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.

"Do you want to grab smoothies or something?" Kennedy asked as she pulled onto the main road in the opposite direction of Rebecca's apartment, "I'm starved."

"Sure." Rebecca nodded, "That would be great."

The two drove until they found a Smoothie King a little over five minutes from the rec center. They went to get out of the car and Rebecca went to grab her wallet before Kennedy saw and stopped her.

"Hey, my idea, my treat. Don't worry about it."

Rebecca nodded her thanks and closed the car door behind her, walking into the Smoothie King to find it relatively empty for a Sunday afternoon. Only five people were in the entire shop: two workers standing behind the counter, a couple in workout clothes drinking one large green smoothie in the back corner, and a 50-something woman standing in front of the counter getting ready to place her order but failing to get the attention of either of the two employees. They seemed to be having a riveting conversation between the two of them, plainly ignoring the woman as she tried to wave her arms slightly at them.

"What are you gonna get?" Rebecca asked Kennedy, eyeing the menu. They had so many different options, with so many different categories: some to help build muscle, some to lose weight, some to get leaner without losing the muscle, some to recover from a workout, some to just...drink.

"I think I'm gonna go with the Original High Protein Pineapple, from the Fitness Blends." Kennedy replied slowly, reading the menu from where they stood behind the woman who still hadn't gotten an employee's attention. "I'm really trying to build muscle right now, not cut down at all."

Rebecca nodded, feeling a twinge of jealousy pierce her chest. What would it be like to not desperately want to lose weight at all times?

"I think I'm gonna get the Slim-N-Trim Dark Chocolate Strawberry." Rebecca mused quietly, eyeing the section of the menu entitled 'Slim Blends.' It looked good enough, with the 20 oz option containing only 200 calories.

"Are you kidding?" Kennedy laughed, looking over at Rebecca, "You're thinner than I am. Get a real flavor."

Rebecca shook her head.

"Chocolate strawberry sounds good right now, though." She lied, "It's not because of the slim thing."

"If you say so." Kennedy shrugged, turning her attention towards the two employees behind the counter. "Excuse me! We're ready to order."

One of the two, the girl, came up to the register to take their order, looking at the frustrated middle-aged woman in confusion.

"Ma'am, they asked first."

Rebecca stifled her laughter as the woman backed away from the counter and left the store, huffing and puffing as she went.

"Sorry about that." The girl addressed Kennedy and Rebecca, "Last time she came in, she threw her smoothie at my boyfriend because it 'had too much blueberry.'" She nodded towards the guy behind the counter who she had been talking to. "She ordered the Blueberry Heaven smoothie."

Kennedy and Rebecca both laughed and expressed their disdain at the woman before placing their orders and stepping back from the counter to wait.

"So, I don't know anything about you." Kennedy commented as the two sat down with their smoothies six minutes later. "Just that you like to fall off of treadmills."

"My favorite activity, actually." Rebecca rolled her eyes and took a sip of her smoothie, "There's not a ton to know, really."

"Well, give me the basic rundown." Kennedy instructed, leaning back in her seat slightly, "Like your family, your major, where you grew up."

"Well," Rebecca thought for a second. "I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. My parents still live there, but they're empty nesters since I'm gone. My older sister, Hannah, is married and has a little two-month-old baby girl named Bella. She's definitely the cutest thing I have ever seen in my entire life." She laughed. Bella had been born at the beginning of July and Rebecca had made the drive up to Raleigh, where her sister and brother-in-law lived, to see her first niece. She had the chubbiest cheeks and huge brown eyes that looked exactly like her mother's. Meeting Bella had been the highlight of Rebecca's entire summer by far.

"That's adorable." Kennedy grinned, "Your parents are married?"

Rebecca nodded, unsure of why that was a specific question the other girl was asking.

"Yeah, for the past thirty years." She replied, "Why?"

"Just curious." Kennedy shrugged, "I mean, 50% of marriages end in divorce, so."

Rebecca raised her eyebrows slightly and continued on with her story.

"Yeah, so...that's my family. I took a gap year to save for college after I graduated from high school, worked as a server at a Cracker Barrel close to my house. So this is my sophomore year of school, but I'm 21."

"Way rad." Kennedy nodded, "That's so impressive that you're funding your schooling through hard work."

"Thanks." Rebecca nodded, feeling her cheeks grow warm. "Um, I'm majoring in Marketing. Not really sure what I want to do with that, but there it is. I'm minoring in Graphic Design, which I'm way more interested in and probably put more effort into." She laughed, "A creative outlet to use when school gets to be too much, I guess."

Kennedy nodded, her eyes trained on Rebecca's.

"That is so cool. Are you good at graphic design? Can I see something you've done?"

Rebecca nodded, pulling out her phone and going to her photo album before pulling up something she had done a few weeks previous: a picture she had taken of the sunrise with a mountain superimposed on the image and a few different animated lines drawn to accent the different parts of the image. Kennedy took the phone out of Rebecca's hand and looked at it carefully before handing the phone back, nodding again. Rebecca couldn't tell if she was nodding at the picture's quality or at something that no one but her knew she was thinking.

"That's incredible." She said after leaving Rebecca hanging for a few seconds, "Like, way incredible. You're insanely talented." She cocked her head to the side and took another sip of her smoothie, "Are you good at erasing things? Like, a tattoo or something off of a person?"

Rebecca thought for a second. She wasn't as great at taking things off as she was at putting them on, but she nodded anyways.

"I'm decent at that type of stuff. I'm sure I could do it if I really tried. Why?"

Kennedy shook her head.

"I was just curious. I like to know about what people can do, so I can brag about them accurately to everyone else." She laughed as Rebecca tried not to blush for the umpteenth time. Kennedy Abrams bragging about Rebecca Eaves to someone else in the former's life. It sounded like the absolute most ludicrous thing that could ever happen, and yet two days ago, sitting in a Smoothie King with Kennedy Abrams would have sounded the same exact way.

"So what about you?" Rebecca asked after a few minutes of silent sipping. She had been following the girl on Instagram for a year and didn't know anything about her.

"What about me?" Kennedy asked, shrugging her shoulders, "I'm not anything interesting, trust me."

Rebecca laughed.

"I definitely don't believe that." She shook her head, "Come on, spill it. Family, hometown, major—"

"I'd rather not." Kennedy interrupted, her expression as firm as her tone. "Thanks."

Rebecca felt her chest start to make the feeling it made whenever she had tried to talk to anyone with a social status in high school. Retreating into itself, unwilling to make another attempt at conversation, another attempt at bonding or becoming closer. It was shutting everything else off, shoving everything else away.

"Oh." She nodded. "Sure."

A/N: Let me know your thoughts! Also I start my internship today and I'm way excited but also way nervous haha.

-Katherine