Do I Look Like I'm Joking? - Promo

So, as some of you may know, I am trying to make a living as a writer via means other than Patreon and commissions, which mostly means occasionally turning one of my Patreon exclusive perks into a commercially available book on Amazon.

Nefarious, I know.

And, speaking of nefarious, now that I am holding hostage the world with a nuclear missile— I mean, now that I have your attention, I released an April Fools Special https://www.amazon.com/Joking-Terry-Laveres-Seasonal-Specials-ebook/dp/B0C1P2JRXT[ not that long ago, and I'm honestly kinda proud of it. It's not the almost literally magic thing that the Christmas Special https://www.amazon.com/Last-Terry-Laveres-Seasonal-Specials-ebook/dp/B0BR2Z1J17 was, nor the trainwreck of a relationship that the Valentine's Day Special https://www.amazon.com/Potion-Number-Laveres-Seasonal-Specials-ebook/dp/B0BVWS5LD2 was—oh, wait.

Yeah. It's that.

It's that to an incredible degree.

In case you're interested? This is the first half of the novella, cut right before anything worth the NSFW tag happens, but ending at a point that I would consider a satisfying ending to the story.

If, you know, there wasn't another half to be read, either on my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/do-i-look-like-81065907?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link or on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Joking-Terry-Laveres-Seasonal-Specials-ebook/dp/B0C1P2JRXT

(Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.)

***

Do I Look Like I'm Joking?

If someone ever asked me to tell them what meeting April for the first time was like, for reasons I can only infer would have to do with an ongoing police investigation, I'd sum it up in a single word:

Pain.

"You're going to be the best of friends. Just like her mother and I," Mom reassured me from the driving seat of her second-hand lime-green hatchback that still smelled like our old dog, looking at me through the rearview mirror with the kind of uneasy smile most kids tend to easily recognize as that of an adult lying through their teeth.

You know what smile I'm talking about.

'The injection won't hurt at all, honey. Now be a brave boy and stand still.'

'Bullies only want attention. Ignore them, and they'll leave you alone.'

'Of [course] I'd like to stay and watch cartoons with you, sweetie. It's just that there's quite a bit of housework I have to get to.'

Yeah. [That] smile.

Now, to be fair, Mom is a young widow who even my younger self understood to be doing her very best to juggle her ongoing obligations to me, the house she was running, and a job that seemed to hold no regard for the notion of a regular schedule. So, when she heard that her old high school best friend was moving back into town with a daughter my age and being recently single yet affluent enough to be a stay-at-home mother, the idea of having a free babysitter made her face light up like she'd seen the gates of Heaven itself. That, or a two-for-one sale on bonbon boxes.

Look, [that] is something my younger self definitely didn't understand, but let's just say I've come to have a disturbingly intimate understanding of the notion of 'sublimation.'

An embarrassing, traumatizing, [deep] understanding of it.

Yes, I owe to April finally realizing precisely why Mom moans in such drawn-out ways whenever she allows herself to slowly melt with her tongue a piece of obscenely expensive chocolate. I most definitely owe that particular nugget of pop-psi factoid to April. To no one's surprise.

…

Have I already mentioned that meeting April was pain? Because it was.

Look, there I was, standing in front of a two-story house with a slanted roof and a yard about thrice the size of my own after a car ride that was short enough to conceivably be switched by a brisk walk if I wasn't, you know, [ten].

And Mom was clutching my hand tight enough that I thought her silent muttering may be a prayer.

So, right. I was [predisposed] to make an actual effort. Get along with the new girl, be pleasant and polite to Mom's old friend, and maybe resign myself to watching My Little Pony or whatever it was that girls my age did. Witchcraft, for all I knew.

… It would've been cool if she was a witch. I already was into RPGs, even if I only read handbooks rather than play, because nobody at school was into the nerdiest side of the Force.

What does that have to do with witchcraft, you say? Well, if you have to ask, you really need to read more Chick Tracts.

Anyway, yeah. I was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved, stripped white and blue button-up shirt. Dressed to impress without being obviously fake, even to my own childish sensibilities.

And Mom finally gathered the courage to ring the doorbell of a white door with more elaborate moldings than our entire house.

There was the sound of hurried footsteps, and then a redheaded woman with the kind of figure that I was about two months too young to properly appreciate opened the door with violent vehemence, the smile plastered on her freckled face a few notches upward of 'Bullies only want attention,' and veering straight into 'Max is in a better place—no, you can't visit him,' territory.

"Lucy!" the woman whose curves were still bouncing and trying to come to a stop yelled, immediately opening her arms, and wrapping Mom between them in a way that left very little room for air. "It's [so] good to see you!"

Mom's answer went unheard. Unless June's breasts were, somehow, very good at conducting sound.

Look, basically? My older self is somewhat envious of how frequently June manages to, somehow, make Mom motorboat her. To be clear, in this scenario, I'm jealous of [Mom], not June.

Ah, yes, June is April's Mom. While I can't say that pain has been such a constant in my relationship with her, I can definitely say it's played a part, given how often April's bony elbow has pushed just under my floating ribs after she's decided I've stared for too long.

I think I did bruise the first time she took us to the pool.

April was particularly vicious that day for [some] [reason].

But, yeah, no more stalling. This was to be the faithful moment. The 'boy meets girl' Hollywood had conditioned me to expect some vague things from. I was about to discover who this girl that Mom was set on becoming my best friend in the whole world actually was.

For causes I attribute mostly to being ten years old and stupid, I didn't immediately associate June clinging to my mother like she was about to drown (unlike my mother, who [was] about to drown) with any hints regarding April's character.

So, when a red-headed girl whose hair was a bit darker than her mother's, done in a long braid that came from her neck to drape over her left shoulder, wearing a white shirt with a unicorn with a rainbow-colored horn on it and jeans with faded knees, came from behind her about-to-be-guilty-of-manslaughter mother, looked at me, shyly looked away, dug the tip of her powder-blue sneakers on the hardwood floor of her entrance and almost fearfully offered me her hand as she said:

"Hi, my name's April. Do you want to be my friend?"

I fell for it.

Hook. Line. And sinker.

"Of course," I said, smiling as broadly as I could without imitating a particular version of the Joker. "I'm Brad."

Then I took her hand.

And sparks flew.

[Literally].

"April!" June yelled, hurrying to let go of my mother and possibly saving her life before she slapped her daughter's hand away from mine as my whole arm shook, and my teeth clenched tight enough that it was a very good thing I hadn't bitten my tongue.

"What?" April asked, her blue eyes innocently wide. "It was just a friendly prank," she said as I finally looked into her palm and saw the [modified] hand buzzer hidden in it, with electrical wires connecting it to a couple of batteries she had tucked into a (brand new) friendship bracelet.

My eye twitched.

It was [not] because of the electricity.

April shot me back a triumphant grin that was, thankfully, cut short when her own contraption sparked in her hands and set her friendship bracelet on fire.

Yes, at the time I was still unfamiliar with the concepts of 'symbolism' or 'poetic justice,' but, over the years, I've come to appreciate them.

Unlike April.

…

Yes, that means that I haven't come to appreciate April. Yes, I'm aware that vividly recounting my first meeting with a girl I've been stuck with for years is not a good way to convince you that I don't care for her at all, but…

Look, just hear me out, okay? I swear I'm going somewhere with all of this.

***

So, okay, that was a rough start, but Mom and June were determined, each for their own reasons, to get their respective kids to hang around with one another and basically give each currently single parental unit a chance to unwind knowing that at least [one] of those kids wasn't utterly insane.

Mom may have been slightly worried at first…

Right, the thing is… sometimes there's just no good choice. It was either me spending a lot of time alone at home or spending that same time with April, allegedly doing our homework. Paying a babysitter wasn't an option, and…

This is a bit heavy, but… I don't remember Dad. I remember what people tell me about him, and sometimes that's enough that I can almost fool myself into thinking I remember those stories, but the truth is that I don't even miss him. I miss [Max]. A lot. That dog was family to me in a way my dead father never was, and I cried for weeks on end when he 'went to a better place.'

But Mom remembers.

And so does the bank.

So, things are what they are: Mom has to work as many hours as the law firm she's a records clerk in can get away with giving her. Otherwise, we lose the house. The house Mom and Dad bought thinking they would have two salaries to pay for it, a dog to take care of, and not an unexpected pregnancy to account for.

Yeah. That happened.

Now, having said that, it's at the very least understandable that Mom prioritized me not being homeless over me having a parent to play boardgames with, and she certainly was not up to playing a DnD game with her as the single player—yes, she still bought me the books. No, she didn't think to check how age-appropriate they were.

Wraith: The Oblivion shall forever live in infamy.

