"Oh, I really messed up this time..." Aralia mumbled to herself as she looked over the body of her now-dead boyfriend. "Oh this is bad, this is really bad... I knew I should have put him in the gutter farther from my house! This one makes me look so suspicious!"
Aralia quickly and quietly pushed the grate off of the formerly-boyfriend-filled gutter and pulled her dead-ex out and onto the plastic laid in the back of her blue Toyota pickup truck. She then drove 3 houses down, scanned the perimeter for bystanders, and offloaded her charge into the new gutter.
"There, much better!" Aralia exclaimed, wincing at the volume of her own words.
*****
Now, you're probably like, "wait, what? Aralia, aren't you supposed to be the protagonist, the female lead, and the hero?"
Well, dearest reader, not this time. This is a different kind of story.
*****
Twenty minutes later, Aralia reached her next destination: her home.
"Aralia! Where were you! It's at least three hours past your 10 pm curfew!" Aralia started at the sound of her mom's voice, jumping what she judged to be at least a foot.
"Sorry mom," Aralia said softly.
"Where have you been? Your father and I have been worried sick! Haven't we, dear?"
Both girls looked over at Aralia's father, who was passed out on the recliner.
"HAVEN'T WE, DEAR?!" Aralia's mother, Johanna, repeated, startling her father awake.
"Huh? Listen to your mother," Aralia's father, Alex, said sleepily, rolling over to go back to sleep on his recliner.
"ALEX!" Aralia's mom said, growing more and more irritated by the second.
"I'm up, I'm up, I'm up." Alex said tiredly, pushing the squeaky recliner into a sitting position.
"This better be good," he murmured for Aralia's benefit.
"Where were you?" Johanna asked with enough poison to kill a cat.
"I was..." Aralia began, "at a... party." She fake winced to add to the "I'm so sorry I disobeyed you" effect.
Alex sighed, rubbing his temples. "Well, thank you for your honesty, but you know we still have to punish you. You did stay out three hours after curfew."
"Yeah, I hope it was worth it." Johanna said loudly, egging Alex on.
"It was..." Aralia mumbled to herself. Upon seeing her mother glaring daggers at her, she finished with a louder "NOT."
"Just... try not to do it again, okay?" Alex said, ready to go back to bed.
"What? That's it? You're not even going to yell at her?" Aralia's little brother, Cole, said in a whiny voice. "I get yelled at more for eating a cookie!"
"Cole! What are you doing up? And eavesdropping? Really? I thought you were a big boy now!" Johanna said immediately, who was always quick to scold her kids.
*****
Oh, by the way, Cole is 8 years old, but in my not at ALL biased opinion, he needs to grow up faster.
Don't look at me like that! It's just so his voice can deepen. I kid you not, (Ha! See what I did there?) it sounds like a hot coat hanger being forced into your ear.
Anyway, back to the story.
*****
"SEE! YOU JUST YELLED AT ME MORE THAN HER, AND I DIDN'T SNEAK OUT TO GO TO A PARTY AT-" here he paused to check his watch "-1 AM!"
"Cole!" Johanna started, "Don't you take that tone with me!"
"Jo..." Alex said softly, "he has a point. You do yell at Cole a lot more than... HEY, WHERE DID SHE GO?"
While the rest of her family was arguing, Aralia had a clear shot at the stairs, which she had escaped up without a second thought.
Up in her room, Aralia stared at the ceiling. She started to smile. She had just committed her tenth murder. "Awesome!" She whispered.
*****
Before you judge poor Aralia, you might need to know her backstory. (I mean the part where she decided killing her boyfriends would be a good idea.)
But I'm not going to tell you. You're going to have to figure that one out by yourself.