Synonym

Chapter 1

I was violently awoken by pounding and yelling at the wooden door of my one bedroom apartment. My eyes were nearly open when I heard the door burst open.

"I swear to God if you two are having sex again I am going to gouge my eyes out and feed them to you!" I didn't even register the voice pounding through the walls of the spacious off campus apartment. Thanks to our fathers, Finn and I had a nice view of the city and floor to ceiling windows in the living room and kitchen.

I was still half asleep when Finn groaned from underneath me and I rolled off of him, clutching the white comforter to my bare chest. The bedroom door was already open so there was nothing to stop the screaming banshee from bursting into our room like death himself.

"Seriously? You guys were supposed to be up an hour ago to get breakfast yet here you are, laying in bed." The monster continued to practically screech. It doesn't matter your state of mind, everything in the morning sounds infinitely louder and more painful.

Finn opened his eyes, looked at his friend and then dropped his head right back down onto the pillow. He let out a groan of annoyance. "Not everyone wants to get up at 3:30am to get breakfast, Jason. Practice isn't until 5 today so leave us alone." Finn practically spat Jason's name like it was venom.

We loved Jason, we really did, but at this point in time we hated him. He was a morning person; we were not.

"It's 4:30. We leave in ten minutes." He said plainly before closing the door and walking out of the bedroom.

"Remind me why we thought having a friend 5 years older than us was a good idea?" I muttered. "It's like he's my father."

"We didn't exactly choose him." Finn retorted while sitting up in bed. I dragged my naked boy from between the sheets and fished for some clothing in my drawers. Once I found my official practice uniform, it threw it on and brushed my hair into a ponytail.

Finn was much more sluggish with his movements, but he got it done in about the same amount of time. I brushed my teeth before exiting the large bathroom so Finn could brush his. When I paraded myself into the main part of our apartment, Jason was laying on our black leather couch while scrolling through his phone.

I wordlessly slipped on my cleats. They were the same as everyone else's on the team; white body with a blue tongue and laces, grey plastic spikes, and a red Nike swoosh. I actually had three or four pairs, but I was saving those until these ones got too beat up to wear. Not to mention my two pairs of white Under Armor cleats with Maryland's signature red 'M' on the tongue and the Retro cleats that were red at the heal and faded into white at the toe. The was on top of the Wounded Warrior cleats with one foot in stripes and one in stars. Truth be told, this apartment had around 16 pairs of cleats between the two of us.

I had more cleats than I had friends.

That's sad but true.

Jason stood from the couch when Finn stumbled out of our bedroom only to reach the fridge and down a cup of coffee from yesterday. It must have tasted stale because his eyes went wide for a second before he shook his head side to side in an attempt to forget the taste plaguing his mouth.

I picked up my gear bag from the dark stained wooden floor and my everyday stick. While the national team never had uniform sticks, the Olympic team was going all out. My stick was a d-pole that started red and faded into white at the top of the shaft. The crosse was blue and the netting was white. They even had our last names printed in blue near the top of the shaft.

Somehow they knew we're all idiots who would get our sticks mixed up.

What can I say, we get hit in the head a lot.