Survival Of The Fittest

((John James continued from How Do You Kill All Six People? ))

Josh (pretty sure its Josh and not Justin or Jeremy or something) put a stack of paper cups on the table. He pinched his own cheek twice.

The table was set up with some food and drink. There was a party sub, some tin catering containers with pasta, a pile of brownies, and a large drink dispenser filled with some kind of red liquid.

Pasta party after school. A morale building ritual among sports teams before games or practices to carb load.

Party party party. Pasta pasta pasta.

Josh was alone and had finished setting it up.

He looked into the top of the drink dispenser and a shining red reflection blinked back at him.



This morning his brother had bumped into his ant farm and almost tipped it over. When Josh caught it and hissed his name, looked at him with his big eyes of concern. All his brother said was, “I said I was sorry. What? You gonna cry about it? You gonna cry about ants?”

Two days before he’d been called on in class to give his opinion on a story they were reading.

“Um… sad?” he said tentatively, truthfully.

He was looked at strangely by the people sitting near him. Josh felt himself sink into his seat.

“Or I don’t know,” he mumbled.

The teacher just kind of smiled past him and then asked someone else.

Last week a girl walked into him in the hallway.

“Ow,” Josh said, in his deadpan way.

“Oh,” she said, and then kept walking. People ran into him a lot.

The week before he’d texted a friend something. He never responded. He resolved to just stop texting people things, because they often didn’t respond.


Josh went around quietly closing metaphorical doors as people disregarded him until he was left on his own. Josh went around closing physical doors to the gym and returned to the table, the squeaking of his sneakers echoing around him.

He squeezed his fists tightly and gritted his teeth.

What is the point of this?

Josh suddenly kicked a joint of the folding table as hard as he could and the entire thing collapsed, flat on the floor. The food and drink shook.

“Fuck,” he whispered darkly, uncharacteristically.

He reeled back and kicked the dispenser of punch, which sent it clattering onto its side. Sticky red liquid spilled over, flooding the party sub, carrying off some of the brownies, and covering the ground.


Josh had to destroy whatever he could get his hands on. He couldn’t explain it, he just knew that he had to.

[Evie McKown was getting lunch, now she is here]

Crash

Evie had been on her way home, initially. But she'd just about gotten through the gate when she recalled that she'd left her gym bag behind in the locker room. Not a mistake she commonly made, but not precisely rare either - it wasn't like there was a rash of locker break-ins going on, so leaving her stuff for next time she'd need it was often a good choice, but this time around she'd forgotten she had a swim meet over the weekend. So, back to the gym it was. At first, she didn't hear the banging and crashing over the racket emanating from her headphone. By the combined powers of noise-cancellation and Carpenter Brut, she was just about deaf to the outside world.

Bang

Singing under her breath, she occasionally peered back over her shoulder, furtively making sure nobody else was around to notice her doing it. Assured that the corridor was empty of potential sources of embarassment for the moment, the girl's movements started matching the beat more and more, turning by degrees into more of an impromptu (and indeed, highly embarassing) dance.
"She's a maniac, maaaaaaaniac on the floor..."
Until eventually she neared a door to the auditorium itself. Coming from this direction, it was quicker to cut across it than carry on around the corridoors to the locker rooms, and as far as she remembered the only thing she might interrupt was the setup for some kind of sports team dinner? That probably wouldn't be on for another hour or so anyway, she reasoned, nobody was going to want to eat so early in the evening.
"...and she's dancing like she's never danced befo~oooooore!"

BANG

Mercifully for her self-image, Evie hadn't yet started pushing the door open when the noise from within coincided with a lull in the track. The chorus's frantic energy calmed into a quieter verse, and the telltale sound of heavy objects striking the floor broke through. So when she did go to open up the door, she did so gingerly, beginning to dread what she might see on the other side. With her other hand she hit pause, and pulled her headphones down to rest around her neck. The absence of music, and presence of random smashing, was a rather stark contrast to her ears, only heightening the creeping fear that she was about to make a classic horror-movie-clueless-teen mistake and maybe, just maybe, she'd be better off just going the long way around this time. Or maybe someone was in trouble. If there was a fight going on in there, would she forgive herself for not taking the opportunity to try to break it up?

So the door creaked slowly open, and a concerned face poked through the gap. Just the one occupant after all, that was good news. But he seemed absolutely pissed about something, and again, Evie's wiser instincts told her to just back away and let him do his thing. Something else in her bade her to stay though, maybe try to defuse. She'd been so worried about someone seeing her bad dance moves, maybe a little embarassment might get the boy thinking clearly too? So a tall and lean body followed the concerned face, and she stepped into the uncomfortably large space. It had never felt conspicuous during the day, in contexts with plenty of people filling the room, but after hours, just the two of them, the expanse of the auditorium was palpable, made her feel small and exposed.

Eventually, Evie managed to croak out an ice-breaker. She hadn't realised how dry her throat was until she first tried to speak, choking on the first syllable before she managed to get the full sentence out on the second try.

"Are... are you good?"

What a stupid question. Of course he wasn't. People don't just go around setting up folding tables, covering them in food, then smashing the lot down. Not usually, at least. But what else was she to say? Demand to know why he was doing it? That sure wouldn't get her anywhere. And she was entrenched in the situation now, so diplomatic seemed like the way to proceed.

The creaking typical of the school's doors sliced through the silence. It was elongated, as if the person opening the door was doing it purposefully slowly.

Josh stared at nothing in particular other than the back wall of the gym. His shoulders went up and down a bit more dramatically than usual, indicating the change in his breathing.

