Molly was out of breath. She tried to pull her escaping brown hair back into the purple scrunchie, she brought for good luck. It didn’t help. Her legs were screaming and she couldn’t breathe. Her hair was swishing, she couldn’t breathe, her knees felt wobbly, and the sun beat down on her. How was she supposed to do her mile run in these conditions? Molly reminded herself, yet again that she should have practiced earlier. But all the times before she either was too busy, or it was raining, or she couldn’t find her iPod to listen to music or she didn’t feel like.

She knew they were laughing at her. Laughing at the parts of her that jiggled as she ran, her ragged body, her sweaty face and her slowness. Yes, the athletes and anyone else who had already finished running were definitely laughing at her. Those people, who took to sports naturally. While Molly took to sports like a fish to rock climbing. A disaster.

As she got closer to where the lap ends, she could see their bored expressions. Yes she wanted to go faster and be done with this torture like the rest of them. But she couldn’t. Her breath heaved, and she decided she deserved to take another break and walk for a while. It was an overall nice day, but the stupid running ruined that and everything else.

Why are we being judged on such a pointless thing? No college is going to say ‘hmm… we can’t enroll you because you could not finish a mile under 7 minutes in junior high.’ At least, Molly hoped so. She wasn’t the honor roll student or the athlete. Why aren’t people interested in the things she was good at like making microwave popcorn or best at Mario Kart?

Why should I have to do this? Maybe I will just continue walking, they can’t force me to run. Molly sighed. She was going nowhere, and if she didn’t run they would just give her a bad grad or a talking to. Both of which were worse than running. So Molly took a deep breath and continued on a slow, pacing jog.

As she neared the end, she heard people shout her name. ‘Molly! Molly! Whoo!’ I guess this is where I have to speed up a little more. The teacher had told them that they should all try and sprint at the end. So Molly, gasping and wheezing ran as fast as her pudgy legs would let her until she collapsed. The other students clapped, as they had been told to do by the teacher. Stumbling Molly got up and found her way to her water bottle. She chugged it in a couple seconds. Wow, Molly thought, this is so not worth it.