“How’s your first day?” She eyed me curiously, careful not to be too obvious by occasionally looking at her smart phone.
“Uh, good so far. First class. I have a break now. And it’s Jules. No one calls me Juliette except for my mother.”And me when I chastise myself.
“Oh, good. Come with us. We’re going over to the gym to grab a quick workout and check out the schedule for the fall tournament.”
I didn’t want to go, but like a kid drawn to an ice cream truck, I was compelled to see the coach. And I had to work out eventually today.
“All right.”
“Come on. Lulu has a car.”
Lulu. I’m not shitting you.
I walked out into the late-August heat as Hilary ran off at the mouth about some football party coming up. In a meadow, twinkly lights, some guy named Pierce she was obsessed with ... it all blurred together. The basketball team ruled the school. Hafton was all about its top-level sports, especially the ones that brought in the big bucks.
“Lu, this is Jules, the new girl. Remember meeting her at the club over the summer?” Hilary said. She opened the front passenger door and slid in while I crawled into the backseat like it was death row.
Lulu, her hair with its expensive highlights slicked back in a low ponytail, turned her gaze on me. Her dark green eyes bore into mine. “Yep, where’d you come from again?”
“I was playing out in California. Didn’t work out, so I came closer to home.” It was mostly the truth.
The two of them might as well have been twins in their olive-green short-shorts and white tanks, and Tory Burch flip-flops on their feet. My cutoffs felt less-than, like me.
We pulled out of the parking lot, and Lulu spoke to me in the rearview.
“King’s got a major hard-on for you. All he talked about was the new singles player he was getting. Stacia was getting kind of pissed. She used to be his shiny star. Though, I’m pretty sure she tried to get in his pants and it was a big fat N-O, so now she ignores him.”
“I prefer to keep a low profile. I’ll have to tell Coach not to run off at the mouth so much.”
Thankfully, Hilary embarked into more of her football-party ramblings for the rest of the ride. Staring out the window, I tried to figure out how to tell King to shut the hell up.
Inside the tennis complex, I found my locker and tossed my school bag inside. Lulu dropped her shorts like she was being paid by the second, her pink thong encrusted in red crystals staring me in the face.
“Sorry ’bout that, but no shame here. We’re all gonna see each other’s junk soon enough.”
I nodded, looking away.
How could I be so close to home, yet had never felt farther away?
Jules
We did some core work and light weight lifting before each of us stole thirty minutes of cardio. Luckily, I was the only one who opted for the treadmill, doing a funky dance routine on the belt we did at my last school. Lulu, Hilary, the aforementioned Stacia, and a girl named Libby hit the elliptical machines like ducks in a row.
One by one, they plugged into their phones and tuned one another out while I tried to focus on the alternative music playing in the gym. I sashayed to the side for two minutes, ran backward for another two, and then walked up a hill before rinsing and repeating, only taking my eyes off the display in front of me when I was going backward.
After the workout/bonding session, I quickly showered and tried to get out of the building before being noticed.
“Hey, Jules, where you off to now?”
No such luck.
“Statistics in a bit.” I mentally chided myself for not asking Hilary where she was going; I needed to fit in.
“Want a ride?” Lulu followed up behind Hilary, both of them back in their matching outfits.
“No thanks. I’m going to walk and grab a coffee.”
Lord only knew, detailed dreams of the very same coach who peeked his head in during our workout kept me up late into the night.
