Jessica Hayles
December 03, 2019 4:17 PM
It's all okay (Sports Room, pre-Welcoming Feast) by Jessica Hayles
Jessica was proud of herself. She had maintained her - outward - cool the whole while she had been talking to her sister in front of the wagons, and then the whole while she had spent walking through the school until she had reached the sport room.Logically, she knew it would have been better to go to her dormitory, if she could find a prefect to get a password out of, but the thought of either interacting with a prefect or going anywhere near Crotalus had repelled her. She knew she would have to go to the common room sometime - sometime rather soon, in fact - but she didn't want to, and thus was committed to avoiding it as long as possible. Avoiding the common room did nothing to relax any of the painful knots in her stomach, but she couldn't imagine that actually going any closer to Gunther would help. If anything, she thought they would get worse if she went there. She could just imagine walking closer and closer to the common room, worrying she was going to run into her probably-ex-friend, then going in, and if she actually ran into said ex-friend....
Just the thought brought her out in a cold sweat.
She'd have to face it, but she didn't have to face it yet. So she retreated somewhere else. Somewhere where anyone could walk in and see her trying not to freak out and to hide from everyone.
Strangely, that didn't help her stomach knots. Even more strangely, she suspected it might be relevant to the fact her shoulders were now painfully knotted to.
She had not really planned out what she wanted the room to be, but was not terribly surprised to find herself in a tennis court. Tennis and swimming had been her sports, the ones she had planned to pursue for her resume. She enjoyed swimming because it was the most pleasant of the sports, and tennis because it was so bright. Tennis and golf had traditions around them, crispness. She thought of golf mainly as a men's sport - her father loved going to the Master's in Augusta - but two sports were enough to round out her resume properly, but few enough to accomplish some modest achievements in without distracting her from more important things. Swimming was more solitary, something she could do without company, but that was the provenance, she supposed, of the water room, so she had a tennis court.
Unfortunately, it was hard to play tennis without a partner. She supposed she could practice serving and see if the balls would bounce back to her - this was supposed to be magic, wasn't it? If it could make a tennis court, it could assume the function of an automatic ball-thrower, couldn't it?
She bounced a ball, preparing to test this theory, when the door opened and she looked over her shoulder. "Hi," she said. "Do you play tennis?"
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Jessica Hayles
It's all okay (Sports Room, pre-Welcoming Feast)
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