… Which could lead me to a very detailed account of me, April, a poorly made ghost costume, and me wetting the bed for the first time in [many] years.

To be fair, she seemed as embarrassed by the whole thing as I was. And we both washed the sheets on her bathtub together to hide the events of the night from her mother, though I suspect April's assistance was more about destroying any evidence than about being a selfless friend.

Call it a hunch.

Backed by empirical evidence.

[Lots] of evidence.

Still, that was… Okay, that was [not] the first night I spent in April's house, and definitely not the last, because our mothers seemed infatuated with the idea of us being as close as they had allegedly been once upon a time. It also gave them an excuse to hang out together and drink the occasional bottle of white wine that Mom would be mortified to even contemplate drinking by herself with me silently watching and [judging].

Apparently, I'm a very precocious judge. She claims she could feel the solemn disapproval while changing my diapers.

April, somehow, never seemed much daunted by such disapproval.

Let's just say it was a very eventful summer.

And then, school started.

"So, is she your girlfriend?" Anna, the black-haired, short, green-eyed terror asked.

I glared at her.

She beamed at me.

Anna was very good at beaming. Still is, really, though nowadays she usually does it when she manages to buy a pack of beers with a fake ID.

Also, when she comes out of a room with Jose. He usually doesn't beam, though. Rather, he looks like he needs an urgent blood transfusion, yet is happy for it.

… I never managed to get them to play Vampire: The Masquerade.

Anyway, back then, I was faced with an Anna who still hadn't awoken to her succubus heritage, and so she was mostly limited to inflicting emotional damage on me rather than spiritual wounds. Not that Jose would allow her to attack me with her racial skills.

Jose is a good pal. He really sacrifices himself for the greater good.

"Get this: they sleep together," he said. Because, back then, Jose was a little shit, a traitor, and somebody who rightfully deserved that time I stole his deodorant after gym class. Even if it was years after the fact.

"We [do not]," I said, glaring at him with all the imposing defiance my eleven years in this cruel world had prepared me for.

"What are you talking about?" April said, intruding on the conversation like… like April.

Basically.

"Brad says the two of you don't sleep together," Anna cheerfully claimed as an introduction to the girl she'd never spoken to once in her life.

Because [Anna].

And… Look, this may seem a bit weird. Many people don't remember what being a kid was like, and the truth is that it was different for everybody, as far as I can now tell. Some say they never had a single sexual thought until puberty was well underway, some remember discussing boners in kindergarten (because they were funny, not because of anything else), and some vividly remember a very awkward family trip to a nudist beach (fuck you, Jose, you're not the only one who knows embarrassing secrets around here).

From a certain perspective, it was absolutely no big deal that April and I had spent a good part of the summer basically living together, and it was just embarrassing that Jose had blurted that out because… well, I had the vague understanding that it was [weird]. I definitely had no awkward thoughts about sleeping on the bed that unfolded from beneath hers, other than the (more alarming than awkward) thought of her being [April], and thus there being a greater than recommended-by-specialists likelihood of me waking up without my eyebrows, with an impromptu face tattoo, or being shipped to a random country she had picked out of an atlas by flipping the pages with her eyes closed.

One of those things [almost] happened. And I refuse to clarify which one.

But, well, that was from [a certain perspective]. And seeing June's bounciness and her frequent attempts to asphyxiate Mom with it had made it so that, over the summer, my perspective had shifted slightly.

Apparently, Anna was well ahead of me.

… And so was April.

Because the redhead's eyes slowly widened as a slight flush of color tinged her cheeks. Then her hands went behind her back, she dug the tip of her shoe on the beige, tiled floor of our now shared classroom, bashfully looked down, and took a moment to look at me sideways.

A tortuous, [long] moment.

"How could you?" she said.

My own cheeks burned.

"How could I [what?"] I asked, more confused than curious yet still feeling a burning pang of [something] as Anna went from kidding around to looking at me with the kind of disapproval she usually reserves for security guards.

Jose, the traitor, just kept blinking.

[Stupidly].

"I…" April hesitated, biting the corner of her lip, her blue eyes standing out in a way that not even the bustling of our classmates chatting while moving out of the classroom and toward the cafeteria could distract me from. "I thought we… And now you say we aren't?"

I… blinked.

Like Jose.

Because, yes, I was aware of things I hadn't been quite ready for before summer started, but I was still [eleven.]

So were April and Anna, but, apparently, their elevens were quite different from Jose and mine.

Still… [Hollywood].

Boy meets girl.

The notions were already there. The pieces waiting to click. Yet they didn't.

No, they [crashed].

My brain was suddenly overloaded with all the times I woke up to find April's face hovering right over mine, red marker in hand, and recontextualized them out of the self-defense category they rightfully belonged in.

My cheeks were burning.

Words refused to come out of my mouth. Mostly because they kept bouncing against one another inside my head, fighting for supremacy and the right to be pronounced.

And April burst out laughing.

"Oh, God, I can't believe you fell for it. [As if]," she said.

Anna joined her in laughter, the mad cackling a disturbing presage of the terrible partnership that had just been born.

Jose blinked at me. Stupidly.

And, yet again, my eyebrow twitched.

It wouldn't be the last time.

***

My first year of shared classes with April went more or less as could be expected: I still spent most of my afternoons at her home, the occasional night in a guest bedroom that was suddenly furnished suspiciously quickly after she cheerfully told her mother about how embarrassed I'd been when she joked about the two of us sleeping together, and…

Well, it's [April].

So, the school year included me discovering that pens with disappearing ink are a thing.

I'll forever remember the horror of watching as my notes slowly faded away right in front of my eyes. Yes, she lent me her own notes afterward, which were far more detail-oriented than they usually were, but [that's not the point].

Let's just say I took to making discreet scratch marks on my pens to quickly check whether they'd been swapped with another fake after the third time.

Let's [not] say just how quickly April managed to replicate my undecipherable code.

Let's also studiously avoid what kind of jokes Anna seemed set on after that first fateful meeting and how Jose and I had a certain penchant for exchanging confused glances as April and Anna cackled in perturbing sorority.

Let's… Let's omit a lot of things, all right?

Like what it was to be twelve and still almost living together with the resident redhead as she started to become far prettier than she had any right to be.

Because, yes, when we first met, she was already cute, but cute as a kid. Then we both hit puberty, and that turned her into, against all biological odds stacked against everyone sieged on all fronts by the damn hormonal assault, pretty.

And… I wasn't ready for April to be pretty.

She, on the other hand, wasn't ready for my ninja phase.

"Aaaaaaaaah!" she satisfyingly yelled in my face as I climbed through her window while she'd been reading on her bed.

Yes, I almost slipped and fell to a mercifully broken neck, but, alas, the sweet release of death was still far from me.

"What the Hell, Brad!" she yelled, though in an entirely different tone that I, nonetheless, still found profoundly satisfying.

"Ninja!" I claimed, showing her the climbing claws I had in my right palm, fashioned out of a broken wood slat, three corkscrews, and two rubber bands that, more or less, kept it steady on my hand.

She squinted at me. Then past me.

"Brad," she said slowly, as if to drag out the time in which I was precariously hanging from her windowsill with half my body out of her house, "did you just maul my cherry tree?"

I… furrowed my eyebrows in deep contemplation.

Then I turned to look over my shoulder to see that, somehow, me climbing up a tree while using my ninja claws to punch through its bark in a way that I'm now ready to admit did very little to help me pull my body up and was, instead, a constant struggle not to have the claws turn around and scrape my own hands raw, had, somehow, and to everybody's shock and surprise, turned the almost black bark into something that looked like the biggest cat in the world had just found its newest scratch post.

I turned back around to face an irate April.

"No?" I answered.

And she pushed me out.

To be fair, the couple of old mattresses I'd stacked under her window made the short fall more exciting than terrifying, [but still].

***

"I can't believe you'd pick Mai Shiranui while fighting against a girl," she muttered, both of us sitting on her bed and playing The King of Fighters on an emulator she had pirated from somewhere Anna had led her to.

I looked at the character on the screen, opposite April's own Terry Bogard, and had the decency to feel a slight cheek-tingle of embarrassment.

Because… well, there's a reason there's so much porn of Mai Shiranui. Or, well, at least [two] reasons. Let's just say she's just slightly less bouncy than April's mom.

And wears clothes that are just a bit more concealing.

But there was another reason I always picked her. A perfectly sane, understandable reason.

"Ninja," I offered with a shrug.

April rolled her eyes.

"It's a fighting game. There are very few girls I could pick that aren't like… you know," I further explained, waving at the screen with the wireless controller.

She rolled her eyes [harder].

