Survival of the Unfit

Chapter 10

Levi

I stayed out by the girl for a good hour or two, waiting for someone to come by and drag the body away, but no one ever came and I kept dozing off in that tree. And the longer I stared, the more I glanced, the sicker I became. She was beautiful, and dead.

I was messing up. I was messing up really, really badly, but the weird thing was that I didn’t recognize this girl. At least I hadn’t recognized her, but I thought I knew nearly everyone in North’s face from keeping close tabs for mental documentation. I didn’t know who the unknown victim was, much nonetheless what she had to offer.

Eventually I left, too tired to function. I only got three hours of sleep that night and let’s just say school was less than spectacular, and a few days later the death of Brandy Faust from South Rushwood was assumed as a suicide by the gun lying at her side. I knew there was no gun there originally. It was planted. It was all fake, and I could’ve caught the culprit if I had just stayed out there longer. Goddamn. I was messing everything up.

Everyone was on high alert now. A South death hadn’t happened in two years, and the last one was during summer break. Some parents were nervous and suspicious at all the two deaths and one “disappearance”, but remained ignorant as they always do. But someone from South targeted? Hunted? Killed? Now that was scary.

Of course I questioned why the girl would be hanging around on the North side or why someone would bother dragging her body up here, but I had to find the source of the problem. No one exactly knows if it’s the same person who killed the other two girls (all girls, mind you, that’s a pattern starting to form). They planted the gun beside her this time. Probably realized that using the same gun was a bad move, getting smarter and better by leaving it there wiped of prints, holding the capability of murdering a dozen more people and getting away with it.

I did my research on Brandy Faust. She was that really good high jump girl, already looking at a full ride to college for it. There wasn’t much else I found, and going to her funeral didn’t give me any more insight as to who she was and what she could do. If her talent was high jump, something so specific, why would someone bother with killing her unless you did high jump too, in which case you’d be found out faster than lightning? God, none of it made sense. None of it was adding up. None of it was coming together, and it really needed to.

The only thing I got from the funeral was the girl who sat down the row from me, Brandy’s best friend. There were track girls and other people there who knew her and such, but you could just tell this girl was crushed more than any of them. More than a good majority of the adults there by that downcast look, constantly sniffing and messing with the hem of her black dress. I felt bad for her, whoever she was, until she started scowling at me for no reason. I saw the hostility out of the corner of my eye and shot her a hostile glare back, caught off guard by her mint colored eyes. I wanted to keep staring. They were really pretty. Wow, they were a pretty color of eyes with just a touch of yellow around the middle, really wide and pretty and just…pretty. But she turned away, and I regretted being so silently rude.

Yet life went on. Casey came home for Christmas and winter break early, as all college kids do. We hung out a lot. We actually went to that miniature beach place. We actually did couple things we hadn’t done since summertime, and it was wonderful. I forgot how much I loved her smile and her fiery, waist-length hair, always down and sea sprayed. She let me brush through it occasionally. I really liked brushing it, but she always fell asleep on me. That was okay too.

It was like falling for her all over again. Not as hard, but a gentle rekindling of the fire. And don’t take this the wrong way, but sex might’ve been what saved it. You didn’t need it for a relationship to work, I knew that, but…it made everything better. And sex is nice. Sex is very, very nice.