Whipped, page 8
Why?
“Go!” Big Red shouted abruptly, leaving Cheyenne scrambling to get moving as Fran dug her elbow into her chest to propel herself forward like a diver off a board.
“Gah,” Cheyenne groaned, her balance compromised, but only momentarily.
Holding her arms out, Cheyenne wobbled back before catching herself. She bit into her mouthguard as if it might make her move faster, then lunged forward. In a few long strides she caught up to the pack.
Weaving around the obstacles was easy but avoiding her flailing comrades was not. The challenge was in anticipating where their bodies would be as they swerved around the litter.
Cheyenne still didn’t have the level of control she needed to step around skaters, so she hustled to get to the front of the pack.
With each new lap, Cheyenne’s rhythm improved. As if acting on instinct, she cut around cones and stepped over bags.
“Don’t get cocky,” Fran warned as they zipped around the bend, her words rising above the roar of the skates and the cheers of the other fresh meat waiting on the sidelines. “Slow down and concentrate on precision.”
The advice was good, but it came too late. She was flying when Sam, a stout dental hygienist with dyed platinum hair, clipped the tire with her skate.
“Shit!” Sam screamed as she went down.
The skaters behind Sam followed in slow motion. They were like a train derailing. Brenda landed on top of Sam like an anchor followed by Pepper.
Fran jumped over the tangle of bodies, tucking her legs beneath her as she did. Clearing the fallen skaters, Fran lost her balance but landed in a controlled fall that allowed her to bounce right back up.
Cheyenne tried to mimic Fran’s response, but she couldn’t make herself jump in time. Instead, she slammed into the dog pile and became the cherry on top of the human sundae.
Her head spun as her feet went out from under her and she landed on her shoulder. Trying to remember her training, Cheyenne balled her hands into fists and tucked them into her
body. The technique did little to mitigate the pain shooting through her hip and into her back.
Several sets of skates rolled toward the mess of crumpled and cursing bodies on the gymnasium floor. Looking up at the rafters, Big Red’s face appeared in Cheyenne’s field of vision followed by Anwar’s.
“Did you break anything?” she asked without demonstrating any particular concern as she scanned them.
Cheyenne did a systems check. Nothing felt broken.
When no one gave any indication of serious injury, Big Red propped her hands on her square hips and looked pensive as the women got to their feet.
“Why did you skate straight into them?” Anwar whispered, a smirk on his lips. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was pretty metal but also kinda dumb.”
Heat blossomed on Cheyenne’s face. “I was trying to jump them like Fran did.”
Anwar’s eyebrows flew up in surprise as he tried, and failed, to conceal his laughter. “You know your feet didn’t move right? You just skated right into them like a kid diving into a ball pit.”
Cheyenne resisted the urge to cover her face. “I know, okay? I lived it.” She rubbed the shoulder that would hurt like hell tomorrow.
“Listen, meat, we didn’t want to put any pressure on you,”
Big Red started, her arms crossed over her ample chest.
“We’ve had a lot of injuries on the team lately. We need fifteen players on the roster,” she explained. “We’re three short.”
“Wait, so you want us to join the actual team?” Sam had unclipped her helmet and was fixing her platinum hair into a sweaty ponytail.
“More like inviting you to try out,” Fran explained. “You have to pass the basic skills assessment, which is tougher than it sounds, and be able to do a contact scrimmage successfully.”
“Meaning we can’t become a human traffic jam,” Sam guessed.
“That would be preferable,” Fran agreed.
“We don’t expect you to be able to play,” Big Red added, obviously looking to put them at ease. “But the league requires us to have a certain number of people on the roster, and if we’re short we might not be able to finish out the season.”
Considering they had yet to win a game, that probably didn’t sound so bad, but in the last several weeks Cheyenne had learned it was about the love of the sport, not winning.
Derby meant everything to Big Red and her Sore Losers.
Cheyenne straightened. “What do we need to do?”
