Edmund had always been content to be wary of Levi from afar. He’d never presented himself as much more than someone who thought it might be a fun game to make the quiet, peaceful boy lose his cool. Now his vision of everything felt skewed and he didn’t know what to think. Was this his intention from the start? Was what people saw only ever what he wanted them to see, nothing more or less? Edmund could relate, and while it was in a different way (one that made all the difference), he found the growing list of similarities between them all the more unsettling.
Eddie started out defensive the moment he saw who had come to disturb him, but now he just felt dumbfounded. Why did Levi insist on moving from one riddle to the next? He stepped away, and the space between them ought to have been a relief from their tense closeness before, but now Edmund felt an unwanted curiosity brewing to find out what was going on in the other boy’s head. Was it all a farce to toy with him, or was there some semblance of sincerity in his words? He took a step forward, following Levi’s retreat.
“Why would you say that?” The smoke wasn’t bothering him anymore, but his head felt lighter, his perception narrowing. For all the times he’d asked why Levi came here today, he knew he wasn’t going to get a straight answer by asking again. At any rate, that wasn’t what was driving the majority of his curiosity anymore, anyways. “I’m not… I mean, no one’s ever been interested. Not in me.” And why would they? He had never been much more than a lost soul too afraid to find himself. He didn’t know what Levi was playing at, and it was making him uneasy. A sense that in the back of Edmund’s mind made him realize he was possibly playing right into his hands.
Levi’s intention wasn’t much that could have been spoken for. It was more the boredom of being a teenager in a one horse town that lead him there. But the dissatisfaction of a teenage soul in the quiet town could lead to any number of dangerous things, such was the natural consequence.
Vandalism, cow tipping, make-out lake, murder. And then, there was Levi. Or Levi and Reese. For in every bit of each, there was the other. It may not have been well shown through a girl constantly covered in coloured bandaids, and rainbow sharpies. Not at least to the public eye. But with each silly little game she played, she thrived in the same way Levi did. In the apathy of what rest around her.
But things changed, when the boy became suspect of murder. When there was little to no other around him. When she left him. When she held out her crown to pass along in her departure, as he wait for her inevitable return. Because to him, she couldn’t be dead. She wasn’t dead.
Or so he told himself.
“Even Reese knows,” he paused for a moment, dismissive in his voice as he thought.
Edmund wasn’t a rose. Not ever, not at all. He didn’t have thorns. He wasn’t tamed or pruned to be displayed. The milquetoast boy was never that.
“Do you remember when we were kid, ‘good influences’ on each other. At least that’s what my father hoped right, that if we were together maybe- I’d end up like you.”
He was a daisy. Simple, dull, surviving. So delicate in appearance, but found on a roadside ran across by wheels, trodden on by weary passers. Waiting there patiently to be picked up as a part of a small hand rounded bouquet of young love, or torn from the ground to be woven into a innocent crown as bright as the sun. For Edmund Washington was beautiful.
“Do you know what the straw was, the bullet that shot that horse in the face?”
