The day in the catacombs had been a long day underground, and pretty boring, considering there was a beach only a few minutes away the whole time. Naomi was dying to get in the water all day, like really, it felt like a crime! Who made this schedule anyway?

Naomi's night hadn't gone too well either. She got stuck in a line with muggles and became an unwitting victim of a group of rowdy Egyptian teenage wizards casting goofy tricks. Of course, they didn't speaky any common language Naomi knew besides hexing, but luckily only one or two of them were really being butt-heads enough about it after they realized she was a witch. Not a very happy one, at that.

But then she saw them surfing. She awed at them for a long time before she finally had to admit that they were good--really good. After a short exchange of spells, some improvised sign language, and random jibber jabbering in separate languages, she'd manage to strike a "deal" them to teach her and her friends how to surf the next morning. And, out of spite, and for collateral insurance, Naomi had stolen one of their hats without any of them noticing. The little Jamaican figured they would figure out what she had done soon enough. Perhaps this is sort of what Gracie meant when she said bribing the older years? Too bad Naomi didn't have any Firewhiskey.

Now she just had to take care of the whole "deal" she made. Naomi had been a little late to joining everyone on the beach, with a straw Stetson hat bobbing at the back of her neck as she spun a volleyball in her hands and sloshed by all the other kids and over to Abby and Veronica, "I got some surfers!" she breathed triumphantly as she floated on the volleyball triumphantly.

Then she hurriedly and less excitedly added, "We didn't get off on a good foot though--gotta beat 'dem at volleyball, then she shook her head and scrunched an eyebrow, "I don't t'ink 'dey ever played before, had to show 'em what ia volleyball looked like." Naomi looked back at the beach, spotting the four boys scouting the beach for her, or maybe their friend's hat, in the distance.

"So got a net set up and all, but maybe we need one or two more people our team?" she expressed doubtfully, "You ever played, Abby?" she was sure Veronica knew what it was, and at least had some inkling on how to play, but she wasn't sure if Abby was too sheltered for that sort of thing.

Then she casually added, "Oh and 'dey don't speak English," at least not to her.

Abby was already in the water, trying different swim strokes and making a big splashing mess. Most of the students gave her a wide berth, but she quit horsing around when Naomi bobbed over to them, looking triumphant.

"Whoo!" Abby exclaimed at the mention of surfers, high-fiving Veronica. "Naomi, you're brill!"

That was, of course, before she'd found out the conditions of the deal. Cute boys? Bonus! Playing a sport she'd never played before, so she could try surfing, which she'd also never done before? Hmmm... Abby began to question Naomi's logic.

"Valley ball?" Abby repeated, making it clear she'd neither heard of it or played.

"I can try! If we lose, we can just pretend to misunderstand what they're saying, since they don't speak English!" Oh, Abby was a smart one.

"Should we round up a few more players, then? Sporty types, right?" She glanced at Veronica and Naomi, trusting them to know who the 'sporty types' were.

Volleyball.

Veronica's face lit up. Volleyball was a sport invented for girls like her. A sport played on the beach in bikinis.

And her face only lit further when she saw who they were going to be playing against- daaaamn. Way to go, Naomi!

One of the things she loved to do was hustle people. She was also fairly good at cards, and would put on her best 'dumb blonde' face and wander in on groups of upperclassmen and feign ignorance.

Which is exactly what she intended to do when she got her claws into those boys. She scoured the beach quickly for some jockish types, her eyes settling on a couple on a beach blanket, both with tanned, toned, and shapely bodies. The man was wearing a pucca shell necklace. Oh yeah, she thought with a little smile. A beach bum for sure.

"Volley, Abby," Naomi said as she tread water and held up the white ball as she rolled its name off her lips again, "Volleyball." For all her abuse of the English language, the witch at least expected Abby to properly pronounce things. But knowing the squib, she'd mispronounce it just because she liked it better that way.

A wave rolled by and the ocean water soaked at her hair and bandana as Abby proposed the novel idea that they just try not to understand the boys at all, "That's a good idea, you don' even got to pretend either, eh?" A glint of a smile tugged at the corner of Naomi's thick lips as she paddled to face her other blonde friend, who seemed to look more conniving at the site of the boys.