Big Red’s bright green eyes regarded her with a little surprise. Had she expected them to cower in fear? Not everyone on the fresh meat team wanted to skate in a bout, but most of them did. After all, it was what they’d been training so hard to learn.
“I printed out the list of minimum skills requirements,” she responded, the hint of pride gone from her lightly freckled face. “If I were you, I’d really practice the stops and jumps.
You have to clear at least six inches and we will be testing anyone who wants to tryout,” she added sternly, her forehead creased. “It does not benefit anyone for you all to be out there without the minimal skills. We don’t want to see anyone get hurt, okay? We’d rather take a knee for the rest of the season.”
“And be grateful you don’t have to pass the twenty-seven five,” Fran chimed in. “That was twenty-seven laps around the track in five minutes. It kept me from passing the skills assessment for three months.”
“We’re still going to make you do it before you’re a starter,” Big Red interrupted, “but WFTDA doesn’t require it to be bout-ready anymore.”
“Does this mean we finally get our derby names and numbers if we make the cut?” Michelle asked as she ran her tattooed hand over her sweaty buzz cut.
Big Red hesitated as if trying to find some way to say no.
When she couldn’t, she nodded. “You’ll have earned it.”
Exhilaration forced Cheyenne’s heart into a trot. She really wanted that derby name even if she hadn’t come up with one yet.
When practice was over, Cheyenne sat in her car reading over the WFTDA requirements. With two weeks before the next bout, she had ten days to master everything before Big Red’s tryouts. She sighed and leaned back into her headrest. It just didn’t seem possible.
Maybe I can ask Erica for help, she thought with a morbid chuckle. That would really be something. She could picture Erica’ face as she casually dropped roller derby into a conversation.
Guilt twisted in her guts as Cheyenne sat up and started driving home. Should she tell her she might be on an opposing team?
How are you going to do that, genius? Admit you were a little weirdo who stalked her and then joined an opposing team so you might one day throw an elbow in her face without getting arrested. Yeah, that’ll go over well.
A sense of impending doom overwhelmed her as the rain started. If she did tell her, could it affect her job?
She imagined Toni’s face marred with disappointment.
Toni had taken a chance on her, and Cheyenne repaid her by losing her temper at a partner and stalking a senior associate.
She’d be out on her ass if she confessed.
But what if Erica didn’t rat her out? She’d been kind of nice to her lately. Maybe she wasn’t some nightmare, but rather misunderstood. Was there a chance that she wasn’t the heinous creature she pretended to be?
Cheyenne recalled their interaction after the meeting that morning. There had been something in the way Erica looked at her. Had it been pride?
Pulling into her driveway, Cheyenne still couldn’t decide what to do about derby. She convinced herself that the issue
was premature. She hadn’t even passed the tryouts. There might be nothing to worry about.
Depleted and sore, Cheyenne dragged herself out of the car before grabbing her workbag from the backseat and dashing to the door under the drizzle. There was a lot to get through before the child support hearing tomorrow and she needed to get to it.
“Tilly!” Cheyenne called as she walked into her townhouse and dropped her stuff on the couch.
A cat bell jingled at the top of the stairs.
“Come here, honey,” Cheyenne said, making eye contact with the big black and white cat staring down at her with luminescent yellow eyes.
She tried sitting on the couch to coax her down. “Come here, Tilly.” She leaned back and patted her belly. Sometimes she’d wake up to find the cat sleeping on her, but as soon as she stirred, Tilly would bolt and hide for hours as if ashamed of her vulnerability.
Relaxing into the couch, Cheyenne had never been more comfortable. She closed her eyes. “Tilly,” she called again but with markedly less enthusiasm.
Before she knew it, she was drifting. When the fat cat finally landed in her lap, Cheyenne didn’t move. The exhaustion had taken hold and she was powerless to stop it.
