View source for A Loli's ENF Adventure/Sally/School/Tiffany, a girl who hates her/Sally tries to be mature and pretend like it doesn't bother her./Sally decides to put on a brave face and joins her friends on the playground.

Sally felt eyes on her and heard surreptitious snickering as she walked the halls.  Word of the incident was making its way across the school on the lips of the students who had witnessed to it.  Sally felt her breathing quicken when she noticed classmates turning away from her to hide amused grins.  The short distance between the fourth grade classroom and the school playground seemed to Sally to be longer than it had ever been before.

Sally took a calming breath as she walked out of the building through the big double doors.  It would all blow over, she knew, but not letting it get to her in the moment was proving to be difficult.  She stepped to the side of the doors both to be out of the well-traveled thoroughfare and to hear a little bit less of the laughing that may or may not be related to her embarrassing exposure.

She needed something to help her not think about it, so she looked over the playground to find a friend who might be willing to play with her.  Traci's short, dark-haired head was poking out of a crowd of kids by the jungle gym, but talking to her would mean joining the crowd and having to answer a lot of questions.  Quinn was starting a game a four-square with a few of his friends, but Sally was not feeling confident enough to talk to him at the moment.  She saw Allen swinging alone on the monkey bars, but, although he would probably talk to her, he wasn't the kind of friend who would make her feel better about her situation.  Tiffany and Sylvia were on the swings, so avoiding that side of the playground would be best.

Sally bit her lip and twisted the straps of her backpack in her hands as she considered just hiding away on the other side of the school, but that would be too much like avoiding the problem.  She sighed and began walking toward Traci and her friends when she noticed that two bigger kids were  playing catch in the grassy field beyond the the jungle gym and the four-square court.  One of them Sally recognized immediately by her angelic long, blonde hair as the fifth-grader Chelsea, but the other girl had a baseball cap pulled low over her face.  Chelsea was nice enough though occasionally condescending to younger kids, and, being a fifth-grader, maybe she hadn't heard from any fourth-graders what had happened in the classroom yet.  Sally knew that it was dodging the issue, but having a normal recess talking with Chelsea would be a heavenly escape from her troubles.

Sally walked left around the four-square court, giving the kids who were playing a wide berth.  Quinn's eyes glanced briefly up at her, and a what Sally thought to be surprisingly pleasant and not at all teasing smile curled the corner of his lip.  Sally was baffled and overwhelmed by the potential motivations and ramifications that lay in that charming smile, so she hunched over and scuttled on her way toward the grassy field, her cheeks burning bright.

Several shuffling steps later, the crunch of gravel under her shoes told the daydreaming Sally that she was past the paved playground and at the edge of the grassy field.  She looked up just in time to see the girl in the cap wind up and whip her arm around like a propeller to zip a highlighter yellow softball underhand at Chelsea who flinched and cowered behind the oversized mitt on her hand.  The ball hit the mitt with a leathery thud and fell to the ground at Chelsea's feet.

The pitcher tipped up her cap to reveal a laughing be-freckled face framed by a few strands of curly brown hair that had wiggled free.  Elly!  She was the softball team's first pitcher, the soccer team's center forward, and, in Sally's eyes at least, the coolest of the fifth-graders.  Elly teased her partner, "You know, it's actually safer if you keep your eye on the ball."  Her voice was crackly and low, almost adult-like, as it had been since her growth spurt started earlier in the year.

Chelsea pouted.  "Oh, I am trying, El, really.  I warned you that I wasn't good at this sort of thing."  She bent her knees in a graceful dip and plucked the softball from the grass like Snow White picking a flower.  She lobbed the ball underhand back to Elly putting a touch of oomph on it by springing up on her toes at the end of her rotation.

Elly snapped her mitt around the ball and hunched into her stance before she noticed Sally approaching from the playground.  She doffed her cap.  "Hey, Sally," she called out with a sly smile.  "Wanna help me practice?"

It was such a welcome offer that it left Sally a bit jarred to be going from laughingstock to playing with the fifth-graders in the space of about ten feet of pavement and gravel.  She nodded like a woodpecker and scampered up to the older pair.  "Yeah, okay," she said, her haste giving the lie to her attempt to sound cool and dispassionate.

