Treadmill

XXI.I

We're going to get into the present now. It's going to feel weird, because now I can't foreshadow anything, because...I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know exactly where everything is going, because we're getting to the...right now.

Those last few sentences were super repetitive and pointless, but I'm keeping them in this literally just because I can. Anyway.

Everything about my life felt ridiculous at this point. I felt like I could have avoided what happened to Hank Wilcox, I felt like I could have avoided becoming dependent on a stupid Instagram account for my income, I felt like I could have avoided becoming friends with Kennedy Abrams in the first place.

But then I started thinking about it a little bit more.

Could I have avoided becoming friends with Kennedy Abrams? Everything about those first few weeks—shit, even those first few days—of my friendship with Kennedy seemed like an absolute whirlwind of activities and parties and guys and everything I had been pining away for from the second I entered college. I had become friends with people I never thought would look twice at me, and I felt like I had finally become someone who I had spent my entire life trying to become.

I was someone who other people wanted to be around.

But those first few weeks of parties and drinking and sex and newfound popularity had masked what was going on: I had become fast and serious friends with a girl who I knew essentially nothing about.

Even in November, months after everything had gone down, I couldn't really name much about Kennedy other than her roommates' names. Her roommates' names and then everything that Leo Lutz had told me about her—if I decided to believe it.

Kennedy, in all her brilliance and all her cunning, had managed to become friends with a girl who wouldn't ask questions, would go along with whatever plan she concocted, and blindly follow her wherever she went. She did it in a matter of days and created a 'friendship' that she could use as an easy copout for one of the worst things a person could do in their lives.

As the days continue to go on and I continue to think about everything that had happened in the last few months, I feel more and more convinced that my friendship with Kennedy Abrams had been nothing but a coverup...with a little fame on the side.

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Rebecca stared at her phone lying on the table for a few moments, letting herself forget about the lawyer who she had just hung up on and about the text from Leo instructing her to not speak to anyone about what had happened. She couldn't say anything to help Kennedy. And somehow, admitting that she was there and had seen everything felt like it would help Kennedy—her lawyers would have someone else to pin the blame on. They would be able to figure something out.

Because when it came down to it, three people had been there that night, and one of them was dead. The other two would have to duke it out on which story people believed. Rebecca already had law enforcement on her side. She didn't want to lose that edge quite yet.

She picked up her phone and opened it, ignoring the missed call from the lawyer that popped up in her notifications as she did so. She opened up Instagram to see if anything had happened with Drew Parley's Instagram account in the past few hours since Kennedy had been arrested. Nothing looked abnormal—the account was still sitting pretty at hundreds of thousands of followers, and there were still new comments popping up on the photo that had been posted the night before. Rebecca tried not to feel envious of the stream of 'You're so pretty!' and 'I wish I looked like you!' comments that poured into every post. Kennedy may have had the looks, but she also had some dark stuff going on in her head that no one else seemed to know anything about.

Rebecca swiped away from @drewboo and started scrolling through her feed. She liked a few pictures from her own friends and a few from Kennedy's friends. She liked the picture of Lyla and Doug acting like nothing had happened to their relationship in the last few weeks. She liked the picture of Celeste and Spencer posing for the camera in front of some waterfall that Rebecca had never seen before.

She was about to exit out of the app when a caption caught her eye.

'Hey guys! So I don't know if any of you noticed but I changed my username this past week while working on updating some things about my social media, and it's been leading up to this! I absolutely love writing and sometimes I want to be able to write even if it's not in book form. I've always wanted to have a blog about anything I want, not just about my books, so I've finally decided to go for it. My blog is called "Shelf Awareness" (get it, because I'm an author and books go on a shelf) and the link is in my bio! I sincerely hope you'll give it a chance and hopefully enjoy the posts I write for it. Thank you guys for always being supportive!'

Rebecca looked at the caption of the random girl's post for a second before turning off her phone and sitting back in her seat slightly. A blog.

She could write a blog.

She didn't want to sell the Kennedy story to a newspaper or magazine because of everything that still had to be resolved, but she wanted people to know about it. She wanted people to know what had happened to her and how she was an innocent bystander in this entire situation. How she had nothing to do with the terrible things that had happened. Rebecca could write a blog about everything and if people read it, great. And if they didn't? At least she could get her feelings out about everything that had happened to her. She felt like if she didn't get her feelings out in some sort of healthy way, she was just going to end up punching Kennedy in the jaw when she saw her again.

If she saw her again.

Rebecca opened her computer and followed the link to the girl's blog, taking note of the website creator she had used to make it. Rebecca went to the website creator's homepage and clicked 'Start Your Website.' She went through every step to make the site and create the blog, before finally coming to a point where she had to name it. She thought for a moment before simply titling it, 'Everything Up To Now.'

She published the site and went in to start her first blog post. Staring at the blank screen in front of her ready to be typed on, she paused. Where was she supposed to start? Everything seemed to have happened so quickly and she wasn't quite sure how to handle it all.

So, Rebecca started from the first thing she remembered about her meeting Kennedy Abrams.

I fell on a treadmill today.

Completely.

Catapulted right off of the thing.

And somehow, I think that flying off of that treadmill at whatever the level 7.4 equates to in miles per hour might have made my life a lot better. Or possibly a great deal worse.

I'll start earlier than that, though.