blue ✧ gxg ✧

✧ prelude ✧

"do you remember me?"

i woke up in a jolt. marimba was blaring loudly through my bedroom. i wanted to die, that only meant one thing, the first day of swim practice junior year. i never really thought i'd have this much anxiety for something i was so used to. i've been swimming since sixth grade, but high school swimming was always different. there was a pool full of pretty skinny white girls that definitely didn't want to talk to me. and no, i had my own friends, but they all quit the team by high school. luckily i still had marlise, she was my closest friend in and out of the pool, yet it almost seemed obvious that her and i were the only black girls on the team. all of my friends had graduated the year before. i had absolutely no one, stuck in my shell of anxiety i felt like i could not do this. not without my friends.

i got up anyway. my heart hammered in my chest the entire time.

to marlise: you ready for hell? lmao.

from marlise: fuck my life bro. be there soon.

i made my breakfast watching the clock tick closer and closer to 7:15 a.m. this was an ungodly hour to be awake in august, and my eyes felt like they were burning. going to swimming always made me feel more anti-social than i should have. i have a group of great friends, but i just can't fit in with those girls on the team, making marlise, eve, and i look like complete loners. eve was a year younger than us, but for some reason she saw that those girls were snobby too, and it had nothing to do with them being white, it was just that we weren't. but eve didn't care how we were, she was a cute ginger, loud and sometimes annoying, but we were all we had.
my first two years on the team i had no support or inclination to be apart of anything social by my upperclassman.

but now.
i was apart of the upperclassman.

i still felt like a freshman.

my phone statutes to vibrate and i gathered my green swim bag and my water bottle. i was actually coming back to a team that gave me so much social anxiety. i honestly didn't know what i was doing or why. but every year i hopes it would get better, and it never really did.

i rushed out to eve's car and got in the passenger side, she had just gotten her license. fucking freedom.

i let out a huge sigh and looked over to her with a nervous smile, "bro."

she frowned, "it's gonna suck just don't talk about it."

i nodded and grabbed the aux cord letting the music fill the car singing along to ariana grande.

we pulled up to my school and i felt myself having war flashbacks. "why are we doing this voluntarily? our parents could use the 400 dollars for something useful! like...books or some shit i don't know," i groaned.

"we literally pay hundreds of dollars every year to be drowned," she laughed, putting the car in park.

"i'm not ready."

"me neither."

"ugh, i'm not gonna have anyone to talk to, fuck my life," i mumbled opening my door. marlise was enough. but i wished that the other girls weren't so snobby, and we could actually click like marlise and eve.

"maybe there will be some nice freshman. maybe even some diversity," she laughed. i rolled my eyes, yeah right.

"according to twitter, black people don't swim," i said with a laugh. kidding of course, but all of my friends black and white thought that marlise and i were literally on crack to be doing a sport as hard as swimming. they all refused to try it. all 8 of them.

marlise laughed and shook her head and we walked down to the locker room. i waved hi to a few people, but mostly just kept my head down. and then i picked my new locker since we switched every year. i made sure it was right next to marlise's.