“I’m not interested in naming her Killer,” Gabe glares at the other man before his features soften and he returns his attention to me. “I was thinking Helen, like Helen of Troy, or… Strawberry.” he adds in a softer voice.
Two rather peculiar choices, to be sure. “Helen of Troy is interesting. Are you really into Greek mythology or something?”
“Sort of. I just always liked the story, I guess.”
“Okay. Makes sense, although I’d use the whole thing, otherwise she’d sound like a middle-aged school teacher if you just went with Helen.”
Gabe chuckles, so I know he didn’t take offense to my joke.
“So tell me about Strawberry. Where’d you come up with that one?”
His flush deepens, and he glances around at the surrounding tables. Satisfying himself that no one is listening—Beau left his seat and is currently across the room, busy trying to make his sleepy bunny karate-chop a carrot—he leans in closer.
“When I was a kid, we lived in a little ground-level apartment, and my mom had a potted garden on our patio. It was small, but she managed to grow a few things in old coffee cans and a couple of five-gallon buckets from the hardware store. Well, she was always complaining that something was eating her strawberries. It made her so upset I decided I would catch whoever was doing it. One morning I woke up extra early and saw a little brown rabbit back there, nibbling on a berry. Even though my plan was to kill whatever made my mom upset, I couldn’t do it. I just sat in the window seat, watching that bunny eat its way through all of the ripest fruit. I decided to name him Strawberry and I started getting up early just to watch him.
“I don’t know what happened, but one day he just didn’t come back. Even though I know one of my neighbors probably got tired of him eating from their garden and got rid of him, I liked to imagine he packed up and moved to a nicer part of town, where the gardens were massive and they had more to eat than a few undersized berries.”
My heart does that annoying pitter-patter thing again. Gabe just always seems to surprise me, in the best way. “Does this bunny remind you of Strawberry?”
“Sort of. She’s brown, so that’s why I thought of it initially. But it’s kind of lame, and I certainly don’t want to have to explain it to Beau, or… anyone else. I’d lose cool points for not being able to kill a pest.”
“So don’t tell them.” I shrug as if it’s no big deal, even though my heart is melting. “You don’t owe them an explanation. Or you could wait a couple weeks until we’re allowed to give them food, then give her a strawberry to eat. It’ll get all over her face and make her look like she murdered someone, and you can claim that’s why you chose the name. Beau will be pissed he didn’t think of it first.”
Gabe chuckles. “That’s a great idea, I might use it. Thanks.”
“Anytime,” I grin. “Anything to piss Beau off.”
“Hey, he’s not that bad,” Gabe asserts. “I know he acts like an asshole a lot of the time, but… it’s mostly an act. We all have our parts to play, even you and me. Beau especially. He—”
“Yeah, I know, he has a rep to protect.” I roll my eyes.
“No, it’s more than that. No one here is what they seem to be, Amber. Not me, not Beau, not even you. They set this place up like it’s a dog-eat-dog kind of world, so everyone flexes and tries to take up as much space as possible. But in reality… well, we’re all a lot more alike than we realize.”
My gaze travels around the crowded dining hall as I consider his words. It’s filled with men barely older than boys, laughing raucously and making filthy jokes. A handful of people from our class with their tiny bunnies among the rest of the school, staring at each other’s ‘practice omegas’ with predatory eyes.
Could Gabe’s assertion be true? That I’m not the only person out for survival, like a guppy in a sea of sharks? What if everyone is some kind of guppy, and some are just better at pretending to be sharks?
My eyes land on Beau, holding his bunny aloft and standing in some kind of heroic pose while he pretends to slash at Johnny Sorokin with an invisible sword.
Maybe some of us are guppies, but definitely not all of us. I am willing to bet there are plenty of real sharks here.
And I need to keep my eyes open for them.
nine
AMBER
By the end of the first week with our bunnies, they had become the hottest new fashion accessory. As if they couldn’t help themselves, the boys all needed to make caring for their charges a point of pride in their ‘alpha-ness.’
Even without the posturing, it was clear the assignment tapped into some innate need for alphas to care about someone or something besides themselves. When Jake Mitchell’s bunny disappeared, he went into a full-on alpha rage assuming someone had taken it, sending two guys to the nurse before his roommate found the terrified animal hiding under his bed. When his little spotted friend was returned to him, Jake sank to his knees in the hallway and sobbed for a solid twenty minutes before he was able to get himself together.
In terms of commitment to accessories, Beau definitely won. He showed up one day to breakfast, a smug grin on his face, wearing a full tactical vest with a large attachment to the front molle straps, plus a smaller, empty one beside it.
I laughed out loud when I spotted him. “Ok, I gotta ask. I get the large pouch for the bunny, but what’s the little one for?”
“It’s also for Killer,” he smirked, gesturing. “This one is for when she wants quiet time, and this one is so she can get fresh air. See? Leg holes.”
“Those aren’t leg holes, you idiot. That pouch is designed to hold ammo magazines and your bunny will slip right through those holes and escape.” Gabe slides into a seat beside me, his brown bunny now secured in a fanny pack strapped diagonally across his chest like Rambo’s artillery.