Drowning

Scar Wars: The Friend Menace

A week had gone by since her blowup at Hawk. Finley had spent her time distracting herself with her friends. She had gone to Miguel's twice, during which they spent a little under an hour on wheelchair exercises before switching to playing Wii. Carmen had outlawed Mario Kart for Miguel's safety after she walked in on them wrestling each other on the floor in an attempt to keep the other from winning. They then progressed to Wii Sports which also would have been deemed too violent if Carmen had witnessed it. Instead, Yaya had walked in on them and proceeded to place bets on who was winning the ping-pong matches. Miguel was making a lot of progress and had gained the ability to move his legs again as well as some feeling in them, but he was still working on improving their strength and essentially relearning how to walk.

At school, Finley did her best to pretend like everything was normal as usual. The soccer unit had finally come to a close, and they had moved onto handball, which Finley was having a blast with. Lunch time was the hardest. She found herself constantly watching Hawk trying to figure out how she could have been so wrong about someone.

During lunch, Sam and the Miyagi-Dos would constantly be talking about karate and how they were defending themselves against Cobra Kai. Finley never really listened, her mind often drifting off and her gaze following suit to stare at the cobra's table. Demetri wasn't sure what to think of her change in behavior. In the past week she hadn't offered more than a few words at the lunch table, and that was just a polite answering of a direct question from Moon. He saw her staring over at Hawk, but surely there was no way she still had a thing for the boy, not after what he had done to him. At one point during the week he asked her if she wanted to come over and hang out, but she declined, saying she had too much homework, and he didn't give it a second thought.

~~~~~~~

It was Thursday night, 6 o'clock. The Collins had just finished eating dinner and Finley was scrolling through Instagram, as she had already finished her homework. She was just catching up on her feed for the day, but she wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. It was the point where she was kind of zoned out while scrolling, and she had to swipe down and go back to a previous post when her brain finally registered that she missed something. This particular post was on Mikey's feed and was a selfie angled group shot of him with 4 other guys. Finley's brow furrowed at the photo, but her heart sank when she read the caption.

Some fierce new cobras joined the dojo today 🐍

Kyler had joined Cobra Kai. Before she even realized what she was doing, she typed Hawk's handle in the search bar and opened his page. He hadn't posted anything. Ever since he joined Cobra Kai, he posted something about it every day they had a practice. But not today. She sat there on the couch, staring at his page for a moment, her brain whirling.

What was she supposed to do? One of her friends just had his bully show up at his dojo, the place where his confidence had been built. The guy who had basically tortured and mocked Eli since they had met in middle school, was now in Cobra Kai. She didn't know if anything had happened, but with Kyler involved it was pretty likely. And if Kyler had shown up, she figured Eli's world must have been pretty shaken up in that moment. He needed someone. He needed someone to just be there for him. He needed a friend. But he didn't have any, he had pushed them all away.

Even as she walked upstairs to grab her car keys, part of her hesitated. He had shoved her into a locker, and he had broken Demetri's arm. Was going to be there for him really the right call? She knew the Miyagi-Dos would probably hate her guts if they knew what she was doing, and Demetri... well he probably wouldn't be too chuffed about the whole thing either. She shook her head as she grabbed a DVD Belle had lent her off of her desk. It didn't matter what anyone thought, her friend needed someone and she was the only one even considering it. So she told her mom where she was going and asked if she could take some of the fudge her mom had made the other day. Demetri had said at the beach party that Hawk loved it, so she figured it could help him cheer up a little.