hard-hitting truth. She's tall and she's never tried to make herself smaller; her shoulders only slump in defeat. No one ever asked why she is the way she is. I, too, am guilty of this, though Raven and I sort of drifted apart as we were coming into the age where it was acceptable to ask these things. (So that's my excuse even if it's a shitty one.)

I always assumed we just had an understanding between us. When we talked, we conveyed more than the words that were said, depending a lot on body language and less on speech. Everything Raven does is so minimal: smiles rarely show teeth, anger flashes across her face quickly before her it returns to its normal state, her eye rolls are almost imperceptible. You have to be watching carefully. It always struck me how these people seemed like they wanted to be close to Raven, placing themselves very close to her physically, but never really paying any attention.

I don't know if I was the first person she came out to, but she texted me one day and told me she had something to tell me. I was like, "Okay, go for it." Raven's never really that formal with me, so I was kind of confused. Her text said, "I have a girlfriend." I think I said something like, "Oh. Okay. Cool." (So supportive. Good job, Sammi.) She sent me a text right afterward that just said, "Don't tell my parents."

Raven was having a tough day. We were in the batting cage. Her father was feeding balls into the pitching machine. I was standing outside. I hadn't come to hit, only to see Raven. She kept hitting pop ups. I could tell she was getting more and more frustrated, taking the time in between pitches to smooth out the dirt with her large cleats. Her father, repeating the same instruction over and over again, was getting frustrated as well. He started yelling and Raven started crying and then she yelled something unintelligible at her father and exited the batting cage. She walked to the backyard and sat on my swing set. I followed her and sat next to her on the other swing, not knowing what to say, and so we just sat.

Growing up, Raven was my best friend. I couldn't really explain why, we just were. I saw her and she saw me. Neither one of us needed to ask the other if we were on the same page; time passed and we always were in stride. Eventually, Raven and I sort of found ourselves in different spaces. The stretches of time between our visits grew and I purposely lost my phone so my parents couldn't reach me, which also made it difficult for anyone else to get into contact with me. I've been at Saint Mike's for a few weeks now and I just keep thinking about Raven and how she never seemed to get lost in a crowd, no matter how hard she tried. How I drowned at GMVS as a freshman because I refused to reach out and took everything personally. How I wish I could harness whatever it is that Raven has. Whatever it is that gets Raven friends in record time without effort. I would sit and watch everyone love her while any efforts to get the same people to like me fell flat. They waited with bated breath for her response while my attempts at interjection were cut off. Maybe I'm wrong about Raven. Maybe she enjoyed the swarms of people. Maybe she liked being able to pick who she would be friends with, as opposed to searching for them. I can only tell you what it's like from the other side.

I am here and I wish I could just choose. The selection process isn't something I have all that much say in. I'll tell you all what I told Lexi about college. The three words I used were boring, dumb, and drunk. How parties are just incessantly evolving groups of people who are talking about the same nothings with every new person who passes through the crowd. How none of these people seem to be acting like people and in doing so, perpetuate an idea they should be demolishing. How Raven's charisma would pull her from the corner and into a group of people who were interested in what she had to say. How we move from group to group without attachment and how I would much rather be laying in my bed. Wherever I am feels like somewhere I shouldn't be and I can't find a place to be.

One more thing about Raven. I know this has been a painful process, simply because I've done such a shitty job with this but whatever.

Raven and I became friends in a stairwell. A hotel stairwell. We were starving, but Raven's always hungry. It was late. I was exhausted, sitting and leaning, half-asleep, against a wall. We were eating those little jelly containers, the kinds they give out at hotels for bagels and stuff. But we were just sitting there eating them and we had three games the next day and Raven and I just sat quiet, not awkward, but still silent. We had gone into the stairwell because we were playing elevator tag with all the other girls on the team. It was one of the first tournaments and we didn't know anyone all that well. Truthfully, we were just hiding. Hiding and starving and avoiding everyone, together.