CHAPTER TWO : she'll be okay

( pilot , part ii )

———

"SHE'LL BE OKAY, RIGHT?"

The girls haven't stopped asking the question. First, to the paramedics who arrived on the scene, including Andie's mother, who'd given them about as much attention as she'd given her daughter in the past few years. That is to say, not much. Then they'd asked Coach Ben, who'd stayed silent, not wanting to give them false hope. They hadn't asked Misty, frankly, most chose not to interact with her in the best of situations. And now, while sitting around in the girls' locker room, it's Andie's turn to be asked.

"She'll be okay, right, Andie?"

She can't even isolate the voices asking her, too busy staring down at her once white sneakers, already stained with dirt and grass and now a few flecks of — is that blood? Andie tells herself it's just ketchup from her lunch and tucks her feet under the bench — out of sight, out of mind.

Too many eyes are boring holes into her body, so much so that she has no choice but to look up. "I don't know," she finally says. Three little words to hide behind.

It's not enough for them. They just continue to stare at her.

"I mean, if there's an infection they'll be able to treat it, but there's still risks. Permanent nerve damage, muscle damage, osteonecrosis, compartment syndrome. Even if everything goes well, she won't be on that leg for months."

Taissa sniffles, keeping her eyes trained on the ground. "So, no soccer then."

"No anything, then. She had a dance thingy coming up, she'll have to pull out of that, now." Andie draws in a sharp breath. "She was really looking forward to it, too."

Tai's brow furrows. "She danced?"

Andie swivels on the bench to face her teammate. "The amount you don't know about half the girls on this team truly astounds me."

"What's osteonecrosis?" Laura Lee asks from behind Andie. "And compartment syndrome?"

She'd forgotten she brought those up. "Oh." She stammers for a second, trying to find the right words to explain the conditions without freaking the girls out too much. "Osteonecrosis is... the bone dying." And... too late. Her teammates' eyes bulge and jaws drop wide. "There's treatment for it!" That calms them a little, not much, but enough. "And, compartment syndrome is, like, pressure building up from internal bleeding or swelling." She elects not to mention that it's a critical condition, that'll just freak them out again.

The room falls silent once more, save for the closing of locker doors and the squeaks of sneakers on the floor. Then Jackie stands and plants herself in a spot where most of the girls can have a clear view of her, shoulders rolled back in a display of confidence — or, trying to portray confidence, anyway.

"I know we're all really worried about Allie. But... it might not be as bad as it looks."

Nat lifts her head from where she'd been resting it on her bent knee. "You could see her fucking bones, Jackie," she sneers. "I'm pretty sure it's exactly as bad as it looks."

Andie nods along, lowering her head to lay it in her hands. "She's right, it is."

Just down the bench from her, Van doubles over. "Oh, God. I'm gonna throw up."

"Please do it in the bathroom," Andie mumbles, voice slightly muffled by her palms.

Jackie pauses, tightening her arms across her chest, watching as Nat gets up off the floor and turns to her locker. "Okay, but, I mean..." Her eyes drift over each of the girls. "We're still a team. And we still have each other."

"And the Lord works in mysterious ways," Laura Lee adds.

Nat loudly slams the door of her locker shut, having grabbed her backpack. She storms toward the exit, calling, "Nice work, Taissa," over her shoulder.

With a sigh, Tai buries into her hands, almost like an ostrich hoping to hide from watching eyes. Andie stands up, bag in hand, to follow Nat out. They're meant to get ready for the party tonight together, but now she needs to see if she — and Gina and Olivia — are even up to going any more.

By the time she's out of the locker room, Nat's already nearly at the doors leading to the parking lot. Andie calls out her name and Nat turns.

"What's the go?"

Nat takes a second to think, clearly still fuming. Her pale skin has a red tinge to it, made all the more obvious next to her bleached blonde hair. "Your place, right?"

Andie nods. "Yeah, Gina's driving, if you want a ride."

"Okay, yeah, but if she plays her music, I'm going to rip her car radio out and throw it onto the road."

The brunette can't argue with that. After the day that they've had, she can't imagine listening to Metallica on full blast for twenty minutes. "Deal."