"Oh, fine! It's not like you pick Terry for anything other than that sleeveless vest and shirt combo!"

"Don't be ridiculous. I also like the ponytail."

"… You do?"

"Sure. Gives a girl something to grab when, you know…" she told me with an entirely too Anna smile.

And I…

Look, we were thirteen. Going on fourteen. Alone at her home because, and I quote, "You two are basically siblings, and your mom and I need a night out on the town."

So, yeah, April's bouncy mother wasn't around to make things awkward for my nascent sexuality, and Mom was in grave danger of dying from the kind of asphyxiation incident that I now know many people would pay good money for.

So, it was summer, we were dressed in our light pajamas, sitting on her bed, alone, and discussing just what April would like to do with a ponytailed, muscled blond.

To understand my reaction, a certain reveal must be made:

Jose is blond.

Yes, his family is Mexican, but I'm given to understand that there's about as much variety in how Mexicans look as Hollywood, that ever-untrustworthy source of flawed wisdom, would have us believe there isn't.

So. A Mexican. With blue eyes. Who was into sports, had well-defined arms.

And had recently started letting his hair grow long.

My eyebrow twitched.

Yet again, not due to an electric shock.

"Really," I said with a flat tone as I self-consciously drew my hand across the back of my brown, bristly-short hair.

April looked at me with the kind of bemused expression she usually directed at her mother's latest attempts at being creative in the kitchen, but that, as was April's wont, suddenly turned into an infuriating smirk.

"Yeah, a girl can get… [ideas]," she said with the kind of purr that left very little doubt about what those ideas were.

Or, well, to be more precise, that left [a lot] of doubt in my direly unprepared mind. Doubt and intrigue.

I, of course, couldn't show any weakness to my sworn rival, and so I pretended to stare into her mischievous eyes as our shoulders rubbed and I became increasingly aware of just how close to one another we always sat while playing.

That was the only warning she got.

"Ryu En Bu!" Mai yelled from the screen as she twirled around, and the tail of her dress whipped forward, shooting a burst of flames that sent Terry to the urgent care unit for burnt victims.

April's eyes widened, and she turned toward the screen, frantically trying to input a useless command as Terry was still stuck in the falling animation.

"You [bastard!"] she accused me.

"The game already started," I nonchalantly told her as we both leaned forward, and I prepared for the sweet victory ahead.

In the end, round one finished with a vibrant, triumphant, dynamic animation of the word 'Perfect.'

And with April's irate glare.

One of those was more satisfying than the other.

"You [cheater]," she accused me as she paused the game to, presumably, avoid my flawless strategy from working once again.

"I prefer calling it 'winning,'" I answered, my chin thrust into the air and my mind at ease at having avoided yet another uncomfortable conversation with the girl who was very adept at making [everything else] uncomfortable.

"You would [never] win against me without those tricks," she indignantly claimed.

With… less than factual accuracy.

Okay, the thing is, I was still the kind of nerd who read RPG books just for fun, while April was, at best, kinda casual about the whole thing. This isn't a 'girls suck at gaming' thing, but an 'April had other outlets for her creative impulses' thing.

Namely, pranking me.

So… that was kinda plain to see in my own victory record when it came to pirated games run on an emulator that she'd found in a place I was certain would load her computer with enough viruses to make Resident Evil green with envy.

And, you know, the T-virus.

"I don't need to cheat to win against [you]," I told her, succinctly summing up all those perfectly objective facts in a polite, not at all confrontational manner that had no Jose-and-blond-long-hair feelings still attached to it.

Certainly.

Her eyes narrowed.

"Wanna bet?" she said.

"What?" I answered.

"A bet. The loser has to do whatever the winner wants today," she said, leaning slightly forward, her shoulder once more rubbing against mine.

My throat tightened, my palms felt suddenly clammy, and my tongue felt two sizes too big in my mouth.

"What?" I, somehow, managed to repeat.

"I won't even ask you to start another match. Just you and me, and you're already winning one round. You don't cheat. If you win, I'll do [anything] you want," she continued, barreling right past any feeble resistance my sanity could put up.

"What?" I blurted out yet again, but mostly because I'd heard somewhere that the Rule of Three was important for comedic timing.

"[Anything,"] she insisted, blue eyes blazing, her breath tickling my chi.

"Okay," I finally answered.

Somehow.

Look, it was either a monosyllabic answer or outright fainting, okay?

Because I… I was no longer ten. Nor eleven. Not even twelve. And, while I was still a bit confused about certain things, I was also curious, a teen, male, and with access to the Internet.

I had [ideas].

Of course, I wouldn't have dared to ask anything too outrageous from April, but… The ideas were there.

And so she won the second round.

Because of my [ideas].

"What's the matter? You look distracted," she asked me with the kind of grin that would've made Anna take notes.

"Nothing," I muttered with the kind of sulky tone that would've made me not take any notes at all, seeing as I was already far too used to it.

"Really? It looks to me like you can't quite… [focus]. At least not on the game," she said, the grin widening and her fangs seemingly growing longer.

… April would be a terrible vampire. Nobody in their right mind would ever invite her into their home.

"Let's just play the next round," I said, focusing on my rage and rightful indignation to push past all the other… [thoughts].

She arched an infuriating eyebrow, nodded, and unpaused the game.

And I destroyed her.

Well, not really, but I definitely put up a far better fight than in the previous round. This one wasn't going to be perfect, but I still had half my life bar left when she was about two strong punches away from ignominious defeat.

I pushed down the rush of [ideas] that thought brought to mind and readied my next combo because I always liked to finish things with a bit of flair whenever possible.

April desperately inputted a command on her own controller, and I smirked because she always tried to counter special moves with her own, but she started [after] I did, so… it was kind of a foregone conclusion.

I looked in with eager anticipation as Mai twirled her fan, and—and that [wasn't what she should have been doing].

She should've charged forward, unleashing flames around her and barreling past Terry Bogard's stupidly muscled, ponytailed self.

She, instead, threw her fan up, jumped in a pirouette… and her clothes exploded.

Mai landed facing me, baring all her Mainess, and blinked stupidly before looking down at her breasts, screaming, covering herself up, and running offscreen.

And Terry flashed a victory sign at me.

The word "Nudality" appeared.

And I turned toward an April who was laughing hard enough that she had to drop on her bed and hold her stomach as she went from guffaws to pained wheezing.

"You…" I tried to find a way to manifest my utter displeasure. My rejection of her actions and all that she stood for. My defiance. "You [cheater!]"

I… may have failed in my earnest search for the right word.

April held up a single finger, bidding me to wait while she managed to get her breathing back under control.

I decided to productively employ said time by glaring at her as judgmentally as Mom claimed I could.

Which made April take another look at me and renew her guffaws, so, either Mom overexaggerates my prowess, or there's something wrong with the way April's brain processes stern disapproval.

Given all the other things wrong with April's brain, it's likely that second option.

"I said [you] couldn't cheat," she finally said when she regained the ability to breathe.

"What?"

"Our bet," she clarified, sitting up, leaning forward with both hands on her bed, and looking at me in a positively predatory way. "[You] couldn't cheat. [I] can. So, prepare to pay up."

…

Look, in my defense? She was [kinda] right. I had gotten a cheap shot at her in the first round, and she'd just paid me back by using what it had taken me embarrassingly long to realize was a modded version of the game to input a mortifyingly sexual 'I win' command. Yes, April had cheated, and so had I, so this was fair.

And I nodded.

Just because of that, you understand. Only fairness and sportsmanship guided me to accept April's somewhat outrageous claim that cheating was all right as long as you didn't specify you weren't going to.

Yes. That's me. The embodiment of fair play.

And the idea that, while I wouldn't dare push too much with my request, I'd be perfectly fine with April pushing with [hers]… well, that never crossed my mind.

…

Shut up.

Hormones. They are a thing.

***

"This…" I hesitated as I ran my fingers through April's hair, and she purred, her back against me, her nape uncovered from the braid she still wore. "Is this… what you want?" I asked yet again.

She looked at me over her shoulder, made a positively innocent moue that may have fooled somebody at some point in her life before she got a public enemy poster, and fluttered her eyelashes at me.

"Well, yes. Why, Brad, were you expecting [anything] else?" she said.

And I…

Looked at the hairbrush in my hand.

And tried to ignore the burning tingling on my cheeks as I met her narrowing eyes and widening grin with a flat deadpan.

Then I obstinately and almost furiously shook my head.

She, of course, giggled. Which, when a girl wearing summer pajamas is sitting between your legs, both of you on her bed, and hormones are raging is [not] a good thing.