Naomi's green eyes rolled towards the sky as she shook her head at her boy-crazy comrade, "Ronnie you're a shark--whachyou t'inkin'?" her gaze then cautiously turned back towards the quartet of boys as one of them pointed their direction; the witch clicked her tongue on the back of her teeth as she quickly looked away and began looking around for anyone else swimming around them who may have been volleyball-savvy.

"Hey! You know volleyball?" she called out to a nearby swimmer.

Since the students on the beach were a bunch of party-poopers, the girls decided to start the game with just the three of them. Abby stood behind one side of the net with Veronica and Naomi, looking excited but much less focused than either of her friends. There were just so many lovely distractions on the beach today! For example, the three boys they were facing. And the fourth boy who was standing on sidelines, grinning (Abby preferred to think he was directing those smiles at her).

Abby paid little attention to the rules that Naomi explained, figuring she'd learn as the game started. It looked easy! You just hit the ball over the net!

"Oh, do I go first?" She exclaimed after realizing everyone was staring at her. "Alright!"

She moved towards the side, and mimed what she'd seenNaomi do earlier. Abby held out the ball with her left hand, made a fist with her right, and then glanced at her friends to make sure she was doing it right.

"Like this? Ok, just a sec, almost ready."

She hit the ball!

And it went flying above her head. "Ahhhhhh!" Abby ducked as it landed by her feet.

She offered them all a guilty grin, "Was it supposed to do that? What did I do?"

Laughing a little, she shook out her fingers and picked up the ball, studying it as if she expected it to fly above their heads like a snitch would. It was just a normal, non-magical volleyball! How odd.

Ronnie flattened her gaze at Abby. She loved Abby, really she did, but she reminded her so of the girls she had known in muggle school who would giggle and act confused whenever a team sport would come up in gym class. Even girls' sports like field hockey. Veronica, a girl who loved competition by her nature,  never understood why they wouldn't want to win.

She stood with her knees bent, rocking back and forth slightly, like a gorilla who might pounce and rip a body apart if provoked. "Hit through the ball, Ab," she called. "It's not gonna hurt you." 'Hit through the ball.' It was a piece of advice that could be applied to nearly every sport. And generally it was useful. She clapped (though not in a happy way) and dug her heels in.

Looking up with catlike eyes, she moved her arms closer together to her sides, hoping to create a little extra cleavage as she met the eyes of the one called 'Cowboy.'

She wound her hands together in 'bump formation' as it had been taught to her in her primary school gym classes.

Recruiting others for their volleyball game didn't go so well, mostly because the boys arrived in the water to confront them before anything happened. Three of them were shirtless and tanned, while the tallest was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and shyly smiled at all the girls. The two darker boys immediately took to trying to flirt and the one to whom the stetson hat belonged to just eyed Naomi suspiciously.

Rather than put up with the cowboy's glare, she immediately introduced everyone, irritating the cowboy further when she refused to call him by his long and obnoxious name. Two names were willingly shortened to Don and Maki, and then Maki and Adio continued their foreign flirt with the "new girls." Naomi didn't care much for it, and then quickly went onto explain the rules.

The Jamaican went off in a mish mash of Jamaican Creole and English, trying to find some common words or comprehensible phrases that would convey to the boys the rules: It was going to be 3 versus 3, they could only hit the ball three times, they couldn't touch the net, they lost a point with a missed serve, they couldn't hit the ball out of bounds, and they couldn't cross the lines while serving. The boys then turned to talking amongst themselves, picking out three boys--the three who met the standards of a palm raised in the air like a bar--which meant Don, the cowboy, and Maki.

After the explanation, the cowboy immediately snatched up his hat from her her with a grumpy expression, and she just shrugged and smiled; she was more than happy to let the Egyptian have his hat back and even happier to refrain from spending ten or more minutes explaining to him that his hat was going to mess up his serves and hits. "Nice" was definitely not a word to describe Naomi.

They then sloshed from the ocean and went over to the volleyball net; the teams standing opposite each other. Abby, Veronica, and Naomi were on one side; and then the two most athletic and the tall awkward one on the other. Naomi could deal with that.

