AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Liz peeks her head out of the hallway. “Is it safe to come out?” she asks.
I laugh and wipe the tears that are still streaming down my face. “Yeah. Sorry, Lizard.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She waves it away like it’s nothing. “It’s been a tough couple of days.”
“Yeah. And I’m sorry we left you. I really needed to get out of there.”
Liz sits and leans against me. “I get it. Luckily Winn was heading this way to check on Aunt Jackie’s house. Else I think we’d owe her like twenty thousand dollars. I was worried about you. Actually, after the way Dean reacted, I thought you’d be with him for sure.”
“You mean how he called me a sore loser?” Not that I blame him. I was a real shit.
“I didn’t hear him call you that. I meant when you passed out. Didn’t you watch it on the news?”
I vehemently shake my head. “Hell no! I’ve stayed away from that television and I threw my phone in the closet.”
“Here,” she says, pulling out her iPhone. As she flips it on, I can see a few messages from Julie. “She’s worried about you.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say.
“Everyone at Maxx is. They’ve been posting videos for you all over Facebook.”
“They have?” I ask in surprise.
Liz grasps my arm, leading me to the couch. “You have a lot of people that love you, Cat. Anyway, here’s the video I took.”
She starts the thing. It’s a little shaky, since she’s basically running behind me with the phone up to video me. I look awful. Sweaty beyond the norm, with a gray hue to my skin that makes me look like a zombie in a fitness suit. And I’m really struggling, too. My form is completely off. Although it’s so far from it, I can’t say the word form fits in any way.
“Oh my god, I didn’t complete that set.” I point to the screen, realizing I only did fifteen of the twenty-five burpees that were required.
“Yeah, that was pretty much the way it was all the way through.”
I sigh, sad and embarrassed for the crazy woman I was. “So sad.”
“Just keep watching.” Liz forwards through the video to the horrible end.
She’d stayed inside when I ran out the doors that last time, and captured my disgraceful and impactful re-entry. I grimace, watching myself throwing limbs every which way, my arms and legs looking more like limp noodles than anything with bones and muscle.
The burpees, which I’d thought I was getting through okay, were almost offensive to watch. My legs would kick out behind me, and I’d land back, and hobble up, then back down. No push up, no speed, no burpee at all!
“In my mind I was killing it,” I admit. “But it’s like I didn’t even do any of the competition. Why didn’t they put me out of my misery from the get go?”
“They probably didn’t want to break your heart,” Reese offers, sitting beside me and rubbing my arms. I wholeheartedly agree.
Then the moment we’d all been waiting for, the pass out. It’s sort of surreal watching it happen from the outside. I mean, while it was actually happening, it didn’t feel like much. My body was moving independently from my mind, which at the time I thought was a blessing. But now, as I see it, it would have been good if my brain would have been in control.
A strange expression comes over the ME that’s on the screen.
“Shit,”Liz says in the video. “She’s not going to make it.”
My skin goes from gray to green, and I don’t think it’s a trick of the camera. Then, bam! I fall out of view just like that. Someone screams, the video is going crazy as Liz runs to me, capturing bodies, the floor, the ceiling, everything but me.
I can’t see what’s happening around me, but I can hear it.
“Cat! Fuck, Cat! Move!”Dean screams. Then the camera is back on us, and I can see Dean holding my unconscious body in his arms.“Shit, Cat, please wake up. Where’s the paramedic?”
He looks so afraid. I want to reach through the screen and comfort him. Reese and the paramedic on standby arrive and Dean is forced to let me go. But he doesn’t look happy about it. He hovers over me, touching me, pulling his hair.
“He was so worried about you, Cat. And he never came back after he followed you out.”
