#ogmilligan

After hours of working on the final article for the most recent issue of the Degrassi Daily, Katie finally closed the doors to the journalism room and locked the door tightly behind her. She’d been feeling confident while writing, but now that she’d left the room, she just felt drained. Katie had worked pretty hard on this edition of the newspaper, but had a feeling that after it would be printed she’d want to hide as deep as she could in the journalism room’s supply closet. How had she been able to put that whole thing together on her own? She was still surprised that it was possible. It was around seven o’clock when she had finally finished. The halls were nearly empty; a few classrooms here and there had their lights still on… teachers finishing up grading or maybe even an after school study session was going on. But Katie wasn’t ready to go just yet. She was pretty angry at her staff for abandoning her  on this paper. All of them claimed to have “other commitments” or that they had just lost their inspiration for their pieces and left Katie to handle it all herself. Of course, Katie had yelled at them as they all walked out the door: “Fine! I don’t need any of you! All of you just slack off until the very last second and leave me to do all the work! Good luck doing that at a real newspaper company!” And then she’d sunken deep into her editors chair and screamed as loud as she could into her hand.

Heading towards the gym, she was surprised to see a light still on, and the sound of someone grunting angrily, taking out their anger on the punching bag, coming from behind the big blue gym doors. Knowing someone was inside made Katie a little uncomfortable, and part of her said to turn back immediately and not bother to work out. But there was only two ways to make the anger that Katie was feeling go away: purging, or exercise. Katie knew which one was the better decision, and besides… she didn’t have any snacks or money to buy herself some. So, deciding that whoever was inside the gym could just learn to share, Katie pushed through the doors and found herself staring at a very handsome and very shirtless Owen Milligan. Katie stood there, uncomfortably, watching for a moment while he swung, hitting the bag over and over. She knew this wasn’t a dangerous situation, but for some reason deep down she felt like she had to fight or flight, and her feet were telling her to run away and let him be. But Katie was much stronger than that, and her will to move and exercise was much bigger than her desire to run away. So she walked past him towards the locker rooms. It honestly seemed as if Owen had barely even noticed her, or pretended that he didn’t, at least.