————

     True to her promise, when Gina tries to hit play on her Master of Puppets CD, Nat all but throws herself between the driver and passenger seats to scrabble at the radio. Gina just manages to escape with her ( and the CD player's ) life, but she takes the hint and leaves the music off. In complete silence, Andie examines the CD case for the album, squinting at the cover, noticing the little details she hadn't paid attention to before — like the puppet strings hanging from the Metallica logo attaching to the rows upon rows of white crosses.

     "So, Olivia's gonna meet us at mine. She wanted to grab some options from home," Andie says once she's finished her inspection, tapping a manicured fingernail against the back of the case.

     The other girls nod. "I don't really have anything with me," Nat admits, nudging her backpack with her foot.

     Andie regards her with a shrug. "I've got some of your stuff, still."

Nat's stayed at Andie's enough times to leave nearly an entire closet's-worth of clothes there, and Andie's never returned anything. No point, really, if she'll just leave them again next time.

After twenty minutes of driving in near silence — car sounds and the odd conversation here and there breaking it up — Gina's Range Rover pulls up into the Elmont residence's long driveway. Andie always feels a little bad inviting Gina and Nat here. She knows their living situations well, and here she is, with her grand ( tacky-looking ) two-storey McMansion, with wrought iron fences and hedges and a heated pool in the backyard. It feels like a brag. At least her house isn't Olivia's. That girl's house is, by every definition in the book, a for-real mansion.

     Andie's mom is working, and her dad's on another one of his survivalist retreats ( yeah, they're one of those weird divorced couples who still live together ), so the house is empty for the girls to wreak havoc in.

Parked further in on the Elmonts' curved driveway is Olivia's white Porsche, freshly washed and gleaming in the sunshine. She's leaning against the side of it, still in her soccer uniform but holding two bags she didn't have with her at school — one filled with clothes, the other with makeup, no doubt.

"Alrighty, let's go," Andie says, pointing to the front door. White pillars stand tall on either side of it, making the entrance seem grander than it is. The brunette leads the charge to the house, Gina and Nat following behind her, and Olivia close on their heels.

Immediately upon entering the house, Nat goes to rummage around in the kitchen for some snacks to bring up to Andie's room, while the other three girls head straight upstairs. Andie's bedroom is suitably gloomy — blue-painted walls and a fuzzy black rug on top of chestnut-brown wooden flooring, the big window in the room facing Eastward so that the afternoon sun is no longer shining through it. She gets to wake up to the soft sunlight filtering through, but she gets absolutely nothing after midday.

Andie collapses backwards onto her unmade bed as Gina plops down on the carpet to empty her backpack out. She has exactly enough clothes stuffed in there to make up one full outfit. Gina is nothing if not a forward thinker, so she'd probably planned her outfit out last night, if not last week. There's a pair of black straight-legged jeans, a Metallica tee that she'd distressed by taking a cheese grater to, and a red flannel. Upon noticing Andie watching her, she pulls her feet out from under her, sticking one leg up in the air and wiggling her foot from side to side. "And, these shoes." They're a pair of black high-top Converse.

"Very nice," Andie says with a nod. Then, she turns her attention to Olivia, who's busy pulling different tops, skirts, pants, and shoe options out of her obnoxiously large Louis Vuitton bag — all in varying shades of white, pink, and blue. Her black hair falls in a sheet, shielding her face from her friends. Gina reaches her leg over to Olivia and nudges her in the thigh with her foot.

     Olivia reels around with a start. "What?" she asks. Gina nods out the door, in the vague direction of the kitchen where Nat is still rifling around in the kitchen for junk food, and raises her brows. "No. Nope, absolutely not."

     "Why not?" Andie asks, sitting up a little and resting her weight on her palms.

     "Because if Nat isn't into me, everything would be all weird," Olivia hisses.

     As if her name was some kind of summoning spell, Nat appears in the doorway, a bag of potato chips in each hand. "What would be weird?"

     "Don't worry 'bout it," Andie says, relaxing back into the bed. "Stuff with my parents."

Nat grimaces and tosses a bag of chips at Andie — she's the only one in the room who likes the honey mustard flavour ( pussies ) — before opening the other packet ( lightly salted ) to share with the other girls. "Please tell me they're either getting back together or someone's moving out."

Andie shakes her head and rolls onto her front to open her own chip packet. "I wish. I'm trying to get them into the same room for once so we can have a conversation as a family but... nope, not happening."

