Treadmill

IV.I

I played a lot of volleyball in high school. I had never played it while hungover, next to a girl I wasn't sure if I admired or was completely in love with, surrounded by people who could easily be playing for the university's team but weren't for some unknown reason.

Point is, I was out of my league in multiple uses of the saying.

What was I doing? Looking back, I feel like I made a complete fool of myself throughout that entire morning. The coffee didn't help that much, we were thirty-one minutes late to the game in the first place, and I was clearly there as a pity invite. I believed.

But something about this new world, this world of parties on the weekend instead of binge watching entire seasons of Netflix shows, this world of drinking and forgetting how I got home, this world of solving hangovers within minutes so I could play a quick game of volleyball with absolute giants of girls—something about this world made me want nothing but to stay in it.

I mean, I had turned down a hot guy at a party. There was nothing I couldn't do.

Except ask certain questions of certain people in this new world I was slowly discovering I could very easily be a part of.

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"I was a complete embarrassment. You can tell me, I can take it."

11: 58 AM and Rebecca felt as if her entire body was bruised. Her knees, her elbows, her forearms, her butt from falling on it more times than she had in her entire high school volleyball career. The other girls, Kennedy's friends, had been absolute monsters on the court. They were there to win, and they could smell a weak link like nobody Rebecca had ever seen before. They had devoured her and spit her back out after every game to repeat the process all over again.

And she had loved every second of it.

Being a part of something, even if she was on the losing side, felt like a high she would never be able to get from anything else. Not that she had ever tried to get high from anything else, but she assumed that this high was much better. The girls—in between games, when they weren't trying to murder her—had been so kind. They had complimented her shorts and her haircut and said how much they loved her sneakers and asked where they could get a similar pair. Rebecca had lied through her teeth, saying she got them from Adidas in a different country so that they wouldn't try to find them and figure out that she had actually bought them for $13.95 at a Goodwill in Greensboro her sophomore year of high school.

They were so genuinely kind to her. And she didn't know that people who were as gorgeous and talented and athletic as those girls were capable of being anything but terrible. That's how the girls in her high school had been. So she had kind of just...assumed that everyone was like that.

Apparently, that was not the case.

"You were definitely not a complete embarrassment." Kennedy laughed as she threw her gym bag in the backseat and pulled on her seatbelt, "A little bit of an embarrassment, sure. But not a complete one. Maybe a quarter."

Rebecca rolled her eyes as Kennedy laughed at her own joke.

"But in all seriousness, you were great. Super impressive for someone who hasn't played since high school. These girls play at least three times a week, so you were up against some fierce competition." She punched Rebecca in the arm slightly as she backed out of the parking space and started for the road, "You'll get better the more you play with us."

Rebecca felt herself blush slightly at the insinuation that there would be more opportunities for her to play with those girls, and Kennedy, and tried to hide her face from the car's driver. The pink cheeks were more embarrassing than her being unable to spike a ball that had been essentially delivered for her to do just that.