“I’m changing!” I yelled out loud and fast. The door handle seemed to stop it’s downwards motion as soon as the air had escaped my mouth while time felt like it had slowed down to crawl. Turning on the light to prevent any more suspicion, I tried to play along with my mother’s beliefs regarding the ownership of the bags. “Just leave it there, Il bring it over to Riley’s tomorrow!”

“Fine, but you better get to bed early to stave off that cold of yours. Don’t want you missing school due to getting sick mister” My mother sternly stated from behind the cover of my bedroom door. I could hear the stairs creak once again as she started making her way back down to her office.

Dodging the final bullet of today’s gauntlet, I could finally take off my clothes and get some proper rest. That could have ended very badly…

***

Over the weekend there were only 2 things on my mind, 2 giant sources of anxiety I didn’t do anything about. I still had not spoken with Riley since the incident, because every time I thought about it, a spontaneous headache of regret would present itself. And in the meantime another anxiety generator in the form of 4 girls from the next town over who couldn’t do anything but talk about finally meeting up kept me from properly relaxing as well. While Rachel had been kind enough not to mention the 2nd part of our encounter, she had let the team know she had encountered a real-life Emily in the wild.

A proper well-adjusted adult would face these problems head on to get it all dealt with as soon as possible, But I was definitely not that. Instead, I had told my mother that the cold was keeping me bedridden, so I had an excuse to spend most of the weekend in my room. Using all that time to simply distract myself from my current life situation by playing Dota 2 non-stop. But as it turns out, hiding from your problems doesn’t put you in the best mental state to perform in your favorite video game. In the 16 games that I had played over the weekend, only 4 of them resulted in a win. Primarily because of me being carried hard in those games. No surprise that when Sunday night scrims were coming up, I wasn’t looking forward to it.

For a second, I even entertained the thought of saying I would be too sick to scrim. But I knew that would just invite a torrent of inquiries from captain Rachel, something that would have been an even worse prospect than playing some scrims while being forced to be social.

Taking a last bite from the ham sandwich I had smuggled into my room earlier I opened my discord looking for our team server. A shiver shot down my back as I viewed the names and pictures of my teammates on the screen, indicating that all of them were already on the voice channel. What if Rachel had told them what a crybaby I had been, and they would all just make fun of me? Before I could complete my mental death spiral however I decide to just make the jump, and without second thought I clicked my right mouse button to enter the channel.

“Hello?” I said into the microphone to announce my presence.

“Hey Em, the others are off getting themselves some snacks and drinks before we get started” I heard the voice of Jade echo through my headphones.

“Rachel said you guys met up at the mall yesterday, and I’m like so looking forward to meeting you in person as well next week” she followed up trying to make some conversation.

I muted my microphone quickly so I could scrape my throat preparing to put on my Emily voice. “Uhm… Yeah for sure. It will be loads of fun.” I responded when activating my microphone again.

Before I could even say anything else though, Jade already started gushing about next week. “Oh my god. You have no idea what Ray and I have planned for you all. Like, we are going to play dotes fo sure. But we are going to do so many more fun teambuilding activities. We really think it’s going to bring us to the next level as a team.”

I decided to Interrupt her monologue, “Jade? You might if we can just focus on the scrims tonight? I’ve had a rough week so don’t really have the mental capacity to think about all that right now.”

I could hear a bit of disappointment in her voice as she responded. “Ok, that’s fine I guess…”

When the other girls returned our scrim partner was already waiting for us allowing us to get the draft started quickly. Being our captain, Rachel would always the take reigns during the drafting stage. Crafting us the perfect team of characters to face our opponents. Nonetheless she would often ask for input from her teammates to judge specific matchups. In our first game of the night for example the opponents’ team consisted of ‘Keeper of the light’, ‘Tiny’, ‘Terrorblade’, ‘Mars’ and ‘Storm Spirit’. Seeing how our team currently consisted of ‘Disruptor’, ‘Nyx Assassin’, ‘Dark Seer’ and ‘Sven’ with our 5th hero yet to be picked. Rachel asked Lizzy what hero she would feel most comfortable facing the Storm Spirit who was presumed to be their mid hero. Lizzy would opt for ‘Shadow Fiend’ as she believed it was great matchup against storm and would get us some much-needed magical burst and team fight control.

As soon we got into the first scrim and Rachel started making calls, it felt like coming home after a long trip. Jade managed to bully our lane opponents incredibly effectively with the help of my Ion Shell and I got pretty much every last hit in the lane on a Dark Seer for Pete’s sake. I was getting completely back in the zone, momentarily forgetting about last week’s events. Due to the strong lanes Rachel had drafted our opponents needed to break up the laning stage as fast as possible. Their rotations were sloppy however and on multiple occasions I would be able to teleport into an attempted gank using my ‘Mechanism’ and ‘Surge’ to keep my teammates alive. With this start we could farm up our items way faster than our opponents. Therefore, it didn’t take long until Kelsey called out that she had her BKB ready and wanted to start taking some towers to open up a Roshan attempt. Rachel popped a smoke of deceit allowing us to catch our opponents completely off guard when they wanted to punish Kelsey for pushing out too far. She got her BKB off before the Mars spear connected, giving me the opportunity to jump in with a Blink, Vacuum, Wall combo. Some amazing follow-up from Kelsey and Rachel than came through using the Sven right clicks and Static Storm, Kinetic field combination to delete the Mars, Tiny and Storm Spirit all in one fell swoop. While this all was happening, Jade had actually managed to scout out the ‘Keeper of the Light’ and ‘Terrorblade’ who were trying to retreat. Stunning the both of them as Lizzy blinked in with her ultimate ability to finish these last two stragglers off as well, completing the full 5-man wipe. From this point on the rest of the game was nothing more than a formality as we quickly took full map control and used the first aegis to destroy the bottom lane of barracks. Only to keep the contain going until we got our hands on the 2nd aegis and closed out the game by the book.