CHAPTER 14
SHIT. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Grateful to the kink in her back that woke her just before sunrise, Cheyenne leapt off the couch and bolted upstairs. If she hadn’t been so gross and sweaty from the night before she would’ve skipped the shower, but even though it cost her precious minutes, she flung open the glass door while brushing her teeth.
Tilly, curled up inside the sink, watched her through half-lidded eyes. If cats could smile, she’d be smirking at Cheyenne frantically trying to do five things at once.
The upside to driving to work at the crack of dawn was the minimal traffic. When she pressed her access key to the black box to open the building’s parking garage, the sky had only just started brightening into a hazy pink.
Flying through the empty garage, Cheyenne breathed a sigh of relief when she reached the firm’s assigned spaces. No one else was at work yet.
Taking cleansing breaths, Cheyenne focused her mind and went over the facts. With six hours before the hearing, she had plenty of time to go over the financials and verify the proposed child support figures. No need to panic.
As she stepped out of the car, Cheyenne’s quads ached, and a sharp pain pulled at her lower back. The combination of the fall and skating so hard had kicked her ass. Literally.
Cheyenne popped two pain killers in her mouth and swallowed them with iced coffee as she darted down the
corridor toward her office with her heavy bag strapped to her back. Closing the door behind her, Cheyenne dropped her bag in the loveseat and got to work spreading everything out so she could see it all at once.
Within an hour, Cheyenne found three inconsistencies between reported income and the figures used to calculate the support. Her stomach churned, kicking panic up into her chest like sludge from the bottom of a lake.
The chances that they were anomalies was close to zero.
These aren’t errors. This is fraud.
Cheyenne debated calling Erica. Could they move for sanctions against opposing counsel? She pushed the thought off to the side and focused on her more pressing problem.
She’d have to do all the calculations herself.
Glancing at the financial disclosures, Cheyenne’s blood turned to ice and her skin tingled with a cold sweat. The six-inch stack suddenly loomed like an unscalable tower.
Cheyenne looked at the time on her phone. Just under five hours before the hearing. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to go through it all.
Instead of giving in to the urge to cry, Cheyenne hobbled on sore legs to her desk with the papers pressed to her chest.
All she could do was her best.
Thinking only of what was right in front of her, and not on the minutes flying by impossibly fast, Cheyenne opened her laptop and started figuring out the income so she could plug the accurate numbers into the calculation software.
She’d only made a dent in the retirement accounts when the singular sensation of being watched pulled Cheyenne’s attention toward the door.
“Why are you here so early?” Erica demanded in place of the customary hello or good morning. It was like she could smell Cheyenne’s panic from several feet away.
“The numbers are useless,” Cheyenne explained, her eyes on the proposed child support order. “Their calculations are
under on almost everything.”
Erica tilted her head to one side, but not a single hair slipped out of place. She was a vision of perfection in her tailored black suit while Cheyenne felt like a moldy mop.
“And when exactly did you notice this discrepancy?”
Panic rose like the bile in her stomach. Cheyenne tried to swallow but couldn’t will the necessary moisture to form in her mouth. “This morning,” she admitted, wishing her voice hadn’t grown thin at the end.
Erica’s dark eyes narrowed, expressing her open irritation.
“This morning?” she repeated as if unable to believe her ears.
“You didn’t even bother to look at this yesterday? Why would you wait until the morning of the hearing to prepare?” Erica’s hostility grew and multiplied like a living thing. “One of the first things I told you was to always verify everything yourself.
It is absolute malpractice to be unprepared.”
Cheyenne struggled to come to her own defense. It had been stupid not to check last night, but it’s not like she’d gone to sleep on purpose. She had every intention of reviewing the work. Would Erica understand if she explained about derby?
She clenched her jaw. Probably not. After all, she’d managed to balance both without messing up.
“If you weren’t going to do your job,” Erica continued, her fair skin flushed over her high cheekbones, “you could have told me yesterday and I would have done it myself.” She gave her another withering look. “I shouldn’t have wasted an opportunity on you.”