Of course Abby was first to serve, and Veronica had to show off her boobs, to which the cowboy and Maki looked over--Maki, obviously, with too much interest, in Naomi's opinion. Barf-o-la. And then Veronica couldn't even use her assets to be distracting, because Abby missed the serve. Naomi wasn't sure how one person could be so clutzy.

"Oy, just bump it right now, Abby," Naomi said as she rolled the ball under the net forcefully (purposefully.) "Like 'dis, watch." Naomi hopped up and bent her knees, imitating Abby as she nodded her head at the other team's current server.

"Serve it, Cowboy."

He effortlessly punched it over the net like a lazy catapult. Too easy. Naomi got it between her forearms and lopped it over to Veronica to either set it, sneak it, or outright spike it over the net. The boys could only watch curiously and unsuspectingly until the tiny blonde made her move.

She saw the ball coming her way and watched it with the eyes of a hawk. Finally, her moves dictated by pure muscle memory, she took two quick strides and slammed the ball with her thumbs and the meat of her palms. The ball was a little overinflated, she noticed- no wonder it had been so sensitive when Abby had hit it- and it bounced higher than she had intended it to.

It shot up sharply and came down just as quickly on the other side of the net, where Maki easily- and lazily, she thought with a frown- bumped it back over the net towards Abby.

Veronica watched Abby intently. She knew Abby could do it. Abby was a perfectly capable young lady, even if she was a bit ditzy at times. She seemed up to it, anyway.

Abby felt a little out of her element, watching Naomi and Veronica with their eyes on the volleyball, knees bent in a competitive stance, faces serious. She stared at them for a moment, stifling a giggle, and trying to remember their instructions. They looked funny! But she knew that if she didn't hit the ball, at some point her teammates were going to shout, and the boys would laugh at her, and Abby might not be having as much fun as she was having right now.

"Right, ok!" She reassured her friends, adjusting the sunglasses on her nose and attempting a slight crouch.

Cowboy served the ball, Naomi passed it to Veronica, Veronica hit it over the net, and Maki hit it back towards Abby!

"Ahh! The ball! I got it! I-"

Abby rushed forward, arms outstretched, her hands clasped together in a fist, and hit it from underneath.

She watched, hopeful, as the ball flew up, then arced over the net!

Grinning, she did a little victory jump. Her face fell as the ball started going over the boys' heads, looking like it would go out of bounds.

But the tallest one stepped back a few paces and hit the ball to his teammate, causing lots of groans from the boys.

Abby had done it! Sort of. She beamed at Don, then at Naomi and Veronica, flouncing back to her spot in the sand.

Naomi skidded in the sand a bit when Abby said she had the ball, or hopefully had the ball. She dove for it, and got it up, too high for Naomi to get to it even though she made a jump for it. Luckily, tall-scrawny-and-awkward got his hands on the ball long enough (or short enough) to mess up the game and give them a point.

"Yeah!" Naomi hit the sand happily, her sun-kissed skin sprinkled in beach-grains, "Yours, Ronni," she got the ball from rolling beneath the net and passed it to the short blond, before hopping back into her knee-bent position and letting the sand seep between her toes as she eyed down the boys on the other side, trying to get ready to recieve.

Adio was happily referee-ing to gibberish to them on the sidelines, and they were animatedly replying with laughing or cursing, she assumed--but from the glances between them and the girls, (especially after the smile Abby shot Don,) somehow Naomi didn't think it had anything to do with volleyball.

Veronica clapped again, more excitedly, and cupped her hands around her mouth. "Yeah, Ab-by!" she squealed, bouncing up and down. She had to weigh her desire to taunt the boys against her desire to remain a lady, and in the end the latter won out as she scooped up the ball.

She hoped the boys wouldn't let them win on purpose. ...But the thought crossed her mind all the same. Were they the type of boys who would rather die than lose to a bunch of young girls, or the type that would be too gentlemanly to play their hardest against them?

She spun the ball gently on her fingertips, eyeing out her spot on the opposing team's side. There was a decided gap in their defenses, and she knew if she concentrated she could put it right through them.

"One servin' zero," she announced, holding the ball out. When she had mentally prepared herself, she tossed the ball up and struck it, hard, with the butt of her hand, sending it sailing towards the opposing team.

