𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙠𝙚𝙤𝙪𝙩

i. curveball

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Thea was getting frustrated. Like really frustrated. Like I'm-gonna-throw-my-laptop-at-the-wall frustrated. She had been sitting at the coffee shop for almost two hours, staring at the cursor blink on an empty document. Of course, she hadn't spent her time doing absolutely nothing. Thea had spent her afternoon cleaning out her playlists on Spotify, putting every due date of the semester into her calendar, and compiling an exhaustive bucket list of nearly two hundred things she wanted to do before she died. Included on said list were "get ordained to marry people out of spite" and "hug a penguin." Over half the items were completely impractical, but Thea didn't really care. It would take no more than a week for her to forget about making it, decide that it was cluttering her computer, and delete it. The only purpose it served was to help Thea put off writing her plan for the advertising campaign she would be working on all semester.

The soft music that had been playing through Thea's headphones came to a stop as the last acoustic song faded into silence. Thea swore under her breath, clicking open the Spotify app where she saw that, sure enough, she had come to the end of the playlist she had randomly selected when she first sat down to start "studying." It was one of those "who cares if i'm pretty if i fail my finals" playlists, complete with a cover photo of Rory Gilmore and composed of Taylor Swift songs from folklore and what Thea could only assume was the entirety of Phoebe Bridgers' discography. She clicked out of the playlist, beginning a different playlist with the exact same name, but a slightly different picture of Rory, before she returned to the document. The computer screen shone with empty white, taunting her as if to say look at all this work you have to do!

"Oh thank God," Thea sighed with relief as her computer closed with a soft click, pushed by what Thea swore was the hand of an angel. She pulled her headphones off her head, letting them hang around her neck as she looked up at the grinning face of Inez Sawyer.

"Sorry I'm late," Inez sat down across from Thea, sliding her a drink before taking a sip from her own cup. "But from the looks of it, I arrived just in time to stop you from breaking something."

"Am I that obvious?" Thea smiled, taking a sip of her coffee.

She really wasn't. To most onlookers, Thea would've looked no different than any other exhausted, overwhelmed college kid hunched over a laptop. But Inez, by some strange miracle, could see Thea's frustration beginning to turn into anger. She could see how it simmered somewhere deep in Thea's eyes, exactly the way that Thea could hear how Inez's voice pinched ever so slightly when she was lying. They just understood each other.

"The last time I saw you looking at a computer screen like that, you popped Cheez-It." Cheez-It was one of those stress toys filled with air that Thea and Inez had gotten from one of those tables that was always set up outside of the student union, handing out free stuff to make up for the exorbitant tuition expenses it took to attend UC Woodsboro. This particular table handed out stress balls, and Thea and Inez picked out a little orange one painted with black stripes and a face to make it look like a tiger. Thea still remembered how sad and disfigured the tiger looked after she accidentally popped it while studying for finals.

"Yeah I guess so," Thea frowned, taking another sip of the drink Inez handed her. Something about it tasted slightly different than her usual lavender oat milk latte. "Is there almond milk in here?"

"They were out of oak milk," Inez shrugged. "My mom says drinking it all the time is bad for you anyways. It's like, low in protein and high in carbs or something like that. I dunno."

"I can live with that," Thea said. She liked her oat milk, despite what Inez's nutritionist mom said about it. "Why'd you want to meet anyways? Your text sounded too excited. I don't like it."