The insult was too far over the line. It was one thing to call her out for her mistake and quite another to berate her.
Cheyenne stood, her legs trembling and twitching beneath her. “You don’t have to humiliate me to tell me I’ve made a mistake,” she said, her voice shaky and her eyes trained on Erica’s cold, sharp face despite the desire to cry and apologize.
“Your job is literally to make sure there are no mistakes,”
Erica roared, her jaw clenched so hard Cheyenne was sure it
would come apart like a snapped chain on a bike. “Why are you here if you can’t do that most basic task?”
Cheyenne’s stomach lurched and acid burned her throat.
She hated the tears prickling the backs of her eyes. “I’ll have this finished in time. I’m doing my best.”
“Do better,” Erica offered coldly before turning around and charging for the door.
When she was gone, Cheyenne dropped into her chair like an anchor thrown overboard. With violently trembling hands she forced herself back to work. The best way to shut Erica up was to prove to her she could do the job.
ERICA DIDN’T SAY a word to her after the hearing. Luckily, Cheyenne had finished with enough time for Erica to check her numbers. Despite the lack of errors in the child support order, Erica didn’t soften.
At least she’d discharged her fury on opposing counsel instead of Cheyenne. After being sanctioned by the court, he’d been ordered to pay the fees for the hours Cheyenne spent re-doing the child support calculations thanks to Erica’s argument to the judge.
Cheyenne wanted to congratulate her on a job well done and apologize for her misstep, but Erica blew past her and out the door before she could utter a syllable. She hadn’t so much as looked at her. It was like Erica was so angry she willed Cheyenne out of existence.
By the time Cheyenne pulled into her driveway, she’d been ruminating about Erica all day. It was no wonder she had no friends in the office. Why people actively avoided her. She was an acidic pit of misery hellbent on alienating everybody.
Cheyenne decided she’d had enough. She might have to defer to her in the office, but derby would be a different story.
After feeding Tilly, who did not come out of wherever she was lounging to greet her, Cheyenne popped two more pain
killers and changed into running shorts and a T-shirt.
Despite the official start of summer being a couple of weeks away, the evening was hot and sticky when Cheyenne emerged from her townhouse. With her hair in a high ponytail, the ends stuck to the back of her neck as she crouched down on her front step to adjust the weights around her ankles. They were the remnants of the scuba diving trip she and Lisa were going to take as a post-bar celebration. At least she’d found a use for something in the boxes stashed in the attic.
Jogging toward the fitness center at the edge of her community, Cheyenne’s legs burned with the added heaviness.
Instead of giving in to the pain setting her still tired muscles on fire, she pushed harder.
As she maintained a steady pace, row after row of identical townhouses blurred in her peripheral vision. Wiping the sweat from her brow before it could trickle into her eyes, Cheyenne imagined herself on the derby track.
She leapt from the steaming, black asphalt and onto the sidewalk. It was only a few inches, but it was harder than she realized to account for the added weight. It would only be more difficult on skates.
With her pulse thumping steadily in her ears, Cheyenne set her sights on the low, green hedge circling the clubhouse and adjoining pool. As the potential hurdle bobbed into view, she judged it was close to the six inches she needed to clear.
Picking up the pace, Cheyenne rushed toward the hedge, lifted both feet, and jumped. It was almost perfect, but the weight on her right leg pulled her down just a little more than she anticipated. The tip of her shoe caught in a branch.
Without the weight on her left foot she could’ve recovered, but she couldn’t get it beneath herself quick enough and she landed face first in the damp grass.
“You okay, dear?” an elderly woman walking a tiny white fluff-ball asked as she peered at Cheyenne from the sidewalk.
Heat flashed through her body as she laughed nervously and scrambled to her feet. “Yeah, I just took a little spill.”
The woman’s gaze traveled from Cheyenne’s face down to her feet and back. “It looked like you jumped on purpose, sweetheart. Are you sure you’re alright?”
