"You!" you say to the girl, wishing you could sound as forcefully scornful as the situation demands. She is alone, and still wearing her leather jacket, white top, parochial skirt, and goofy tanker boots. Her red hair's even redder under clinical fluorescent bulbs than it was in the too dark park.
"I am April Park Coughlin," she tells you, forcing a femme fatale purr into her delivery. "You may call me April Park. My family name has become a badge for my failures."
"So be it," you say, not sure that you want to call her anything at all. "What do you intend here, April Park?"
She approaches, green eyes wide and unblinking. There's a menacing playfulness to her that you don't care for. She's got a blown out ponytail and a valiant ahoge over her left ear. With hair like that, they're always playing for keeps.
"I'm meant to cheer you in your convalescence," she says, hopping into your bed. She kneels astride your lower legs provocatively, trying to pinpoint your wound through the hospital johnny.
"Get your filthy motorhuckles out of this bed immediately!" you say, glad to recapture some of that chilly inflection from the old days.
April Park eagerly complies, pulling her oversized boots off and dropping them on the floor, where they thunk. You might have been able to catch the shadow of a boot thunk fetishist (the Greek for which you can't recall) eavesdropping outside your window, but the vertical blinds were drawn over an hour ago.
As April Park daintily cracks her knuckles and limbers her fingers, you struggle to sit up and get a glance at her feet. Her white tube socks are just dirty enough to accent the engaging details, shadowy footprints stamped into the cotton.
"My soles in grimy negative, yes," says April Park, looking back to check the state of her hosiery.
When she turns back to you, her game face is on. Wiggling fingers held up to either side of her face, her eyes go even wider as she waggles her tongue and looks entirely doolally.
She says nothing, teasing with an infernally high-pitched giggle and she digs into your ribs.
"My deah!" you shout, developing a slight accent as the breath leaves you in hoarse laughter. The pain from your wound is both exquisite and tolerable.
April Park giggles like a bedlamite, you laugh huskily like a man in aftercare (groaning, now and again, with pain), and you both struggle... you, to escape April Park; April Park, to keep on top of you.
But you're hurt and April isn't, and now she's crossing her eyes as she keeps up the tongue-waggling and malicious, screamy giggling. She's also being careful to tickle around the spot where you got stabbed, though you could tell her that's no help when you're roaring with laughter.
Thinking she means to be the end of you, you reach up and twist the hell out of her nose.
"OUCH, damn it!!" says April Park, which ends all the giggling and yahzick-wambling, PDQ. "I should stand on your face with these dirty socks until you snuff it!"
"I was... helpfully managing a... comedo on that lovely... nose of yours... Miss Coughlin! You... should have seen... the lovely blossom... of keratin and sebum... corkscrewing forth!"
"Yeah, right!" says April Park who, punk or not, uses Bioré cleansing strips on a regular basis and knows damned well she doesn't have any clogged pores. You can't make assumptions about her overall hygiene just because her socks are dirty.
You continue to catch your breath, considering retaliation. April Park gets her left hand up as a snoot shield and prepares to work you with her right.
And then...
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