Survival of the Unfit

Chapter 32

Levi

I had a nice time with April Monday night. It all went as planned: meeting her parents, heading out to the new safe place (I considered bringing her back to the beach, but it had too many memories), getting fast food and talking for a long time. Some kissing too, that was nice. I brought her home before eight and definitely earned some brownie points with her Dad. I liked her Dad, despite that he tried to scare the living daylights out of me. Which failed. I didn’t know he was a cop, but I’ve shot a gun quite a few times myself (okay, more than a few times). I thought it best to not share that information with him.

Of course, he knew. The few seconds of silent exchange we had, when he asked my full name, he knew. That’s probably the only reason he let her go out with me. 

But now it’s been two weeks since then, Thursday March 18th. St. Patrick’s Day was yesterday, Dad let me have a beer as tradition. I don’t really like the taste of beer and alcohol in general, but I gulp it down and watch TV with Dad, listen to his and Mom’s drunken banter. They aren’t Irish, but Mom’s side is all German. So, my family likes beer. 

I worried about April a bit throughout the past two weeks. We talked after school a lot, the ten or so minutes she could get on her phone before her Mom would be home. She told me about the whole wine incident, about getting it from Violet and why she did it in the first place, because of Brandy. And we talked about other things throughout the week and stayed in our homes, put our weapons away, remained incognito. That Saturday I met her at the cemetery and gave her some flowers to put on Brandy’s grave. We sat and talked with her for a while before going back to the cliff. Talked to Brandy, of course.

I realized how we had both lost someone: Brandy to her, Casey to me. And how we both had losses in a very different way, but were still reeling from them. Still recovering, still not fully ourselves. Certainly April would take a lot longer than me to heal from her loss, since I was almost over Casey, but that was okay. I liked spending time with her. 

And the following week her parents lifted the punishment and we talked for hours after school, met up almost every day. I had actual dinner with her parents. Her mom made the greatest homemade pierogies I had ever tasted in my entire life and they even had lemonade, which I suspected April had requested for me. She kept kicking my foot under the table. I kicked her back. I talked to her Dad about global issues. I talked to her Mom about good pie.

So, life was decent. There was no crime. There were no killings, there weren’t any talk of killings. The way everyone looked at me in the halls, you’d think I was the killer myself. I could see greed and hunger in familiar faces, including Patrick. Everyone knows Squeak died. Homicide. Killer didn’t even try any fancy cover story. 

Therefore, no matter how safe I might be staying in my room all night, I had to take different routes home. I had to lock my doors and cars and not be anywhere vulnerable. I kept a gun under my car seat, knives in the center console, pepper spray and a switchblade in my pocket. Another gun in my room, windows forever locked. Combat knife, I took that wherever I went, when I could. The best place to keep it was my leather jacket, so I started wearing that more casually. People stayed out of my way more.

I advised April to do the same, but forgot she was still decently protected herself. Not everyone knows it’s April, but a good portion do. The rest call her the heroine of the South, or another popular name for both of us was bloody meat. And the killer was known as nothing but Lioness. Lame ass names if you ask me.

But Thursday night, again, sitting at home. Doing the same old boring routine. In my room, CD over the stereo, homework out on my desk. A huge essay was due at the end of the month with a thesis that really needed some attention, but I couldn’t focus on it for the life of me. I tapped my pencil on my notebook and paid more attention to the music. Bugs chirped outside.