A question in a girl's voice timidly followed.

Josh turned his head to see who had spoken to him. Evie, from the swim team, who was always bothering people with some cause or another. He walked to her in a steady pace, heel to toe, stepping through punch.

She was tall, almost as tall as he was. Suddenly, Josh grabbed her around the shoulders. He had never touched a girl like this before. He'd never even hugged a girl who wasn't a member of his family, and those were the approved Christian-side hugs.

Control yourself.

Psalm 37:8 Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil

"Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. It tends only to evil," he muttered under his breath. His face was blank. His hold on her loosened.

"The table..." he swallowed. "It fell," he said, imploring her to believe him.

Her earlier comparison to a cheesy teen slasher flick only seemed more and more darkly apt as the boy silently fumed, then started pacing towards her, seemingly unaware or uncaring of the sticky mess he was tracking through. The boy, who even was he, again? Evie was sure she’d seen him before, he seemed like he should be recognisable being tall and conventionally attractive and all, the sort of boy she would’ve tried to convince herself she should want in years prior. But it just wouldn’t come. He was so painfully average it was hard to apply a name to the face. Joe? James? It was surely a J name.

“Hey, don’t worry J—“ she caught herself moments into forming the sound, but there were certainly the beginnings of a J nonetheless,
“I’m,” beat. I’m definitely didn’t usually start with a J sound. “Not gonna…”

By then he was inches from her. Evie just about had enough time for her eyes to widen as a surprisingly strong grip closer around her shoulders. Sure, perhaps she could’ve shook him off if she’d been thinking clearly. Instead however, every part of her tensed and she froze, stunned, staring back into Josh’s eyes. Was it Josh? No, that wasn’t right either.

Then he was muttering something. It had the air of the Biblical about it, but the girl was hardly devout, she wasn’t sure of that either. Could’ve been a philosopher for all she knew. Then at last, he seemed to calm, maybe the verse had helped centre him? Whatever it was, Evie was relieved. He insisted that the table fell. True, technically. Shoving things does often cause them to fall. His tone seemed desperate, in dire need of belief. For her part, Evie was rather in need of being unhanded, so she played along.

“It sure did,” she began, trying to formulate a plausible agreement that wouldn’t come across as insultingly insincere. But her mouth did tend to run faster than her brain at the best of times.
“I can see, uh, yeah, it’s… fallen down.”

Evie tried to relax, let her upper body loosen just the slightest bit. She found little success.

“You want a hand, um, clearing up?”

If she’d been thinking clearly, she’d have immediately kicked herself for offering to stay in the situation instead of getting out as fast as she could, but that was the secret, wasn’t it? Diplomatic-and-helpful Evie didn’t just arise from her better altruistic nature, mostly she came from some kind of fear or another.

Josh (?) realized that Evie had started an attempt at saying his name, but then aborted. Possibly, not unheard of, because she wasn't completely sure what it was.

"No," he said quietly after a moment. There was no need to be loud; the only sound was the faint humming of the lights, and they were so close that she could likely see the dark flecks of color in his blue eyes.

"Thank you," he added, as if it had been one sentence with a particularly long pause.

He realized that he had actually never touched anyone like this regardless of gender. He had never held someone around the shoulders or gripped someone with his whole hands. His hands dropped off of her and returned to his sides.

The emotion on his face seemed to melt away and became replaced with the sort of neutral look he always wore, as if this outburst was someone else that had taken his place for a brief moment in time.

"It's fine. I'll order pizzas. Everyone likes pizza. Go on, and forget that this happened," he said.

Slowly, he closed the door.

((Josh James continued elsewhere))

As the initial shock abated, complex thoughts became possible again, and the young woman’s conscious mind caught up with what her instincts had already been preparing for. Her heart raced, her breathing was fast and shallow, mouth dry, and most importantly everything else in the room seemed to fade into background noise. All she could meaningfully perceive was that face, hoping she could predict its owner’s next move. Did he mean to attack her? Scream and shout? Worse?

No, he said. A simple response out of an unmemorable face and yet, Evie suspected she’d remember both for a long time coming. No thank you.

He seemed to be calming. Back to his normal self? Or had that been the real normal? Hard to say of a stranger. But he did at least seem safer to be around. Evie swallowed heavily, and her focus expanded again to acknowledge the rest of her environment, quiet but for the low drone of overhead lighting. Looking around at the mess, it still felt incredibly eerie for her, like the site of some terrible violence. Then Josh was leaving, asking her to forget. She wouldn’t, of course, but she also had no intention of gossiping either. No need to draw further ire.

Instead Evie stood there for a while, feeling her pulse slow to normal, feeling blood and warmth return from her muscles to her extremities, and feeling altogether vulnerable. What would she have done, if he had gotten violent? She’d heard often enough the danger an angry man poses to a woman at any given moment, but it had never truly been real to her before, just an abstract reason to not stay out too late or take sketchy shortcuts. Now? Well, now it felt a little different to her. Still not wholly real or immediate, but much less abstract.

After a while, she lifted her headphones back onto her ears. Maniac felt altogether inappropriate to put back on, so as she walked, she browsed for something else to drown out the oppressive silence and the intrusive thoughts. Eventually she settled on something comfortable, the sort of inoffensive indie pop her dad would certainly tease her over if he knew. And then maybe ask if it meant something deeper, since, you know…

She chose not to cut back through the gym on her way back. She didn’t dance either, and kept the singing inside her head.

[Evie McKown can later be found experiencing Skateball]

I think we could do it if we tried, if only to say, “you’re mine”,