Treadmill

X.II

11:36. AM.

Pain.

So. Much. Pain.

It was dark. It was so very dark. Rebecca was pretty sure that was due to the fact that her eyes were closed, but she couldn't be sure. The darkness was comforting, but the pain was otherworldly. Her entire head felt like it was going to either collapse in on itself or explode in a giant ball of needles.

Memories from the night before were hazy but not completely unrecognizable. She felt like she could remember some things, and certain parts of her body were definitely in pain. But it was so dark. She needed to open her eyes. That made sense. Light would help.

Rebecca slowly opened her eyes and the pain in her head multiplied by ten; the light felt like it was piercing into her skull one ray at a time. She shut her eyes immediately before allowing them to open again even slower, accepting the pain as it came. The room came into focus slowly, like she was watching a movie whose cameraman refused to show the entire frame at once. She knew where she was, vaguely; on one of the couches in Kennedy's apartment. She was laying down, no one on the couch with her, which was probably a good sign.

Except she was pretty sure she remembered bringing someone into a bedroom at some point during the party. So having someone on the couch wouldn't have made such a huge difference.

There were red solo cups strewn on the floor around her, despite the fact that Rebecca was sure she hadn't had anything except the two shots from Celeste early in the night. Two shots. Was it really that easy for her to get plastered?

A condescending voice that sounded suspiciously like Celeste's echoed in her head, telling her that this was the first time she had drank whatever Celeste had given her. It was going to be easy to get hammered.

Or who knew? Maybe one of the cups on the floor around her had belonged to her and she simply couldn't remember it.

Rebecca continued to look around her. There were a few people sprawled out in different positions on the floor or other couches, each of them completely asleep and nowhere near able to get up. She didn't recognize any of the people around her and started to sit up slowly, trying not to think about the fact that her head hurt more than it ever had before in her life. She felt something hard under her leg and lifted it to find her phone, turned on and with 3% battery left.

She saw three missed calls from her boss at the grocery store on the notifications tab before Rebecca turned her phone off and silently berated her drunk self for not remembering to find a charger before blacking out. She was already over an hour and a half late for her shift; there was no point in trying to go into the store at this point and making excuses wouldn't do anything for her at this point.

The people laying around her were still motionless, but Rebecca figured that was normal since it had barely been thirty seconds since she last checked who they were or what they were doing. The couch she was now sitting up on was directly across from the porch doors, where the light was streaming in with terrible brightness.

As she stared at the doors and tried to force her eyes to adjust to the light, Rebecca saw a person sitting out on one of the chairs by the porch table. Her head told her that there was no way she could survive without finding out who that person was, so she stood as slowly as humanly possible before stumbling over to the door, doing her best not to wake anyone on her way over.

Upon reaching the door, Rebecca saw that it was cracked open slightly, as if the person who had gone outside had forgotten how hard they had to slam the door shut in order to actually close it. A voice carried over from the chair and Rebecca barely figured out who it belonged to before deciding to not go outside: Kennedy Abrams.