Sometimes It's Just Like That

April

April was born the third of five children. When she was growing up she always felt ignored by her parents. She constantly fought with her brothers and sisters over the smallest things. In many ways that was how she strove to get attention from her parents. More often than not when she fought it was also a demand for respect from her siblings. At least that’s how it was after she began to mature.

She had always been a pretty girl, but in a world full of pretty faces she wanted to find other ways to be distinguished. She flung herself into her studies at school, and devoured all the books she could get her hands on. By the time April was thirteen all of her brothers and sisters went to her when they needed help with schoolwork. Her parents always told her how lucky they were to still have school after half of the planet had been blown to hell. She took advantage of the privilege to its fullest.

When her parents took notice of how bright she was they began to talk to her differently. They knew she was mature beyond her age, so they spoke to her almost as an equal. Her father endeavored to teach her the dividends of a good work ethic, and her mother spent many long hours telling her about the joys of having a family. April appreciated the things they said, but she knew that she would be different than both of them.

April wanted to have a family, but from the time she started thinking about boys she knew that she would never be happy in the sort of relationship her parents had. She would never have a man who treated her as anything but her equal. If her parents had been able to read her young mind they would have been shocked by the thoughts they found there.

As April sexually matured her mind became a cauldron of steamy romantic fantasies, all of which were filled with the ideals of equality and independence. She longed for a Prince Charming to come, but when he came to her in her fantasies he bowed to her and her brilliance. Sometimes she even wrote down her dreams about the perfect relationship. She always burned those stories later, with color flooding her cheeks and an aching in other parts of her body. She never, ever told her family about such things. She would never have heard the end of it.

Now, in her new home in the scorched lands, she remembered those dreams with a smile. How easy it had been for her to believe that a gallant and noble prince would one day come for her. The man she had fallen in love with was no prince. He was terribly poor when they met, but he always said the most wonderful things to her. At times, when they first began to take long walks together, it would seem as though he had been reading her mind. He always knew the exact thing to say at the exact moment when it would make her feel the most pleasure in life.

Gamma was far from gallant. He was often very clumsy, a trait which she found particularly endearing. Often he would pretend to stumble and fall just to make her giggle. Gee was noble in many ways, however. He also had come from a good family, and so he treated her with supreme respect and devotion. Like the prince from her younger days, he always bowed to her brilliance.

At first April had felt guilty that often she knew the right answers to common problems when he did not, that often she had good ideas that he had not thought of. After she realized that he appreciated her all the more for intelligence she became less apprehensive of sharing her ideas with him. He always told her that it just wasn’t his destiny in the world to be one of the people who had all the right answers. Gamma reckoned that he made up for it with all his hard work.

April had been devastated as they fled Poe. She knew that none of her family would bow down to the blossoming dictatorship. She wondered how the agents of oppression managed to take so much power with so little effort, and she wondered if any of her family was still alive.

“I’ll miss you forever, daddy,” she thought to herself. Even if he wasn’t dead or imprisoned, she knew that she would never see him again, nor any of her family. She would never return to Poe. Whatever would happen to her would happen on the mainland, with Gamma.

As she finished cooking the squirrel she had killed that morning she thought about the baby inside of her. For just an instant panic flared up inside of her. Life would be very hard for her if Gamma didn’t come back from their expedition. She put the thought out of her mind.

“He’ll be okay,” she thought to herself, “My poor, dumb, hard working man will come back to me.”

As she was growing up she would never have suspected that she could feel joy at just being able to lead a normal life. It wasn’t until she found out how hard it was to live a normal life that she accepted it as an accomplishment. She always wanted to change the world. Finally she had found a way, though not in the way she had intended. She put her hands on her stomach and wondered for the millionth time if her baby would be a boy or a girl.