Clearly, we were in sync tonight, as the other two games we played that night were just as successful. While playing on my own I was constantly worrying about what had happened last week, and what was coming up next week. Playing with the girls, however I was just Emily, their fun offlane player from the next town over. These few games had put me in such a positive mood, that when Jade started talking again about the upcoming bootcamp next week, I didn’t feel nervous at all.

“So, Like, on Sunday we are going to be scrimming hard. But on Saturday, it’s going to be teambuilding day. We are going to…”

“Be doing some things that will allow us all to connect on a deeper level due to being more comfortable with ourselves and our teammates.” Rachel interrupted Jade, taking back the lead in the conversation while trying to keep Jade from spoiling the surprise. Rachel’s description was clearly intentionally vague, so figuring out what we would be doing exactly was no use. But whatever it was, I’m sure it would be fine. If Friday night was anything to go by, I had at least 1 person looking out for me.

“Emily? Did you uhm… ask your friend yet if she’s coming along next week?” Rachel suddenly dropped pulling me out of my comfort zone. Yup, still hadn’t dealt with the whole Riley situation, what a shithead had I been. Due to my internal worries however I had completely missed the fact that there were some slight giggles in the background from the other girls as Rachel had asked me that question.

“Not yet, she has been away over the weekend. I will ask her tomorrow.” I lied.

“Ah ok…” Rachel responded, but at this point I wasn’t really paying attention anymore as took a quick look out of my window. Since it was facing the side of street, I could actually see Riley’s house from here. Better yet, her room was also facing streetside so I could pretty much look straight into her room. I could see the light was on, but since the curtains were closed, I had no clue what was happening in there. Red letters on my alarm clock showed 10:00 PM, as peaked at the bags I brought back from the mall 2 days ago.

Instantly making up my mind, I focused back on the sounds coming from my headset where the girls were discussing our games of the night.

“I just think we should give ‘Brewmaster’ support a shot, you saw how much their offlane Brew did while we completely shut him down in lane” Kelsey said trying to make Rachel adopt one of her weird ideas again.

Interrupting the strategy talk I excused myself. “Sorry y’all, I won’t be staying around for the replay review. Have some stuff I need to handle before school tomorrow. “Speak to you all soon” and shut down my computer before any response could come in.

I knew that if started doubting myself even for a second, I wouldn’t go through with this, so I needed to do this now. I made this mess and now I needed clean it up.

Like a speed runner trying to break their personal record I opened one of the drawers in my wardrobe and pulled out some old clothes. I placed the new clothes I got at the mall in the space that had now opened while shoving some other clothes on top of that. The old clothes got stuffed into the plastic bags making my “Excuse” complete.

Hauling the bags under my arm I left my room to make my way downstairs where I got greeted by my mother who was enjoying a glass of wine in front of the television. She was watching some kind of crime investigation program when she spotted her son’s determent face.

“Just dropping these off at Riley’s” I shouted out quickly.

I had already made my way to the central hall as I was looking to leave through the front door when could hear my mother say something to me, about being sure about dropping off the bags now. But I didn’t want to get trapped in an actual conversation with her, so I just kept moving like I didn’t hear anything. Making my way across the street I headed straight for 12ft pole besides the big walnut tree in their front yard, using it to knock down the rope on top of one of the branches.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Riley’s parents. While a bit weird sometimes, they are also some of the nicest people I know. But this was between me and her, so I couldn’t face them before I spoke to her. Especially because there is no doubt Riley will have told them about our fight.

I set down the bags, and tightly gripped on to the rope. Not even thinking about how I was going to get the bags up there I jumped up and put my full weight on the rope instead of the ground. Trying to lift myself up with these noodle arms however was a lot harder than expected and regret started to set in quick. I had only ever used this rope to go down, never up. And now I was finding out exactly why this was the case. Stubborn as I was, I kept trying.

As I got halfway up the rope, a humanoid shape coming around the corner of the house spooked me completely. Before I could even make sense of what was happening, I let go off my grip on the rope causing me slide down rapidly. My butt impacted with the grass and dirt below, making my nerves release painful sensations across my lower backside. My hands also felt just like when I scrapped them over the asphalt due to a cycling accident 2 years ago. Clearly my reflexes trying to regain grip on the rope during my fall, had caused quite the burn.

Trying to regain my senses I could already her laughing for a short second before the same voice started calling out my idiocrasy.

“What in Wayne’s World were you even trying to do there you doofus?”