Treadmill

VII.I

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not even a pre-law major. So legalities of anything I do in my life are never at the forefront of my mind.

I know, weird way to start a section of anything. Legalities? What does that have to do with someone sleeping with their best friend's boyfriend? Literally nothing. It has everything to do with the following parts of my story, since I tried to convince myself that catching Kennedy looking for a condom with Lyla's boyfriend was just a dream.

And who knows? Maybe it was. It's far too early to give anything like that away.

But going into everything else...the law started to become blurry. Not yet. Not as of this moment in the story. But as of this moment in the story, morals started to become a little blurry. Not illegal immoralities. Completely legal immoralities. But when morals start to become blurry, it doesn't take long for the law to become blurry as well.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I should start with the morals becoming blurry.

I'm bad at this. I would apologize, but you're the one reading it of your own free will. I'm not holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read this. Or who knows. Maybe I am. Maybe the law has gotten really blurry.

Anyways. Morals. Here's where they started to fade.

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8:45 AM.

Rebecca's alarm started blaring the noise that made her have some sort of primal reaction that wanted the noise to stop as soon as humanly possible. She opened her eyes immediately and rolled over to press the 'off' button of her phone and the blaring stopped. Her heartbeat returned to normal. There had to be a better way to wake up than with a heart attack. Without a heart attack and still having the ability to wake up in the first place.

She looked around the room for a second, her brain struggling to register where she was. Was this what it felt like to be drunk? Waking up somewhere and not remembering how you got there in the first place?

No, it couldn't be. Because her brain was slowly starting to place the things around her: the dresser with clothes spilling everywhere, the vanity with more makeup than in a single Sephora, the mountain of pillows behind her head and surrounding her on the bed. Everything started to come together as Rebecca remembered that she had fallen asleep in Kennedy Abrams' room just five hours earlier.

She sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes as she did so. Five hours of sleep was not enough. By a long shot. Rebecca stretched her legs over the side of the bed and stood to her feet slowly, trying to not tip over from the spots that appeared in front of her eyes—her body's usual sign of telling her that she was dehydrated.

Rebecca walked slowly into Kennedy's bathroom, selecting a facewash that seemed good—it was in a fancy glass bottle—and using it quickly before drying her face and heading back out of the bathroom. She walked down the hallway and down the stairs, into an empty living room that had no sign of anything that had happened the night before—not even Kennedy's laptop.

The night before almost felt like it hadn't even happened. It seemed like a ludicrous idea in the daylight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows—creating a fake influencer account. It didn't make any sense; who in their right mind would be convinced of the account's legitimacy? Especially when the 'influencer' looked exactly like Kennedy, one of the better-known people at Clemson.

Rebecca shook her head slightly before grabbing her purse and keys. She walked out of the apartment, closing the door softly before turning to walk to her car. There were so many different things swirling around her head; how they had spent hours creating this fake person, how they had actually thought this would work, and how Kennedy had definitely stumbled into her own room at almost 5 AM with her best friend's boyfriend in tow.

Everything about the situation seemed odd. Bizarre, even. But Rebecca tried to ignore the thoughts in her head as she climbed into her car and headed to her own apartment, just a few minutes away, her hands on autopilot to turn the wheel in the right directions. It seemed impossible that she had met Kennedy just three days earlier. Three days and her life was doing somersaults.

Rebecca walked into her apartment quickly and ran to her room, tearing off her work uniform that she had been wearing for over 15 hours and putting on sweats to go to class in. It was definitely not a day for any type of classy outfit; nothing in her wanted to do her hair or makeup, and nothing about the clock ticking in her head told Rebecca that she had the time to do so.

She grabbed her backpack off of her bed and left her room, turning off the light quickly before heading into the kitchen. As she grabbed a banana off the counter to take with her on her way to class, Rebecca heard a voice from behind her.

"Are you just getting home?"

Rebecca turned to see Celeste standing in the doorway, head cocked to the side and pajamas still on. She was holding her phone in one hand and a smoothie in the other, clearly confused as to why her best friend was running out the door after just barely walking in it.

"Yeah, I am." Rebecca nodded, shrugging slightly. "How was your night?"

Celeste raised her eyebrows and took a sip of her smoothie.

"It was fine. What were you doing? Where were you?"

Rebecca paused for a second. Just a second. She wanted to tell Celeste about the account. About the crazy idea she and Kennedy had come up with and had decided to spend their entire night working on. She wanted to say how stupid the whole thing was and how she was sure it would all catapult to a stop within the next 24 hours.

But something inside of her knew that the less people who knew about the fake account, the better.

"I had to work on a project with Kennedy Abrams." Rebecca replied. Technically, she wasn't exactly lying. It simply wasn't a school project. "It went really late, so I decided to crash at her place."

Celeste looked at Rebecca carefully.

"That's it? It was just a school project?"

Ah. Here came the lying part.

Rebecca nodded.

"Yeah. That was it."

Celeste was quiet for a moment, sipping her smoothie slowly.

"If you say so."

Rebecca nodded again.

"I do say so." She laughed uncomfortably, "But I really should be getting to class, I'm gonna be late. I'll see you later."

Celeste was silent as Rebecca turned around and ran out of the front door. She couldn't remember the last time she had lied to her best friend. She couldn't remember the last time she had had any reason to keep something from Celeste.

And then in walked Kennedy Abrams.