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The last bump hits Carmody far too hard. The wind is driven out of her lungs, and pain lances up her spine. She rolls out of the ring, coughing, but the substitute coach doesn't even look up from her magazine.
This sucks.
THere's no one thing that happened, but a series of them. A bad week of bad days.
Carmody lost to Holly-Hope Again. Okay.
Then Sola lost to Karna while Carmody stood by and watched. Okay. No shame in losing to Karna, you can't win 'em all, hell of a match against a hell of an athlete, and all the other cliches she'd known since she was playing sports in middle school.
And now Coach Ash had jetted off to Japan, taking Paule Coupe with her, with no warning. Kanako wasn't around much; apparently she had something else big going on. Sola was rather quiet lately. And the subs just ordered Carmody to take bump after bump after endless bump, with no rhyme or reason to it. She'd tried looking for matches, but the opponents she wanted were booked, and all she got was an invitation to some kind of bar. Carmody wasn't stupid, that was the most transparent attempt to catch her drinking on a fake ID she could've imagined. Meanwhile, everyone was busy preparing for this B1 thing, and when she'd asked about being in it, the WWA executive had answered, in a patronizing tone, that it was meant for elite pro athletes, not rookies like her.
And they were probably right. But Carmody was still going nowhere.
So today, Carmody now found herself alone, hurting, and frustrated. She excused herself to the hallway leading to the locker room, behind steel doors, and checked her phone. She remembered what Amy said, when they spoke in this very hall. She even looked at Colby's past texts, outlining why she just wasn't cut out to be a wrestler. Bree, her brother, was supposed to have brought her shit down to move in, but he'd been stopped by the penguin disaster an out-of-season blizzard, and had to turn back. And didn't they always say things happened for a reason?