Chelsea turned to Sally and took a deep, relieved breath.  "Wonderful," she said in her peculiar high, breathy voice as she presented Sally with the mitt in the palms of her outstretched hands.  "Perhaps you more enjoy sports."  Her smile of relief made Sally half-expect her to add, 'My hero.'  Then she bounded doe-like to Elly's side as much to be better able to converse with her friend as to be out of the way of flying fastballs.

"You ready?" Elly called to Sally from her spot in the middle of the field.  Sally thrust her left hand into the mitt, which she noticed wasn't sweaty at all, and stood with it extended in front of herself like a superhero about to stop a runaway train.  She gave Elly a nod.  Elly went right into her wind-up and hurled the softball in Sally's direction.  Sally impressed herself when she caught the ball without trouble.

As Sally threw the ball back overhand, Elly addressed Chelsea without taking her eye off the ball until it was in her mitt.  "I wish that you would come to the game, Chel."  She kept talking as she wound up, "Even if you don't play, it's nice to have friends watching."  Elly's arm whipped around again and zipped the ball back to Sally who, to her delight, snapped it up in the mitt.

Chelsea was thoughtful for a moment.  "I suppose it would be a good occasion to wear the new dress that my dad bought me," she said.  Sally noticed that she hadn't referred to him as 'Daddy' like she used to do when they were younger.

Elly took her eyes off of Sally's return throw and bobbled it in her surprise.  "Really?  You will actually go to a game?"

Chelsea shrugged, making a show of it being no big thing.  "I have never been to a real game before.  You like it, so maybe it will be fun."

Although she did not voice it, Elly's gratitude was written all over her face.  She wound up another pitch and zipped it to Sally with more heat than before.  Sally felt the ball hit her mitt and her fingers close around it before she registered how quick it had been coming.  She checked her mitt and was surprised to find the bright yellow ball in the middle of the webbing.

"Sorry about that, Sally.  I didn't mean to throw it so fast," Elly said with a doff of her cap.  "But, hey, you can catch!  Why didn't you try out for the team?"

Sally's cheeks flushed with pride at Elly's genuine praise.  "I didn't know I could either," she said before flinging the ball overhand back to Elly who caught it just over her head.

Elly poked a playful thumb in Sally's direction and made an aside to Chelsea, "Look at this, Chel.  We have a natural here."

"How exciting," Chelsea said without a hint of sarcasm, seeming delighted to no longer have to help Elly with her softball practice.  Sally smiled at the hope that she and Elly could keep practicing together in the future.

Elly adjusted her stance and stared at Sally like she was imagining the path that the ball would take to her mitt.  "Alright I am going to try some actual game pitches now.  Is that okay, Sally?"

Feigning more confidence than she actually felt, Sally said, "Yeah, go for it.  I bet I can catch them."  She set her feet apart and held her glove hand forward in her superhero pose.

Elly paused her wind-up and furrowed her brow at Sally.  "Uh, these are going to come kinda fast and low, so you should probably take a catcher's stance.  Do you know what that looks like?"

Sally did not watch sports, but she had seen what baseball players look like when they play.  The pitcher stands on a little dirt hill, and the catcher squats down behind the plate with her glove hand in front of her.  Sally didn't have a mask or that chest pad thing, which worried her, but there was no way that she was going to miss this chance to impress Elly and Chelsea.  She dropped into a squat on the balls of her feet with her knees spread wide and held up her mitt.  "Like this?" she asked.

Elly slipped out of her stance and started snickering into her hand.  Chelsea's blue eyes went wide, and a rosy pink colored her cheeks.  Sally wondered, was her stance really that bad?  She scooched her feet out wider and let her heels rest on the ground, but that just made Chelsea avert her eyes skyward and signal downward with her finger.  Sally looked down, expecting to find some very amusing thing on the ground, but all she saw was her pleated skirt draped over her spread knees.  The color drained from her face, and she began to tremble as it dawned on her just what she was displaying to Elly and Chelsea, naked and spread wide.  She shrieked and snapped her knees closed, drawing eyes from behind her on the playground.

Sally scrambled to her feet and shoved the front of her skirt down with both hands.  She almost turned to run away when she realized that the only place that she had to run to was the playground, where the story of her shame was no doubt still being told.  Recognizing her distress, Elly called with the smile still in her cracking voice, "Hey, it's alright, Sally.  It's no big deal."