One serving what now? Oh, that was points. How'd they get points? Abby really should have been paying better attention as Naomi had explained the game. She'd been so pleased by her friends' praise and distracted by the chatter from the boys that pesky things like rules had gone over her head.

"Go, Ronnie!" Abby cheered her on as she made a valiant serve, the ball racing towards the ground on the other side of the net! Abby fully expected Veronica's serve to crush them. For a little thing, she packed power!

There was a bit of scramble from the boys, but then Maki moved back from his spot, nearly running into Grumpy Cowboy, and sent the ball back towards them!

Oh, no! Right towards her! Why was she the weakest link?!

Abby gaped at it for second, then hopped once and swatted it away from her like a cat.

The ball went sideways, but was low to the ground. "Naomi!" She squealed, hoping the girl could save it.

Veronica made a great serve, but somehow it came back over the net. Naomi wasn't too thrilled with it, and it headed straight for Abby. Was it too much to ask that she would be able to hit it again?

Well she did, but apparently hit it towards some invisible sand crab, and Naomi took a low slippery step towards the spot as she slid under the ball and got it up between her arms. It went high, over her head, and hopefully somewhere near the net for Veronica to save.

One of Naomi's legs was curled to the side while the other was jutting out in front of her, and sand had gotten in all sorts of places up and around her swim bottoms. Naomi brushed her legs off as she scrambled up, trying to shake off the sand as she watched what Veronica did.

"Fi' you freak, Abby hit it up," Naomi was still trying to get sand off her when she finally just gave up and gave the Reid sister a quick look, "or at me or Ronni. We'll figure out somet'in to do wit' it,"  Naomi then turned around to face the net as she adjusted her bottoms from the sand wedgie in the rush of getting ready, "Damn..."

Veronica supposed she was glad to see Abby make any kind of contact with the ball. It was a decided improvement from earlier, at any rate. From what she saw, Abby's bad-ness at the sport was due in much larger part to her goldfish-like inability to focus on the game rather than any athletic shortcomings. Either way, it was going to make things a bit more challenging.

She was back farther, watching as the ball took a hard jolt off Naomi's strong hands. It careened for the net but Ronnie knew it would never make it over. She took a few quick, slightly panicked strides before-

-oh, God.

She felt the sick lurch of the sand shifting and giving way beneath her and almost immediately knew what was going to happen.

Somehow falling on her back in the sand wasn't a soft landing. When she thought about it, yeah... technically when it all got pressed together it was just a bunch of rocks, wasn't it?

She landed hard, the ball bouncing down in the sand next to her, and hit the errant sand with a stony fist. "Bastard!" she spat. Who was a bastard? The sand? The ball? Oh well. "Sorry," she added to Naomi and Abby.

As she got to her feet and brushed herself off, she could see the boys laughing at her. And pointing. And that infuriated her. She rolled the ball grudgingly under the net and felt her face white-hot with embarrassment.

"Go ahead and laugh, arseholes," she muttered to herself, her eyes trained on the ball steadily.

Abby watched the disaster unfold as her teammates were foiled by the sand. She winced, struggling not to crack up as Naomi got a wedgie and Ronnie nearly fell on her face.

But her positive mood started to fade at all the cranky mutterings from her team and the laughter from the boys. What happened to the flirting and casual competition? This was almost like... work and effort.

"It's not a big deal!" Abby exclaimed, sounding exasperated. "We'll beat them." Eventually.

She spoke too soon! The tall one she'd smiled at earlier served the ball, seeming to purposefully send it in her direction. Since Abby was so focused on trying to hit it, she didn't notice his playful grin, and after a startled glance at her teammates, made an attempt to get underneath the ball.

Missed! She skidded on her knee as the ball bounced right next to her. Face warm, Abby made a show of brushing off the sand and ignoring the opposing team's laughter.

"Oy! You could try hitting it towards those two once in a while!" She gestured at Naomi and Veronica, then kicked the ball towards the net, not caring if it was supposed to be their serve or the boys' serve or what. This was supposed to be fun, but everyone was taking it seriously and getting upset so she'd get upset! That was the problem here. Not her lack of volleyball skills.

They should have played that popular muggle sport, football. She could kick things!