Thankfully, as I undid the green ribbon at the end of her long braid and I untangled her tresses with my fingers, she went silent, other than the occasional muffled protest when I accidentally pulled on a tangle.

Then…

Well, then, I just spent… a very relaxing time running the dark piece of round wood with soft, crème-colored hair bristles through the deep red of April's hair.

I kept staring in fascination as each strand seemed to get glossier, almost shining under the shifting light of her computer still running the demo matches after we had quit playing and only muted the volume.

So… many colors and flashes of bright light that punctuated special attacks shimmered over April's hair as I ran both my fingers and her brush through it, as we both settled in silence for longer than we ever had when we weren't sleeping together in this very room.

My lips were set in a soft smile, and I could not have told you why.

And then… April leaned back, her warm body on my chest, her soft hair under my chin, and I hugged her waist without even thinking about it.

"You never asked me," she muttered after a bit more silence.

"What?" I said, but… but not abruptly. It was like the word flowed out, a part of something greater and longer.

"You… everybody always asks why I don't have a dad."

"Ah."

The silence continued as if the exchange was just another way for it to fill my chest with something at once calm and frantic as a trapped hummingbird.

I leaned my chin on the crown of her head and almost kissed it.

Instead, I talked.

"People always ask me," I said. "And… and it isn't like it feels bad, or anything, but… but I also don't want to keep telling them I'm an orphan and then explaining that I don't remember him. That I miss the idea of him, but not the person, because I never knew him enough to. So… So I figured that if you ever wanted to tell me, you would. And I would listen."

There was a pause.

And then April rested her hands over my arms, gently pressing them tighter against her warm belly.

"I don't remember the first one," she said. "He… He left before I was born. I don't even have his surname."

I hummed.

"Then… Then Mom married who I [thought] was my real dad. But I learned he wasn't when they got divorced. He sent me a card and a gift for the first couple of birthdays after, but then he just… stopped."

I held her a bit tighter.

And listened.

"By then, Mom remarried. And I… I did my best. I wanted him to see me as a good daughter. To not forget about me with just a few greeting cards.

"He didn't send a single one."

I wanted to… to say the right thing. To tell this version of April that it was all right. That none of it was her fault. That it couldn't be.

I just held her.

She leaned farther back, resting completely against me as she straightened her legs and tilted her head so that my chin rested on the side of her head, above her left ear.

"Then… there was the next one. The ink had barely dried before the divorce came, and I barely had any time to get attached."

I nodded, which meant brushing my cheek over her recently combed hair, my lips almost touching her ear.

"And the last one… I didn't even try," she says.

I tightened my hold on her, a part of me wanting to reassure her that [I] was there. That I wasn't… That I would never forget about her.

I blame Stockholm Syndrome.

And then she snorted, wriggling inside my arms, and turned to face me.

"At least, between the settlements and the child support, Mom's now rich," she told me with a wry grin that barely hid any of the things that had been in her eyes as she turned.

I…

Look, I am a regular guy. Yes, I'm well-read, and I like stories enough that I can come up with some impromptu dramatic speeches from time to time (this [may] become relevant later in the story), but I'm definitely not equipped to reassure a young girl who just bared her heart to me about things I wasn't even aware she wanted me to reassure her about.

So, instead, feeling the need to say something back to those blue eyes looking at me after a joke that grew more and more bitter with every second of silence I allowed to pass…

I also joked.

"Do you think that's why she does it? For the money?"

It was… a [terrible] joke.

Because the tone wasn't a joke. The [phrasing] wasn't a joke. I was just… I was [angry] at June in a way I'd never been. Angry and unfair. Because it wasn't like April was the only one who'd have gotten hurt after all those failed relationships, but at the moment, I was furious at how much my… my [friend] had been affected by a string of terrible choices.

So, what was meant to be a joking, ironic comment… Wasn't.

April blinked at me, first incredulous, then with narrowed eyes.

"Are you calling my mother a [whore]?" she said.

And I kinda… well, [froze].

As in, there I was, April held in my arms after she'd opened up to me in a way she never had. Talking about something bad enough that it had taken her years of knowing me and basically living together before she'd dared to bring herself to broach the subject.

And I called her mother a whore.

So, remember earlier in the evening, when my hands went clammy at April proposing an 'I'll do anything you want' bet? And how the mere idea of [that] was enough to get me to almost faint while I was barely entertaining the notion of maybe asking her for a peck on the lips [at most]?

Yeah. This wasn't it.

"I—I… Oh, God, please, don't kill me," I told her with utter sincerity.

"Because you just suggested that she sleeps with men for money, and that's [the very definition of—"]

"I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! I was just upset that—are you laughing right now?"

It took April a bit to answer my question.

Mostly, because she was laughing too hard to.

Fuming, seething, and any other verb that sounds slightly more dignified than 'sulking,' I kept holding the shaking girl until she got a hold of herself and met my unamused glare with tearful, mirthful, and other things that end in '-ful' eyes.

… No, 'beautiful' isn't on the list. I am still pissed off at the damn brat.

"You're cute when you panic," she said with what I think was a practiced wink.

And then she turned back around and sighed a happy, soft thing as she leaned back against my chest.

I held her… for quite a while.

***

So, right. That happened.

And… I'd say that things changed, but, really, the next morning, I found myself staring at my reflection in April's bathroom mirror, the words 'Property of April Doyle, if found, do not return,' [somehow] scrawled in red ink across my forehead.

Right.

Things [didn't] change.

Except I was more aware of her, and maybe a tad more tolerant when she acted up, and I was [very careful] about never talking about anything that involved both June and money.

But, yeah, overall, no changes.

None worth talking about.

"Do you know Emily?" I nonchalantly asked as we worked on our math homework.

She stopped scrawling on the margins of her notebook and looked at me across the solid mahogany desk of her living room with an arched eyebrow.

"Emily? Blonde, short, and you know…?" she asked, making a very expressive gesture over her chest that more or less correlated with June's level of bounciness, but not with Emily's, no matter how much of an early bloomer the blonde was.

"Yes, Emily," I said.

And she stared at me.

And stared.

And [stared].

Until, finally, with a frustrated huff, she gestured at me with her pencil, making a circular 'go on' gesture that made me nervously lick my lips and take a deep breath.

"She asked me out," I said.

April… froze.

As in, she wasn't even blinking. She just stared straight at me, but I was half-convinced that, were I to move to the side, her eyes would remain fixed on a vacated spot in the middle of her spacious living room.

…

I waved my hand in front of her eyes.

And she jerked upright.

"[You]?" she asked with an incredulous tone that, somehow, [hurt].

"Yes. [Me]," I answered with my own narrowed gaze.

"Wha—but—[Emily?"] she asked, once again making a June-worthy demonstration.

"Yes. [Emily]," I answered, my eyebrow twitching yet again in a way that it very rarely (read: never) did without April present.

"Huh. I… Whoa. Congrats?" she offered.

"What?"

"I mean, you've finally got a girlfriend. You know, maybe all those rumors will stop now."

"[Rumors?"]

"Oh, you hadn't heard? Never mind! Just don't pay any attention to them; I'm sure you and Emily will make a wonderful couple—"

"I didn't say 'yes!'"

She stopped.

And then, the kind of grin that years of experience had conditioned me to dread bloomed across her face.

"[Really]?" she asked, leaning forward, elbows on the table, chin resting on her twinned fingers.

"What rumors, April?"

"Don't worry at all! I'm sure this won't turn into a [thing]," she said.

The Chesiree grin that accompanied the words did nothing to reassure me.

And then, the next day, I found Emily in the school hallway, our eyes met across the throng of students, and I [definitely didn't peek at her bounciness].

I smiled nervously at her, aware that I should give her the answer that I had delayed yesterday because, for some stupid, [misguided] reason, I'd wanted to have a talk with April before doing that, and I was feeling my hands getting clammy even if maybe for different reasons than when I took April on her ridiculous, [rigged] bet, and…

And, suddenly, I was standing in front of her, by the side of the navy-blue lockers the walking students were buffeting us against. She was looking up at me (because she [was] short), and I… fidgeted with the black strap of my backpack.

"Look, about what you told me yesterday, I—"

"I'm sorry!" she said, cutting me off and distracting me from my fascinating backpack strap.

"What?"

"I didn't know! I should've guessed! It's just… I thought April and you were cousins or something, not that—"

"April and I are [not] dating."

"I know! It's just…" she bit the corner of her lip and looked around us suspiciously before she decided to get on her tiptoes to reach my ear, which, coincidentally, made me suddenly acquainted with Emily's own bounciness. "I didn't know you were in the closet."

I… blinked.

"What?"

Yes, I had gotten a lot of use out of that monosyllabic answer since I met April, why do you ask?