It felt like a very big deal to Sally, her embarrassment having chased away in an instant all the pride and happiness that she had been feeling before.  She had a chance to play with Elly and Chelsea, and she had messed it up in the worst way.  Her breathing became heavy, and she began to feel some congestion in her nose--the beginning of a cry.

"Elly's right, you know," Chelsea's beatific voice said from beside her.  It surprised Sally who had been too flustered to notice her approaching. "Nobody saw but us, and we will not tell.  Will we, Elly?"

"Everyone saw," Sally choked out.

"No, no," Chelsea began.  "You were facing this way, so nobody behind-"

"In class," Sally interrupted.  She looked at her shoes and clutched herself with her trembling arms.  "Tiffany pulled my skirt down, and everyone saw."  She didn't know why she felt the need to share that.  Was it just how nice they were being?

Elly, walking up to the pair, rolled her eyes.  "That little perv.  The whole team knows that she's obse-"

Chelsea wheeled on Elly and breathed "Shh!" with sudden unsaintly ferocity.

Elly swallowed and tried a new tack.  "It's just a little skin.  What does it even matter who sees it?"  She patted Sally on the shoulder, a gesture that calmed Sally.  "You don't have anything down there that I wasn't expecting to be there, anyway."

"We are not all as shameless as you are, El," Chelsea said with her nose in the air.

"You should be.  Shame is dumb," Elly teased.  She rested a hand on her hip and cocked her head at Sally.  "So, why aren't you wearing panties or something?"

"It's not because I'm shameless.  I just like how it feels."  Chelsea blinked and hid her face behind her hair, realizing too late that the question hadn't been directed at her.  Both Elly and Sally stared at her.  Elly broke and started to giggle.  Sally, although fresh from her own embarrassment, could not help but grin.  Part of it was because it really was funny, but another part of it was the simple joy of knowing that she was not all alone at school.

Elly's cracking snickering sounded almost like she was choking.  When it tapered off, she asked the universe, "How am I the only girl here wearing panties?"  She blinked at a thought and addressed Chelsea directly, "I thought you liked clothes, and aren't panties, you know, clothes?"

Crossing her arms and recovering some of her lost dignity, Chelsea smirked at her friend.  "So are overalls, but you will never see me wearing those."

"And doesn't it feel gross?" Elly continued.  "I know when I don't wear panties, it gets all sweaty and sticky down there."

Sally saw an opportunity to defend her fellow commando.  "No, I think the air keeps mine dry."  Sally pondered how she hadn't actually noticed a difference between wearing panties and not wearing panties.  Thinking about it, there was a different feeling to it.  She supposed that it made some sense that wearing no panties didn't feel like anything, while wearing panties felt warm and cottony.  After today, she was afraid to ever leave the house without panties again, but she wondered what it would be like to go pantiless somewhere she knew she couldn't get caught.  She was surprised that she found the idea appealing.

"And I just don't sweat," Chelsea stated as a matter of plain fact.

Elly snerked.  "Yeah right."  She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and leaned down to whisper into Sally's ear, "I bet it smells like my brother's armpit under her skirt."  Sally snorted a laugh before she could check herself, and immediately felt guilty about it.

Chelsea huffed and turned her back to Elly.  "I no longer feel like attending your game, El, if I am to be teased this way."

Elly around to her friend's front and tamped down her smile as best she could.  "I'm sorry, Chel; I didn't mean it.  I was just trying to make Sally feel better is all.  You probably smell like lilacs and daisies or something."

"That's lavender, and it's my conditioner," Chelsea said, thawing before her dear friend.  "Oh, very well, but you had better be nice to me.  I expect a foul ball or something."

"I'll autograph it."  Elly beamed a sly half-grin at Sally.  "You should come too.  Maybe you can tell Coach Osbert that you want to try out."

"Or you could just sit on the bleachers with me and keep me company," Chelsea turned her cloud-soft smile on Sally.  "El is going to be too busy playing, and it would not be fun to sit alone."

[[Sally tries out for the team.|Sally wants to find out if she really has a talent for playing softball.]]

[[Sally watches the game with Chelsea.|Sally would feel awkward being teammates with Tiffany, but sitting with Chelsea sounds nice.]]

[[Category:  A Loli's ENF Adventure]]