This is Danger. She plays roller derby. She is a scary person. I tried to use a small picture in order to avoid inadvertently granting her the power to control all of you through the Internet.

Danger’s talents include making people sweat by staring at them, wrapping her voice around people’s spinal cords in order to control their movements, and adjusting her proximity to newbies in order to diminish their bladder control. Jammers have stated that when Danger hits them, they have to look back on the track to make sure they had not pooped out their kidneys.

If you are a new girl and you are resting your hands on your legs as you skate around the track, Danger will scream at you to take your hands off your legs in a manner so compelling that you may never touch your own thighs again, in any context, instead choosing to walk around for the rest of your life with your hands pulled in close to your ribcage as if you are a small child whose hands have just been slapped with a ruler. Decades from now, when you are old and withered and your derby days are long behind you, you will refuse to use a walker despite hours of cajoling on the part of nursing-home staff, so concerned are you with the prospect of incidental hand-thigh contact.

Danger has been playing derby for as long as it’s existed here, and in addition to having won Meanest Rollergirl a multitude of times, she is also very good at the sport itself. Which is why one of my favorite fantasy pranks involves paying a new girl twenty bucks to, after her very first practice at the rink, walk up to Danger, pat her affectionately on the shoulder, and say, “Hey, you looked good out there today,” in the most patronizing voice possible. There are two problems with this plan: first, I don’t really want the death of a newbie on my conscience; second, even the most expendable newbies aren’t stupid enough to do it. Danger is that towering headstone in the middle of the graveyard that you dare your friends to run up and touch in the middle of the night without getting caught by cemetery security and/or murdered by an evil spirit (hint: Danger).

To the untrained eye, my friendship with Danger is unlikely. In a zombie invasion, Danger would be running down the street with a chainsaw in each hand, decapitating zombies while cussing a blue streak. She would probably be on her way to my house, where I would either be 1) clad in my underpants and asleep with my face in a plate of hummus, utterly unaware that a zombie invasion was under way or 2) trying to soothe the poor agitated zombie that I had corralled in my bathroom and named Steve. I would be shoving slices of pizza under the door and talking to Steve in a soothing voice when she found me, gave me two seconds to say goodbye to my new friend Steve despite my protests, and then threw me over one shoulder. I would explain to her that it wasn’t the zombies’ fault they were so hungry while she bashed their skulls in, the poor things, and made absentminded “mmm hmmmm” noises.

We’re very different, is my point, and yes, Zombieland was an uncomfortable movie for both of us.

When I decided that I wanted to be friends with this person, there was really only one way to go about it, which was to declare my allegiance in some way that did not garner her disdain. It was tricky, because I couldn’t be too cool or blase about it. Danger can smell fear, so any faked attempts at coolness would cause her to do that thing she does where she raises one eyebrow while otherwise maintaining the ominously resolute expression of some sort of stone goddess on a godforsaken island somewhere. No interpretation of this reaction has ever been offered to me, but I’m pretty sure that it means you are not at all cool, you and Danger both know it, and you should probably just go kill yourself and get it over with. On the other hand, simpering and groveling before her would be even worse, and would likely result in death by eyeball laser beams, like the ones from those sphinx-things in Neverending Story.

Needless to say, I did not want to hear THOSE drumbeats, so I figured I would avoid either extreme with simple honesty. So I skated up next to her, confessed to her that she had become the dominant force behind my submissive social existence, and said, “You know, I think that if we were two monkeys in the jungle, I would be trying to pick lice off of you right now.” And she did not raise her eyebrow and I did not get zapped by lasers. If I am remembering it right, she made a startling and unfamiliar noise that sounded kind of like laughing, except it was coming out of her face so I guess it was something else. Not long after that, we were good friends. And by “not long after that,” I mean “damn near a year and a half later, after I had scrambled through an invisible social gauntlet in which I completed a rigorous battery of unspoken tests.”

Also, she knocked me down a bunch of times and jabbed me in the ribs at random intervals, because no one wants to be friends with a crybaby. Danger has VERY discriminating tastes.