This conversation is getting too real, too fast, so Olivia moves towards Andie's closet and whips the door open. "Okay, what are you wearing tonight?"

She truthfully hadn't thought about it, so she tries to mentally sort through every item of clothing she has. When she doesn't respond fast enough, Olivia takes it upon herself to go through Andie's wardrobe and select some options for her. It's a lot easier to pick for other people than it is to pick for herself. After a good long moment of looking, Olivia pulls a black dress off a hanger and tosses it on the bed — the one with the silver sequinned collar that makes it look marginally more expensive than it was. She'd found the thing at a thrift store with Nat and had done the sequinning herself. Andie can thank her mother's crash course in stitching up wounds for her sewing skills.

     Dress in hand, Andie scrambles off the bed and turns to face the wall, away from the other girls, so she can strip off her top and shorts and change. The other girls avert their eyes anyway. Nat takes Andie's spot on the bed and picks through her bag, pulling out a red tartan skirt, a brown flannel, and a leather jacket while Olivia returns to staring at her array of choices.

     "What do we think?" Andie asks, turning back to face the girls, striking a pose with her hands on her hips. Gina and Olivia both give nods of approval, while Nat observes the outfit for a moment longer, squinting her eyes a little.

     After a few seconds, she balls up the brown flannel from her bag in one hand and throws it to Andie. It hits her straight in the chest. "Dress it down."

     Andie does as she says, slipping the flannel on over the dress, and shrugging it off her shoulders a little to make it even more casual. Then Nat gives her a nod.

     With two of the four girls sorted out, Gina and Andie decide to take on styling duty. Gina heads to Andie's dresser, specifically the drawer with Natty written in black Sharpie on a piece of white masking tape stuck to it, and searches through for something for her to wear, eventually producing a crumpled white button-up, a black sweater, and a pair of sheer black tights. "These," she says, placing them on the bed next to the clothes that Nat has already produced, "with those." She points to the skirt and leather jacket. The outfit seems good enough to Nat, who jumps up to change in the same corner that Andie had. And, no, Olivia doesn't peek.

     Olivia's too wrapped up in pestering Andie while they peruse her many, many options. "I'm just saying, Lottie's single."

     "She is also, to the extent of my knowledge, straight," Andie replies, picking up a pair of light-wash, straight-legged jeans and handing them to Olivia. The raven-haired girl, fully aware that nobody else in the room is looking, strips off her shorts right then and there and changes into the pants.

     Olivia scoffs a little. "Have you met that girl? No way is she straight."

     "I don't think anyone on the entire team is straight, honestly," Gina pipes in, nearly tripping over her own feet as she shimmies into her jeans.

     Nat frowns. "Laura Lee? Shauna?"

     Andie hums under her breath, selecting a lacy white camisole from the pile and pairing it with a long-sleeved, pale pink cardigan. "Wear those," she says. She turns to face Nat, not phased at seeing her only half-dressed. "And, I dunno. Have you seen the way Shauna looks at Jackie half the time?"

     "You look at me like that."

     Gina coughs into her hand. "Yeah, and you two were fu—"

     "—Okay, enough of that!"

     Andie can't help the laugh that bursts out of her at the exchange. Her fit of laughter wrenches similar giggles out of the other girls, which only fully fade away once Olivia's fully dressed and they're heading down the stairs and towards Liv's car.

     "Oh, Gina," Andie says, in a way that makes it sound like it was a last-second thought. "I hear Bridget's gonna be there."

————

a/n:
hope everyone's having a great pride month!!! shout out to... the gays :)

lmao sorry for literally posting this on christmas and then dipping. i have no excuses besides: i got hyperfixated on criminal minds again and then started writing a fic for it and fell in love with matthew gray gubler.

it just felt right for my first update of june to be this fic, tho. i don't think i have this many queer ocs in any of my other stories. so, happy pride month to andie and olivia (lesbians), bridget (you haven't met her but she's super cool and bi), and gina (pan). and ofc, shout outs to nat and lottie (both bi).

i'm gonna try my damn hardest to get chapters out more frequently, but i've made promises before and have broken them a million times.

anywhey, i have to be up in like 4.5 hours so goodnight my luvs. thank u so much for reading, voting, commenting, whatever. i love u <3

published : june 3, 2024
word count : 2.6k