"It's… I didn't know she was acting as your beard! I'm really sorry! I promise I won't tell anybody!"

"What?"

"I promise!" she repeated, maybe thinking that I had just not heard her the first time around and not that I was stuck in my default response to April-related shenanigans.

You know, other than murderous rage.

So, with a final apology and muttered promise of secrecy, Emily fled, disappearing into the surrounding crowd like somebody who had seen far too many spy movies.

It was only then that I heard the sniggering.

I turned slowly around to find April in her customary villainess pose: holding her belly as she shook with laughter gained at my expense.

Of course, I made all the right noises: indignation, a refusal to admit even an iota of humor in the situation, a few death threats… you know. The drill.

And, to this day, I deny any kind of relief at April pulling me out of that whole [thing] with Emily.

Most definitely, I didn't feel any kind of fluttering in my chest at the thought of April being so obviously set on me not dating another girl.

Really.

None at all.

…

Shut up. You don't know me.

***

So, remember when I said something about me going through a ninja phase?

Right, what I neglected to mention is that such a phase didn't [precisely] end.

By this, I don't mean that I yelled out loud Naruto attacks or anything like that ([that] phase was long over, thank God), but that…

Well, I [liked] ninjas.

Actual ninjas. The ones that relied on stealth and skill rather than those who did landscape renovation.

Ninjas of a, let's say, chelonid persuasion.

"Come on! It will be fun!" April said, holding up a yellow jumpsuit.

And making my sixteen-year-old brain crash at the superimposed image of April dressing up as April O'Neil in her first cartoon incarnation. The one with all the cleavage.

Because, yes, June's genes were starting to [show].

April was still far slenderer, and her bounciness wasn't even on Emily's level, but she was no longer the almost waifish girl she'd been just a few months ago. Her dark red braid complimented her pale skin perfectly, and she still sometimes wore some of her older shirts, which I couldn't help but notice were doing increasingly interesting things to the bust they tightly wrapped around.

And yeah, she only wore those shirts at home. At [her] home, I mean.

… Even if I still spent about half my time there.

"Brad? Did I crash your brain again? Do you want me to reset you?" she said, leaning forward and looking up at me with almost perfectly feigned concern.

I jumped back and away from the fingers already reaching to poke me beneath my ribs, and I wrapped my arms protectively around the weak spots she so dearly loved to attack.

Also, just for good measure, I glared at her.

"You're planning something. I'll show up as Leonardo, I'll wait for you, and you will do… [something]. I don't know what. Maybe something involving turtle soup. An Iron Chef competition with me as the secret ingredient. I just know it," I told her, maintaining at least two steps between us even as she remained by her open closet, still holding the yellow piece of clothing up and around her bounciness.

She rolled her eyes at me, dismissing my childish dramatics and completely unfounded concerns.

I narrowed my eyes [further].

"Look, it's…" she hesitated. "It's the first Halloween party we've been invited to, and I don't want to blow it. Also, I think I'd make for a cute April, don't you?" she said, fluttering her eyelashes at me and making the double meaning entirely too obvious.

And thus, making it impossible for me to disagree.

So, yeah, I acceded.

She was kind enough not to mock the costume that my meager budget could manage, and even decided to be supportive and craft a couple of foam katanas (with me present to avoid April-related shenanigans such as, I don't know, [electrified] handles), and, well…

They were cool.

Like, [really] cool.

April's craftsmanship had improved quite a bit since her ill-fated, self-igniting hand buzzer, and… remember when I mentioned that she had creative outlets other than playing fighting games? Yeah, this was it.

I once asked her if she wouldn't like to get into cosplay, but somehow, she managed to turn that around on me by implying I only wanted her to dress up in skimpy night elf armor. Which I did not [not] want, but that was completely beside the point.

Look, I mostly just wanted her to get into a hobby other than pranking me because that creative outlet of hers basically amounted to being on James Bond Q division with me as a hard-to-kill, yet easy-to-humiliate, target.

So, yeah, part of April's garage was a workshop for her to craft ink-disappearing pens with the same casings as my [regular] pens (even if it had been a few years since she last used that one trick), food replicas that I had inadvertently bitten into a couple of times, and even a couple of slightly less lethal hand buzzers.

It was… nice to see her using it for something for me instead of against me, for once.

And I may, or not, have spent quite a few days looking up the Niten Ichi Ryu school and practicing dual katana techniques with her gift.

So, well, I was walking to her home, already dressed with my Leonardo costume, the sponge shell not as cumbersome to move in as I'd previously thought, the blue mask only [slightly] impairing my vision, the green snout about as comfortable as an itchy scarf, and my two katanas sheathed on my back, my currently green fingers longing to take them out and perform a couple of dramatic twirls while making whooshing noises.

Night had already fallen, the suburban street was mostly empty, and the houses on each side of it were decorated with jack-o'-lanterns, glowing plastic skeletons, black paper bats, and even, on a disturbingly memorable occasion, a man hanging from a tree who waved at me as I passed by and gave me the biggest scare of my life that didn't involve April and an improvised ghost costume.

I cheerfully waved at him while internally cursing him and his ancestors down to the seventh generation. Then I wondered if I shouldn't have been cursing his descendants, given that most of those ancestors were already presumably dead and beyond the reaches of my mystical power.

That was when everything went to Hell.

I turned to the right to head straight to April's home, and a shadowy, caped figure slid out from behind a tree to stand in my way.

A figure with a purple cape and a silver helmet.

And spiked pauldrons.

"Well, look who's come out without his brothers' backup," [Shredder's] rough voice said. "Let's not waste this chance, shall we? Foot Clan Soldiers, attack!" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villain par excellence said, dramatically pointing at me and sending his cape flaring behind him.

…

Okay, I knew it was April. I knew it could only be April. I was [expecting] it to be April.

But she had outdone herself.

Every metallic piece of the costume looked precisely as it should, the claws protruding from her gauntlet glinting dramatically under the lamppost to her right, while the facemask covered enough of her face that only her blue eyes hinted at anything even vaguely feminine.

Also, her chest plate was doing a magnificent job in that regard.

In hiding hints of femininity, I mean.

… Look, I [know] how I sound, but I assure you I had no more fixation with April's chest than with any other chest around me. I was just a healthy young man who noticed it when things bounced.

…

I blame June. This is all June's fault. She and her damned genes.

Anyway, Shredder's voice was the one who gave the order, and that was… from the 2000s cartoon? Yeah, April had outdone herself.

Much like the Foot Clan soldiers charging me.

So, I know what you're thinking:

This is all nice and everything, but, surely, you don't expect me to believe you had a ninja duel in the middle of a deserted street on a Halloween night?

To which I can only answer:

"Turtle Power!"

I unsheathed my katanas with a flourish that only my mirror had been witness to so far, and I turned around to intercept whoever it was that was running loudly toward me, wearing the customary ninjaesque garb of the Foot Clan. He struck at me with a fancy kick that was clearly aimed somewhere in front of my green prosthetic snout, and I mercifully slashed past his belly as he tried to recover his balance and not fall on his face, both of us coordinating his dramatic death with me holding his shoulders so that actual drama wouldn't happen.

Then I turned back around to face the other two extras who had been politely waiting for me to finish the scene, and we exchanged a few strikes with all the best dramatic noises we could come up with.

Of course, all of them fell to my twin blades. It turns out that April was an excellent blacksmith, the foam folded into a thousand layers that gave it supernatural sharpness.

… I may have been getting too much into things.

"Shredder! Your reign of terror ends tonight!" I yelled, one katana held upright by my face, the other pointing imperiously at the foul villain.

I mean, the [pauldrons].

Only villains wear pauldrons.

"Your ninjutsu is still weak, turtle. Now witness the power of a true master of the art!" she said, still with Shredder's voice.

And she…

Spun toward me.

Dramatically.

In a way that made it so her cape whipped at me as she turned her back on me.

"Ryu En Bu!" [Mai Shiranui's] voice yelled right before a burst of flames shot at me.

This had two more or less predictable consequences. The first one was me staring in dumbfounded horror as April flaunted my shinobi nudity trauma in front of a masked audience—which, I presume, had always been part of her plan.

The second was that my foam snout caught on fire.

Which she assures me to this day [wasn't] the plan.

Let's just say she'll have to reassure me for a few years more before I'm ready to buy it.

Anyway, I stopped, dropped, and rolled, my turtle shell mercifully blunting the impact of the concrete sidewalk before I remembered that I could just take off my snout and throw it away so I could properly glare at a panicked April who was, for some reason, slapping the front of my costume despite there not being any hints of a raging inferno about to burst from it.

Her face was… kinda close to me.

