friends (rick riley and scott holland)(INDEFINITE HIATUS)

chapter fifteen

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chapter fifteen: and everything stops (I don't want you like a best friend)

a/n:

i'm not ready for this, you're not ready for this. let's be not ready for this together!

tw(s) — sports violence, implications

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Game day, as per usual, has everyone in the girls' locker room buzzing, but Gwen just can't find it within herself to be quite so excited.

To say it didn't take a joint effort from her friends to drag her out of bed would be a lie. She'd been making excuses all day—— feigning an illness, or blaming her father for a potential absence, or any other thing that would get her out of living what has quickly gone from her favorite thing in the world to her worst nightmare—— but they just weren't having it. Your little brother is playing today, Laney reasoned as Alexa all but forced Gwen to take a shot of bourbon for courage and Rachel dragged all of her bags out of the closet, you should go for him if anything.

She wasn't wrong. Of course, Adam would have someone there for him in the form of Jake, but she should be there for him, too. And if doing that meant swallowing her pride and the dread that was sitting in her throat, choking all of the oxygen out of her lungs, then so be it, right?

(Optimism, among other things in this equation, has never suited her.)

That thought is what carried her all the way here, leaving her in her cheer uniform and wearing ten pounds of makeup and glitter, smiling a too-wide smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. None of the new girls seem to notice, and if the girls she's known for a while do, they don't say anything; all of her friends know that asking her if she's okay will crumple what little resolution she has and leave them with a mopey, bitchy Gwen that no one has time to deal with right now, so, for the most part, they ignore her.

They leave her to her own devices.

But, as always, someone doesn't get the memo.

"Hey, Banks," Mindy's voice is accompanied by a soft tap on her shoulder.

"What?" She snaps a little more harshly than she intends, turning the other blonde as she redoes her pony, pulling the hair so tight that her head aches.

"Don't rip my head off, blondezilla." Mindy bites back tersely. Gwen wonders if the sudden change from enemies to acquaintances is as strange for Mindy as it is for her. "Cole said he was told to give this to you."

Mindy holds up Rick's chain, pinched between her index and her thumb like something gross, and Gwen stares at it like a deer in headlights.

He... wants her to wear it?

They haven't spoken in days, and the fate of their friendship is in the air, but he still wants her to be his good luck charm?

She's not sure what it means—— is he doing this because he still loves her? or is it a superstitious hockey player thing?—— but, after Mindy starts shaking the jewelry in front of her with this sour look on her face, she hesitantly takes it. Gwen, as soon as Mindy walks away with a roll of her eyes and a swish of her hair (and a not-so-secret look over her shoulder to make sure that Gwen hasn't spontaneously combusted, or something), blows air from her puffed-up cheeks.