I feel that any remaining progress to be made in our friendship was achieved during the 2009 season, during which I spent a lot of time partnered with Danger in the pack. This essentially meant that I scrambled to do whatever she told me to while she saved both our asses. If I got knocked onto the floor during practice and Danger yelled at me to GET UP UP UP UP UP UP!, I did not clamber to my feet like a mere mortal. I was actually lifted onto my skates like a puppet attached to the cosmic string that is Danger’s unadulterated willpower (commonly referred to in casual conversation as “the Tether”). Sometimes she would realize that someone was gunning for her and then yank me backward in order to propel herself forward, stretching my jersey cartoon-character style while sucking me back with the force of a black hole while I scrabbled on my wheels like a drunk baby giraffe. I eventually stopped falling down when this happened. “Look who learned to stay on her skates like a big girl!” Danger would muse afterward. This is her version of effusive praise and should be taken as such.

I hope I’m not implying that she is not a delightful person. She actually is a delightful person, but if I say so it will make her so very angry, so you’re going to have to pretend that I didn’t. (Sometimes she is even very kind and went quite far out of her way to help me throughout my split with Jeff. YOU DID NOT HEAR THIS FROM ME.) Thus, I specifically avoid publicly pointing out that she acts tough, but on the inside, she is in fact my squishy-wishy Dangerkins. If I dared to tell any of you that, she would punch me hard enough to necessitate a defibrillator, so it’s best that I keep it to myself for the time being.

At this point you’re asking yourself, “What on earth does this have to do with Jen’s book?”

Um, only EVERYTHING.

Only Danger has the power to make my book happen, you see. All of my other friends are sort of mundane in the sense that I am not actively terrified of them. When Danger says jump? I do not ask how high—not because I am not dying to know, but because the question would necessitate an unacceptable delay between her command and my obedience.

This tendency is deeply compulsive, yes, but could also be quite useful if, say, I had asked Danger to pound on my door on May 2, 2010, and collect a full copy of my completed manuscript …

… and that’s exactly what I did …

… and Danger takes her promises VERY. SERIOUSLY.

She now tracks my progress with actual concern, because she knows that won’t enjoy bending my limbs into funny shapes if I do not comply with her request for the book when she arrives. Despite her distaste for hearing me scream like a rabbit in a trap, she won’t hesitate to manipulate my body into something resembling a balloon animal if that’s what it takes, because she has a lot of integrity that way. Anytime Danger takes it upon herself to do you a solid, her commitment to quality is unsurpassed. I’m pretty sure that if I told her to hide some cookies from me so I wouldn’t eat them, midnight would find her out in the middle of Sahara with her footsteps trailing to infinity behind her, holding a flashlight, a trowel, and the Tupperware bin of cookies. Note that the Sahara is in Africa and I didn’t even mention the cookies until right before dinnertime.

Anyway! My point is that I finally have an answer for everyone who asks, “So when are you going to submit that book to an agent, anyway?”: May 2. May 2 is the day that I will mail it out to various publishing professionals. Danger is going to take a picture of me standing by that big blue mailbox and maintain a faux atmosphere of cheery celebration while I smile weakly and try not to throw up the ice cream cone I have told her to put in my hand as a distractionary mechanism.

And then Danger is going to go home WITH MY MANUSCRIPT and maybe actually read it while I writhe on the floor while contemplating the sweet release that death by random falling anvil would bring, if only the universe would arrange it. Also, I may or may not succeed in resisting the urge to call her every four minutes. Does she like the book? She does, right? She shouldn’t say she does unless she really does. I mean, the last thing I want is to be PATRONIZED. BUT SHE DOES LIKE IT, RIGHT????

I’m not sure which one of us I pity more in this scenario, now that I think about it.

The good news is that I have never felt less doubt that this is going to happen, now that I really don’t have a choice. I could have hired an assassin to put a bullet in my forehead on May 2 if I did not finish the final draft of my manuscript, and I would only feel marginally more confident that I am going to pull this off. If I wind up faking my own death on May 1 and joining the witness protection program (is “John Connor” taken?), I guess we’ll know that I was wrong.

Not that it would stop her, of course. I just want to live long enough to turn thirty either way.