And so, Leonardo found himself soulfully staring into Shredder's surprisingly blue eyes. Which I'm sure is not the subject of a thousand fanfics written by sexually adventurous teenagers.

"Okay, that's a wrap," Anna dryly commented as she stood up from the shrubs she'd been crouching in.

With [a camera].

I hatefully glared at her, then at April, then took Jose's hand and allowed the former, dramatically dying Foot Soldier to help me to my feet.

"So… Is that it?" I asked. "I won't have to watch my back for anything else through the party?"

I had the very vivid impression of April licking her lips behind the metal mask of Shredder.

"Well…" she dithered. "Maybe [just] one more thing."

And she threw her cape at me with a flourish about as stylish and practiced as my katana unsheathing, the piece of purple clothing fluttering in the wind and obscuring my vision of her until it smacked my face and [continued] obscuring said vision.

I mumbled in frustrated resignation as I pulled it off and—

…

I mean…

I already had had a sexual awakening of sorts. An early one, embarrassingly related to June, a red bikini, and a pool exit that made Fast Times at Ridgemont High sulk in a corner.

I most definitely knew far more than my younger self had when he'd been entranced by glimmering drops of water over… [wide expanses] of Irish pale flesh until April decided that her elbow and my sides had been separated for too long.

None of that prepared me for the apparently innocuous sight of April wearing a yellow jumpsuit strategically unbuttoned to show just the barest hint of cleavage even as her hips strained it past a waistline that fit her, even if the polyester seemed to cling far too amorously to anything that came under it.

So.

Yeah.

I'd seen Mai Shiranui naked in multiple contexts and incarnations that the Internet had provided me with. I had seen April herself wearing far less than she was at the moment. But something about her emerging from the pile of hastily discarded Shredder armor just…

"Oh, you've got it [bad]," Anna treacherously whispered as she walked past me to help Jose out of his Foot Soldier costume and—and dragged him to the bushes from where she'd previously emerged from, presumably never to see the light of day again.

"Ah," I finally answered… something. I'm pretty sure there was something I was answering, and this just wasn't the sound of my soul striving to escape from my body.

"So…" April guiltily stared at my still-burning snout in the middle of the street and rummaged in her handbag to procure a set of makeup. "Ready to party?"

I wasn't.

We still did.

Fun fact: underage drinking and April are [not] a good mix.

***

A few days later, the plot finally came together.

As it turns out, April had recruited a couple of extras from the Drama Club to fill up the ranks of Foot Clan Soldiers, but that had all been naught but the first step of her master plan.

The second laid in my hands.

"What?" I asked stupidly, blinking at the tall yet thin book that bore the Steve Jackson Games logo.

"You always sulk that nobody wants to play your nerdy games with you. You're welcome," she nonchalantly said.

I blinked at her.

Then at the book that boldly claimed to be 'Killer: The Game of Assassination.'

And I fell in love.

… With the [game,] I feel I need to clarify.

***

So, yeah, the thing is… It can be kind of hard to find a group of kids to play RPGs with due to a lot of things, many of them amounting to people having certain prejudices regarding the acceptability of being seen as the kind of nerd that would make the Big Bang Theory cast look like anything other than a gross parody.

I had only had a few games in my life before the friend who played DM for me had to move away to the other side of the country, and I'd never managed to convince anyone else to try. Not even Jose or April—though I suspect that, in her case, it was mostly due to her having read online that a game with just a player and a DM was always going to be dreadfully boring, if not outright a recipe for disaster.

What I had never considered before was that a live-action RPG may be like catnip for the Drama Club.

April, due to her scheming nature—and not to her being more socially aware than I am—had figured that out and looked for what may have been the lowest barrier of entry to the genre.

You see, most games rely on elaborate settings, on complex rules, on arcane dice, and a few other things that make the uninitiated look at the whole thing like the kind of Satanic rite the media used to claim it was. But Killer? No, Killer is straightforward.

Simple.

[Beautiful.]

The idea is that there's an organization of assassins. Nobody knows who's who except the director of the agency, and each assassin gets assigned a target. The game provides ways in which to recreate different assassination tactics from popular media, going from a straightforward shootout (with Nerf guns or anything garish enough [never] to be confused with an actual weapon), to being electrocuted in the shower (by taping a piece of string [near] an electrical outlet and also [near] a shower), to an actual bomb (by setting up a recording that screams 'I am a bomb that will explode in ten seconds!' and then starts a dramatic countdown).

It's not about straightforward combat but about tactics. About studying your target and discovering where they are most vulnerable. About setting up an inescapable situation that can only lead to their demise and your triumph.

So, of course, I made myself a ninja parka.

By which I mean I borrowed April's foam supplies to craft some throwing knives fashioned after what anime thinks kunai were like (spoiler: kunai were modified trowels, so being thrown wasn't their main raison d'être), I sewed a makeshift bandolier for the knives on the lining of my coat, I cut open the right pocket to stick a Derringer-sized water gun inside the stuffing where it would easily pass a visual inspection, concealed a stack of origami shurikens (that were woefully inadequate to hit anything farther than five feet) on my other pocket, and sawed off a piece of wood that I turned into a rubber launcher latched onto my forearm with a couple of electric wires that also served as a sort of covering so that the sleeve of my parka wouldn't fall on top of the rubber and mess my aim when I dramatically pushed down on the clothes pin holding my ammunition loaded and ready.

There… may have been further additions.

Have I already told you that I never quite outgrew my ninja phase?

Look, let's just say that, by the time the game was set in motion a couple of weeks later and we were anonymously assigned our targets, I could shoot a can of soda at fifteen feet and hit the bullseye of my darts target with any of my (differently weighted) foam knives.

I was [ready].

Sadly, so was April.

***

My target was neither Anna, Jose, or April, but [Emily], whom April had more or less adopted after the whole awkward fiasco and rescued her from the clutches of the cheerleading squad or whatever it is that popular, busty blondes are destined for in high school.

As it turns out, she was in the Drama Club.

Which… [appropriate].

At some point, she'd been disabused of the notion that I was gay, possibly because of my hormones making it all but impossible for my eyes not to stray from time to time despite my best efforts and those of April's sharp, bony elbow, but we had managed to become regular friends with no apparent awkwardness hanging around us.

… It made me suspect that she never actually thought I was gay and was just playing along with April's plot, but that would just add layers to the conspiracy until I ended up locked in my ninja hideout (that is: my bedroom) with far too much colored yarn.

Anyway, I went through the school gates that day, confident that I could claim my first target easily enough. Emily was neither cunning, athletic, nor vicious, so setting up an elementary ambush during the safe times and places we'd agreed that the game could be played on wouldn't be too hard.

Then I entered my English classroom, and April wasn't there.

Which [immediately] made all the alarms in my head ring.

April skipping? It had been known to happen.

April taking a sick day without complaining about it to me until she managed to guilt me into bringing her whatever she was in the mood for to 'stave off the incoming specter of the Grim Reaper?' Never.

April skipping[ because she was plotting?]

Ding, ding, ding.

So I spent all my morning classes looking for any sign of red hair lurking out of a corner, behind a closed door, under a windowsill. I finally understood what 'hypervigilance' meant, and I most definitely didn't like it.

In the end, I never caught that glimpse of red hair.

Because, as I exited the school cafeteria to go eat my sandwich in the yard, under a trio of pines off to the side, standing in the circle of pale earth devoid of any tufts of grass…

There stood April.

But with no red hair.

It took me a moment to recognize her. She was wearing ripped black jeans that hugged her legs tightly enough to make her usual jeans seem prudish by comparison, and patches of pale skin peeked through the holes over her thighs. She also wore a black, silken blouse with lace cuffs and something that almost turned it into a dress, if a scandalously short one, as the skirt of the blouse was the same kind of semi-transparent lace and hung just slightly above where her behind sharply curved into her legs.

And… And she had black hair.

A razor-sharp bob, angled under her jawline, with the inwardly curved tips tinted neon green.

Like her lips.

The sanest part of me screamed, 'It's a trap!' yet still went ignored as I found myself walking toward her, only some vague sense of self-preservation making me stick my hand into my right pocket and through the opening in the lining to grab my water gun.

Which had leaked a bit, because of course it had.

"Hey, new look?" I greeted her, about as nonchalant and relaxed as I certainly didn't feel.

She glanced at me though her low-hanging bangs, and I saw the thick eyeliner for the first time. Which… Which made me suspect that April may have found some of my carefully hidden videos with girls with runny makeup.

[You know why].

So, already predisposed to a panic attack and wildly stammering, I was completely unprepared when she deliberately turned toward me, rested her right hand on my chest, and her cheek beside it.

"The world feels so cold sometimes…" she muttered.

