venus ⋮ peter parker

8.

E i g h t

✷

Calliope Liu had not been having a good day.

It had already started out poorly because she had been up until the early hours of the morning the night before finishing an essay for her history class, and she was pretty sure she had answered the prompt entirely wrong. Then, Calliope went to her math class and discovered she didn't get as great of a score as she had hoped on the test she had studied hours for. All her classes seemed to drag on for hours, even more than usual. The cherry on top was Penelope informing her during lunch that they were having an emergency cheer practice straight after school, so Calliope couldn't escape back to her apartment.

So, Calliope was already in a sour mood when she got to the girl's locker room. She was trying to avoid conversations with all the other girls as she got dressed in her practice uniform. The only person she spoke to was Penelope, and even then Calliope only managed to give responses with as little words as possible.

This didn't matter as much to Penelope, who was completely content filling the silence. "You're about to walk into a disaster when you come to Academic Decathlon practice tomorrow. Without that bitch Peter there, it's like everyone's fallen apart at the seams. Who knew he was actually the glue holding our team together?"

Calliope shook her head. "What have I said about calling Peter Parker a 'bitch'?"

"I hate the fact that you two are apparently friends now," Penelope grumbled.

Overhearing the conversation, Phoebe Atkinson turned to look at Calliope and loudly questioned, "Since when are you friends with Peter Parker?"

"Because Peter's my lab partner and he's nice to me..." Calliope responded, her eyes narrowing as she frowned at her. She had to stop herself from adding on 'which is more than what I can say about you guys right now'.

"Didn't even realize Peter even had friends besides Ned," Alicia Hamilton commented in a snide tone. "He's gone all reclusive and weird ever since he got that internship at Stark. I think the only person who seems him outside of school is Ned."

"He's, like, always disappearing at random times and doesn't do any extracurriculars," Phoebe added. "I'm pretty sure he's a male escort."

"Well that's certainly a jump," Calliope remarked. "He could just have a lot going on at home on top of that Stark internship.

"Also Peter's not hot enough to be a male escort," Penelope commented. She then winced and glared at her best friend when Calliope elbowed her in the side.

"I don't get why you guys are in my business so much anyways," Calliope continued as she reached up to tighten her ponytail, trying her best to hide how annoyed she was. "I know you guys love gossip, and I do too most of time, but there's literally nothing here to talk about. I don't want to deal with that, I'd rather just focus on practice."

✷

By the time cheer practice was coming to a close, all Calliope wanted to do was curl in her bed and ignore everything from the outside world while she watched some sort of trashy Netflix rom com. Her annoyance with her teammates had persisted all throughout practice that afternoon, and her coach seemed to be especially on edge, snapping at the group over every miniscule mistake. It didn't help that the basketball team was practicing on the other half of the gym, and every time Calliope happened to glance over she saw Cole leering at her.

However, as Calliope would discover, her escape from cheer practice wouldn't come quite as easily as she had hoped.

"Hey! Hey, Calliope!"