Their Paid Girl

***

          I hate how accident-prone I can sometimes be. I’m the girl who trips on flat surfaces and gets hit by parked cars. Only this time, it was a tennis ball that came hurtling out of God’s own blue sky and smacked me right in the eye.

          I gave the strangest scream that my vocal chords had ever given; I sounded like a panicked, squealing pig as I saw the yellow ball speed towards me. I never had the chance to avoid it before I was down on the ground.

          “OW, dammit!” I shouted, bringing up a hand to gingerly cup my left eye. It was stinging and involuntary tears were leaking down the left side of my face from the steadily swelling area.

          Only I would get hit by a flying tennis ball out of nowhere, while I was walking along and minding my own business.

          I heard everyone within a five-mile radius erupt into hysterical laughter, and even heard someone choke out, “Man I even got that on camera!”

          Youtube was gonna owe me a couple million views after this.

          The pain was still stinging something awful, and I heard steady cursing and pounding feet coming towards me. I flinched away as a shadow suddenly loomed over me, and then I opened my normal eye to see a sweaty, frantic tennis player kneeling in front of me, looking extremely apologetic.

          “Oh my God, are you okay?” he gasped, frantic and genuinely sorry. Behind him, people were still rolling around on the grass, laughing till they cried.

          My own tears were still trickling down my face and I couldn’t control it, but I wasn’t actually crying. Was I humiliated? Absolutely. Was I going to cry about it and feel sorry for myself because I was always the victim of circumstances? Nope. Things like this happened way too often, and it would get exhausting, being emotional each time.

          The poor guy whose ball was responsible for bringing me down like a sack of potatoes was still apologizing over and over again, to hoots and cheers from the background. My every humiliation seemed doomed to be public: the courtyard was filled with people, and even those sitting at benches under the trees had seen everything.

          “Are you sure you’re okay? Oh, dear God, when I saw you go down, I thought for a moment that I’d killed you somehow. You’re okay, right? You’re sure you’re okay?”

          I gave a chuckle, hand still clamped over my swollen eye and propping myself up off the ground with my other one. The tennis ball in question was nowhere in sight. “Fine, fine,” I tried to wave away his concern, but forgot that my hand had been holding half my body up.

          I would’ve fallen backward and cracked my head on the pavement, if another shadow hadn’t appeared then, and strong arms caught me, holding me up with ease.

          I tilted my chin up to gaze at my saviour, somehow already knowing that it was Adam holding me.

          “Oh, hi,” I said, in an attempt to be casual.

          I couldn’t really see Adam’s face because I was staring directly up at the sun, but I could tell that he was rolling his eyes at me.

          “Hey,” he replied in an exasperated tone. “I see you’re still alive.”

          I glared at him with my one good eye, struggling to my feet with Adam's help. Tennis Boy was still hovering behind me anxiously, but I ignored him for a moment.

          “Excuse me,” I said in a dignified voice, well aware that my eye was steadily swelling shut and also trying to ignore the laughter that remained in the background from those few who still couldn’t get over my little episode, “It’s a matter of survival. I can’t help it that God painted a target on my back the day I was born.”