Through the thick smoke and sparks of my brain doing a very good imitation of April's first hand buzzer, I managed to answer:

"Well, it [is] November. And you aren't wearing a jacket."

She stiffened for a brief moment that a part of me thought corresponded with her suppressing raucous laughter.

"You know what I mean," she corrected me instead, her tone sad in a way I am pretty sure Emily had coached her through.

"I really, [really] don't," I answered.

Look, before you accuse me of being an absolute moron—which I'm not denying I was—there's something you must know about Killer:

While there are different scenarios, as a rule of thumb, you're only allowed to kill your target or somebody directly targeting you. And yes, April was raising all kinds of red flags, but she was still [April], and she could be doing all this just to mess with me because that was the April thing to do. Yes, I do realize that I should've shot her on principle and just braved the consequences of maybe murdering an innocent bystander before my first contract was fulfilled, but I had my pride as a shinobi.

I wouldn't fail my contract. Not like this.

Also, April's palm over my thin blue sweater, between the open lapels of my darker parka, and the softness and warmth of her cheek may have slightly skewed my judgment and determination to fulfill the letter of my contract.

Just a tad, mind.

"Brad, I… I sometimes feel so alone," she said, tilting her head up, her eyes meeting mine.

And I believed her.

Because those were the same eyes that had once told me about her long string of absent stepparents. Those were the eyes of a girl who had rested silently against my chest until we both were falling over from sheer drowsiness.

Those were the eyes of an April that very few people had ever seen and that I was always proud to be among them.

So, her hand crawled up, reaching the collar of my sweater. Then my neck.

My nape.

And her fingers were cold, yes, but I still felt like they were burning me as the whole world went blurry, and she pulled me down toward her, toward half-open, glossy, neon green lips as she slowly closed her eyes and trusted me to follow through.

So I did.

It… It wasn't… I don't even know.

It should have been clumsy. Because it was my first kiss, and I didn't know how to lead or what to expect.

It should have been hungry. Because I was a stupid teen with blood roaring in his ears as something long repressed was finally given an excuse to rise up.

It should have been… a lot of things.

But it was tender. Slow. A caress. It was me leaning down until we barely made contact and holding onto that sensation for long, eternal seconds as April's touch seeped through me, warming me from the inside out, reverberating across my whole being and back to her until I finally pressed just a few millimeters farther, barely enough for her lips and mine to mold together into a shape uniquely ours.

I let go of my water gun and wrapped her in a hug, pressing her body as tightly against my chest as I refused to do with our lips. Holding her fiercely even as I showed her the utmost care I could, as I tried to tell her through touch alone that I never wanted her to have reason to ever again show those hidden eyes of hers. That I wanted her [whole].

That I wanted [her].

And then she slowly pulled back, staring at me with her eyes wide open and her pale cheeks as red as her hair usually was.

She pressed both her hands on my chest and slowly pushed away before she bit her lip and looked down at the bare earth between us.

And then she pushed a wad of paper on my (still wet from the water gun) right hand and ran away faster than I've ever seen her flee.

You see, usually, she wants me to catch her so she can laugh at my incoherent rage and frustration.

But then…

Then I opened my hand and looked at the ball of creased paper.

A piece of paper that turned out to be a photocopy of a section of Killer's handbook. Specifically, the section that explained the rules for poison lipstick and how it needs to be a garish, unusual color.

Something like neon green.

***

"I'm going to kill her," I muttered darkly to a slightly amused Jose.

"Maybe in the next round. You're out of this one," he said, leaning back on the red plastic chair in the cafeteria.

"Yes. Next round. I'm gonna kill her in a game. Ha. Ha," I answered with a perfectly natural, well-meaning laugh that did not make Anna throw me an actually disturbed look.

"Isn't this, like, your thing? I don't get why you're this angry," the brunette asked with a slight tilt of her head as she shifted in her seat.

Namely, Jose's lap.

I stared at her in what she would later confess to me as the single scariest look she'd ever received from somebody not wearing a uniform.

"It's [definitely] not our thing," I told her.

"Brad…" Jose tried to pacify me with a raised hand. Possibly because he didn't want me to add his girlfriend to my imminent police crime report. "It [is] your thing. You've been dancing around this for years. Heck, Anna still doesn't believe you aren't fucking like bunnies whenever you spend the night at her place."

"We [what?"] I asked, shocked out of my seething rage.

Despite myself, so I took a moment to deliberately slip back into the comfortable well of churning, warm darkness.

Shut up. Ninjas are allowed to be chuuni. It's one of their racial skills.

"I mean, I believe it [now]," the somewhat paler than usual girl said, the arm draped behind Jose's neck tightening minutely.

"And it only took a sincere declaration of homicidal intent for you to get it. Progress," my best friend in the world (at the moment) told her with a rueful smile.

"Can we get back to the issue of me being seriously planning to strangle April? I feel like that's an important subject that we shouldn't neglect."

"Right. So… have you called her?" my sanest (at any moment) friend asked.

"Yes. She isn't picking up."

"Messages?"

"Unread."

"Dramatically chasing her to her house?"

I looked at him like he was a moron.

He shrugged.

Anna laughed.

And I sighed before standing up, balling up the aluminum foil that had previously contained my meager lunch, and leaving the school premises.

***

"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh!" April screamed as I poked my head through her bedroom window.

And, because trauma makes for a very good learning experience, I grabbed tightly onto her windowsill with both hands.

"What the Hell, Brad?!" the red-faced girl sitting on her bed in front of me yelled right in my face.

"Ninja?" I offered with the start of a shrug that got turned into more tightly grasping midway.

"You—this is my bedroom!"

"I know. Why would I sneak into any other girl's bedroom?"

"Why—what the—[Brad!"]

"April!"

She glared at me.

I glared back.

And she muttered something unkind, looked away, and shuffled on her bed to make room for me to [finally] crawl past her window and into her recently vacated spot.

"You should really fix this. It's dangerous to have a window that can open from the outside," I told her as I shrugged off my ninja parka.

She mumbled something entirely inaudible and refused to meet my eyes.

And I sighed.

Then I sat next to her, our shoulders touching, and I took her hand so that she could grasp me tightly enough that it hurt.

"What happened?" I finally asked.

She nervously licked her green lips, and I waited for the uncharacteristically goth April to answer.

"I… I thought it could be fun. Teasing. That we could both laugh about it."

I felt the anger push back up from my belly, and I, somehow, managed to stop it before it went past my chest.

"You [thought?"] I told her with more bitterness and incredulity than maybe warranted.

Except not really.

She shuffled over the colorful stars dotting her white bed coverings, once again looking at the carpeted floor that bore the scuffs from all the times my bed had rolled out from under hers (despite my having my own room just on the other side of the wall behind her bed's headboard) and… and I tried not to think about all the times I had, despite my self-preservation instincts, slept right under her bed, her hand dangling past the edge of it, grasping my own until we both fell asleep together.

Those were the nights when I was safe from waking up with red ink on my face. The nights when April was… unlike April, yet more April than ever.

There was something sacred about it. About those shared silences that had only started after she tricked me into brushing her hair. Something that I always tried not to think about but that I still leaned on when… when she didn't tell me why she had dissuaded a girl from asking me out. When she organized a whole Halloween event just for me. When she managed to find me a way to [finally] play an RPG after years without having anybody to play with me.

I… I never wanted to analyze them. To turn them into something other than the glimpses of an April that I was almost certain was just for me and me alone.

And, that day, she had violated that.

"I didn't. I really didn't think. I… I had the idea, and yes, I found it funny, but also… I wanted the excuse, you know? The… Please, don't make me say it," she told me, finally meeting my eyes with ones that wore runny makeup but for all the wrong reasons.

I couldn't push my anger down.

Because it was no longer there.

So I pulled her against me, her face once more pressed against the front of my blue sweater, her arms hanging limply by her side until she brought herself to wrap them tightly against me as she burrowed against my chest.

And I just…

I held her.

In a way, April was like a sister to me. She was family. She was… like Max. Like that dog that had meant more to me than an absent, dead father.

So… She could have been many other things. I [wanted] her to be those things. But if she couldn't, if she wasn't ready to…

I wouldn't push her.

I would hold her like a sister. I would still sleep beneath her bed, holding her hand.

And I…

And I didn't know what else I would do, but just those things would have to be enough.

"I have an eggshell full of itchy powder that I copied from a ninja handbook downloaded from a suspicious website in my parka's pocket. If you do [anything] to ruin this moment, you won't be able to sleep in this room for weeks," I muttered into her hair.

She laughed against my chest, her warm breath seeping past the thin layer of cotton before she managed to look up at me with a few more streaks of wet darkness running from under vibrant blue.

