April North by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

body?
    She sighed. There was some roast beef in the refrigerator, and she was dying of hunger. But she could not go into the kitchen and start gnawing on the roast and still live up to the lie about the wonderful dinner she had just finished packing away at the Liverpool’s. Well, it would not hurt her to miss a meal.
    The doorbell rang.
    She stood up. Her father had started to fold his newspaper, but she shook her head and walked past him. “It’s for me,” she explained. “A boy.”
    “Got a date, Hon?”
    “Not exactly,” she said.
    When she opened the door, her not-exactly date stood on the stoop with a silly expression on his face. She tried to decide whether he was nervous or excited. It was hard to say. Jim—
    “April—”
    They had both started talking at once, throwing their names at each other, and now they stopped at once. She looked at him for a second or two, taking him in from his oiled black hair to his scuffed brown loafers. Now, she thought, if she were going to start putting out for the fine young men of Antrim, she could not find a less exciting start than Jim Bregger. Admittedly, the FYM of Antrim were a moldy lot, but Jumping Jim Bregger was the bottom of the barrel.
    He was fat. And he had pimples. He was not merely fat—he was jellyfish, with no discernible muscles. And he did not just have pimples—even his pimples had pimples. He was so thoroughly a mass of acne that, when you looked at him, you wanted to squeeze his head.
    “April,” he said, “I can’t go out with you tonight.”
    That’s right, she thought. You can’t.
    But how in the world did he know this fact already? She had not yet opened her mouth, except to spit his name at him.
    “I’m sorry,” he went on. “But I can’t go out with you.”
    She asked him why he could not. It occurred to her that this was a little like examining the dentures of a gift horse but she just had to know. Maybe his mother would not let him go out with a horny little tramp like her. Maybe—
    He said, “Bill Piersall told me.”
    Sure, she thought. First Danny Duncan told you, and then Bill Piersall told you. It figures.
    “He said you’re—well, his property now. He said he’s dating you steady and everybody better lay off. Stay away, I mean. He said if I kept my date with you tonight he’d scramble my brains for me. That’s what he said, April.”
    Jim Bregger’s brains didn’t need scrambling, April thought. They were already poached.
    “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly. “Bill told you—that I was his property?”
    “That’s what he said.”
    “You go tell him he can go to hell,” she said. “You tell Bill Piersall I wouldn’t spit on him if he was dying of thirst. You tell him—”
    “You mean you’re not going with him?”
    “You’re almost as clever as you are handsome,” she told him. “No, I’m not going with Bill Piersall. Not even to a dog show. Not to a funeral. Not even to his own.”
    “But—”
    “Bill Piersall,” she said firmly, “can go to hell.”
    She looked at Jim. He was shifting his weight from one foot to another while he shifted his wad of chewing gum from one side of his mouth to the other. She wondered if he was testing his coordination or something.
    “That means you want to go out with me,” he said.
    “Huh?”
    “I guess it’s okay then,” he said. “I mean, if Bill was mistaken, what the hell? I mean, we can go out for a ride and park somewhere, and—”
    “I’m not going out with you,” she said.
    “But—”
    “Jim,” she said, “I don’t even like you.”
    He stood there with a stupid half-grin on his face until she closed the door. She went back to the living room, sat down once more on the flowered couch. Her father asked her if anything had gone wrong, and she told him nothing had. He went back to his newspaper and she put the television on.
    There was nothing good on television. She sat in front of the set for an hour, hardly noticing the program,