Then she grabbed her black hair, pulled… and the wig came out.

Her red braid unspooled, cascading down her back like she had rehearsed for it (and it was April, so she most likely had), and…

And I felt something unclench.

Because, as it turns out, April was not the only one who got ideas when she saw long hair.

… Incidentally, mine's currently shoulder-length. For no reason whatsoever.

***

"You got in!" Mom yelled at me as soon as I walked through the door.

I blinked at her.

"What?" I asked in a rare instance of the line not being due to April.

[Allegedly].

"Santa Monica College! You got in!" she said, wrapping me in the kind of hug that only Mom can give. One without the risk of asphyxia inherent to June's shows of affection or without the scary intensity of April's restrained, fragile, tender moments.

…

Okay, I may have a slightly smaller-than-average sample of hugs to draw comparisons from, but Mom's were still nice.

Are.

I mean, it's been a while, but that's what being miles apart does to a relationship: it decreases the number of available hugs.

Also, it may be that, at the time, I had been in a slight amount of shock.

Because, well, I was elated to have gotten into my first choice of college, but there was still the issue of it being [damn] expensive, and I didn't know if I could qualify for a scholarship, and… and…

And [April].

Because the last thing I wanted was for her to feel like I [also] was about to leave and forget her.

So, look, I may have done the smart thing and chosen a college solely on the merits of its Computer Sciences program. I may have done the smart, [pragmatic] thing and shot for the best education I could aspire to while still being realistic (because there was [no way] I was getting into MIT).

So, to say that I had mixed feelings about the news that had Mom so excited was a bit of an understatement.

***

"You're going to live together," June told me.

Or, well, me, April, and Mom, the three of us sitting on the wide, cream, cotton sofa of April's living room.

"What?" April asked instead of me [for once].

"You're both going to SMC, and you're basically siblings already. Sharing an apartment will be cheaper than you going to the dorms," she explained as she took a calm sip from her mug of hot chocolate.

The hot chocolate she tended to bring out when Mom visited.

The hot chocolate that had Mom's eyes fluttering in a way I tried very hard to ignore.

Let's just say that the list of sexual things I had discovered directly or indirectly due to June was disturbingly long, given she had just claimed that her daughter and I were practically siblings.

"Mom, I…" April looked anxiously at me, then at her mother. "Are you [sure?"]

"Positive!"

"But I—" Mom started to object.

"I'm paying," June preemptively opposed.

"I can't accept—" I tried to argue.

"You [most definitely can]. Think about it as me paying you to keep this one out of trouble."

I blinked at June sitting on her wide, dark wooden chair that was incidentally taller than the sofa, the older redhead peering down at me with an anime-worthy grin as she languidly rested her right cheek on the knuckles of her hand, her wavy hair draped down her side in a way that made it look orange in contrast with the tight red sweater she somehow had managed to keep in perfect condition despite years of stretching the poor, abused fabric.

And I looked at April, my alleged sibling looking at me nervously and licking her lips.

Then I looked back at June and gave her the only reasonable answer I could think of:

"There's not enough money in the world to—"

That was as far as I managed to get before a bony elbow found its way under my floating ribs.

Totally worth it.

***

So, look, I know it sounds like I'm mellowing out right now. Where's all the 'Meeting April was pain' that I started this whole spiel with? Why do I keep dwelling on these moments of shared intimacy? Why do I keep bringing up things that make me feel like maybe I shouldn't strangle her and turn myself in to the police, confident that no jury in the world would ever find me guilty of anything other than self-defense?

… Fuck if I know.

But… let me go on a bit more, and I'm almost positive you will understand where my latest yearning for righteous vengeance may be coming from.

So, well, it was only April and I that were going to be living in Santa Monica. None of our other friends and acquaintances had gotten in or, in Jose and Anna's case, applied to it.

Mostly, because Jose had gotten a basketball scholarship at Stanford.

… I always knew he was a jock. The signs were plain for all to see when he first refused my very generous offer to allow him to play a psionic character without making him roll for it.

Anna, on the other hand, just didn't feel like going to college until she, and I quote, 'Have gotten some actual real-life experience rather than rush into getting a degree just because that's what you're supposed to do.'

Yeah.

Anna may be smarter than I am.

So, well, there we were. Graduation. A time of farewells. Of celebration. Of moving on to a new stage in our lives.

And Anna was the valedictorian.

"So, you know that damn nerd that managed to get the whole year into a game of assassination that somehow ended up with half the boys getting murdered via colorful lipsticks?" she said from the podium, pointing straight at me in case there was any doubt regarding who the nerd in question was and making my cheeks burn almost as hard as June and April's best efforts had ever gotten them to. "Well, he convinced me that if I was going to be myself and do an Anna thing, and I'm quoting him here, I should end the speech by saying the following:

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

"Which is utter nonsense, because I know almost none of you, and I like less than half of you as much as I care. But, you know what?

"I'm not going to do an Anna thing.

"I'm going to tell you that me, the screwup, the girl who spent more time desecrating deserted classes than taking notes, managed to be the valedictorian, and that I only did it because April, and that's [the other] nerd that got us to play assassins and almost managed to trigger an anti-terrorist federal response, dared me to.

"I'm going to tell you that that's the best you can do: raise a middle finger to everyone who tells you that you can't do something. To everyone who ever tells you that you don't have the balls, ovaries, or whatever preferred method of reproduction you rock. To everyone who tells you that you don't even need to try because you're going to fail…

"To look them straight in the eye and tell them, 'Fuck you!'

"To try anyway. To fail sometimes, maybe often, maybe always.

"But to keep trying.

"Because, sometimes, despite spending most of your time in high school hidden in a janitor's closet with your knees vigorously bruising, you will get the immense satisfaction of standing in the middle of a stage, all eyes on you, and tell your best friend that she lost the bet and that she is going to [pay]."

Somehow, Anna said all of that before she could be wrestled away from the podium.

Mainly because the whole basketball team was running interference, but also because most teachers had already resigned themselves to something like that happening when she managed to, somehow, beat everyone's GPA.

Also, she was yelling at the top of her lungs, the disconnected mic doing absolutely nothing to stop the madwoman's rant from washing over the graduating class and assembled parents as the warm spring breeze rustled the grass of the yard where the foldable white chairs were set.

And where April and I were staring straight ahead with almost lethal levels of mortification burning through us as we were made complicit in Anna's madness.

I glanced at her. At the girl wearing a pretty, dark blue dress with a shimmering chiffon layer that left her calves and shoulders bare and revealed to me just how deeply her blush ran across her always pale skin.

"Now you know how [I] feel," I whispered.

She kicked my shin.

Then we both smirked and stood up to vigorously applaud the girl being rushed out of the stage.

***

I found April alone under the same three pines where we had… where she had won our first round of Killer.

She was leaning on the thickest trunk, staring up and through the branches at the bright blue sky above her, the shade of her dress seeming to become a starless night just to contrast with the sunny spring day.

I leaned back against the rough bark by her side, my grey suit's jacket barely thick enough to turn the experience into something almost pleasant as the edges of the strips of reddish bark dug between my shoulder blades.

"I'm here," I told her.

She didn't say anything. Just grabbed my hand.

"I… I know you wanted at least one of them to come. That… I'm sorry if I say too much, but…" I continued without looking at her.

Her lips opened, the pale pink she had chosen for her understated makeup dotted by traces of sunlight and translucent shadows.

She closed them, still wordless.

"Okay," I muttered, my fingers tightening around her own. "I just… Look, Anna's right: fuck them. Fuck anyone who ever makes you feel like this. Whoever makes you feel like you're less than you truly are. They don't matter: [you] do."

Her fingers answered mine, and her grasp almost hurt.

I looked up, past the branches of the old pine, past the green needles swaying in the wind.

"Fuck anyone who left. I'm staying," I said.

And she turned and, still without saying a single word, wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my chest.

And yes, I'll admit that a part of me wanted to tilt her chin up and kiss her. To get back even a hint of that stupid, broken moment we had shared under those very same branches not that long ago.

But… that was just a part.

The others were happy enough that, once again, only I would get to witness this April.

Even if I never wanted her to be like this.

***

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So, this is it. My latest attempt at publishing something worth buying. I hope you enjoyed the preview. Also… Well, some of you have said that you can't afford either subscribing to my Patreon (where this and my other novellas are available as perks) or buying the books themselves. I know things are really tight right now (and not just for starving artist types), so, as I'm terrible with self-promotion, how about any of you willing to leave a review or promote my work on sites I haven't thought of leaves me a private message and I send you the rest of the story? Let me know if this sounds like something reasonable at all.