I liked Kevin a lot when I was a kid. Possibly because I perceived him as the youngest character and, in a weird way, that made him relatable.
So this is the kind of story that kid Zephyr would've come up with, written by older and more experienced Zephyr. (Some things toward the end might be put into slightly better perspective if you know that kid Zephyr assumed Kevin was an orphan and about four or five years younger than his teammates...)
"That girl with the glasses was bothering you, right?"
Mariah adorned her strictest no-nonsense face before Kevin finished the sentence, knowing instinctively from the even tone he kept his voice at and the way he avoided contact that he'd done something he wasn't supposed to.
Was there any use in denying it though?
Not really, not as far as she could see. It was Kevin's perceptiveness that made him so sneaky, not that he ever used that sneakiness for anything good. And considering her rivalry with Emily was about as subtle as a brick, there was no way he wouldn't have picked up on it.
"What did you do?" she asked, skipping the denials and heading straight for the interrogation.
If it was a good enough trick, she might be willing to forgive him. Just this once. And as long as Lee and Gary remained out of earshot.
"Ah, nothing much," he replied. "I only told her that she's lucky your match didn't take place in China. And that our team got its name because everyone in our village is given a baby tiger to train at birth, and yours would've totally eaten her–"
"Ugh, like she'd believe that."
The worst thing about Kevin's lies and outrageous stories, that sometimes people actually believed he was telling the truth. He had a tendency to add details that made it seem believable, well enough that most people didn't have to be completely gullible to sometimes wonder if what he were saying was true. He was skimming details in his current retelling though, of course.
"–because she made you so angry," Kevin finished, evidently not caring. "I thought it was believable."
"I don't," Mariah replied.
He didn't say anything after that. In fact, he turned his head in the opposite direction – Mariah suspected that she'd been right about Emily not believing, and the odds on his story's believability were two-to-one against him. At least the rest of Emily's team hadn't been around to laugh, or he'd probably be in a much worse mood right now.
And so would hers.
Kevin may have possessed most of the qualities straight off her mental "annoying little brother that I never wanted" checklist, but he was still a teammate – she hated seeing him upset same as the others, even when he deserved it.
"You're a smart kid, but you never apply that towards anything good. One day all that sneaking around and lying is going to get both you and the rest of us in a lot of trouble."
He liked to shrug off his responsibilities sometimes, but surely even he could understand what "for the good of the team" meant.
"And I'm not just talking about extra chores back at home, Kevin!"
"Yeah, yeah, I hear you."
Despite his careless dismissal, Mariah evidently wasn't done talking yet. "Don't you remember the last time–"
"No," Kevin replied automatically.
Or maybe because he was already thinking of something else:
"Are you sure there's going to be food at the end of this?" Gary asked. There was a shovel in his hands and a surprisingly almost perfectly circular hole in front of him, wide enough to fit most adults and already three feet deep.
And it had only been about twenty minutes so far.
Gary sounded tired and his work right now was slow, but Kevin knew that he was just being impatient and hungry. A couple of years ago, Gary's appetite had been even bigger than it was now, as hard as that was to believe.
"Of course," Kevin promised again. "And I'll give you my serving of xi gua lao for dessert after lunch too, if you can finish this hole in the next ten minutes."
"Oh." It wasn't much, but he'd been sure Gary would've felt motivated by it. Instead, a foreboding crease between Gary's eyebrows appeared, like he'd suddenly thought of something other than food – "Are you sure we're supposed to be doing this?"
Yep. Exactly as Kevin had feared, there it was.
"C'mon, I just want to see if that old 'covered pitfall' thing actually works."
He'd prepared an abundance of excuses and incentives to motivate Gary just in case something like this happened, but he never got the chance to utilize most of them –
"Gary! Kevin! What do you two think you're doing?!"
Kevin nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized there was a reason for Gary's sudden apprehension, not to mention the fact that someone managing to sneak up on him had been totally unexpected. With Gary doing all the hard work, all Kevin had needed to do was keep watch.
At any rate, the answer to his pitfall question had been a definite no, not for as long as Gary remembered that day and that he was strictly forbidden from playing along with any of Kevin's pranks and trading favors for food ever again.
"Or," Mariah spoke louder, aware that she'd already lost Kevin's attention, "that time–"
"Hey, how about that time I convinced our opponents in the qualifiers that Lee knew twenty-seven styles of kung-fu and wrestled tigers as a hobby? That was funny!"
Mariah frowned. "Lee didn't think that was funny," she pointed out.
When they'd shown up at the stadium and discovered their captain was actually someone as a short as Lee, they'd burst into laughter, calling him names like "puny" and trying to brush off having ever taken Kevin seriously. Lee didn't normally let name calling get to him like that, but the entire team had been loud and obnoxious and instantly gotten on Mariah's bad side too.
"Casualty of war," Kevin insisted dismissively. They'd suffered a crushing defeat, as the White Tigers didn't lose a single battle that round. "We obviously won because they believed me, didn't we?"
Naturally, Kevin had been repaid for his efforts by being benched. But as far as Mariah knew, he probably thought of himself as the martyr of their team every time it happened.
"Anyone gullible enough to have believed that wouldn't have stood a chance against us in the first place," Mariah replied. "You saw the way they freaked out after Gary" – who intentionally fit Kevin's descriptions of an eight foot tall monster who broke cinder blocks with his forehead better than Lee had – "showed up late."
"Then the whole team panicked and fell apart after a single loss to your Galux. It was great!"
No matter what they did, Kevin never seemed to get it through his thick head. Scolding never worked, and neither did extra chores or training or being grounded or forced to sit out during Beyblade matches–
What would Lee do if it were her acting like this at his age, she wondered.
"You know, if there's ever anything you want to talk to me about, I'm all ears," Mariah offered.
Judging by Kevin's wide-eyed reaction, this was probably one of the last things Kevin had expected her to say right now. Mariah surprised herself too, just a little bit, but this was also what she currently felt Lee would do, what any good older sibling would do. She didn't really think of Kevin as "troubled" or anything, but maybe if he started talking to someone before acting, he'd finally start behaving less brashly.
But... that didn't make it any less weird.
"What got into you all of a sudden?" Kevin asked, sounding unaffected.
Earlier that year, he'd managed to trick Ray with his acting. He was a pretty good actor, in fact – if Mariah didn't know him so well and hadn't spent more time with him lately than Ray had, she knew she would've been fooled.
"You're like a little brother to me," Mariah replied gently. She'd gone this far already, there was no point in backing out now. "But I don't think I've ever told you that before, and I want you to see me as an older sister too, okay? I'm there for you if you ever need me."
The last person who'd ever said anything like that to him was probably Ray, and they both knew how that had turned out.
"..."
It didn't seem like Kevin had forgiven Ray yet either.
X
Eventually, Mariah's bitbeast was stolen by someone she'd tentatively thought she could call a friend. Something else unexpected happened the same day.
"H-hey, Mariah? I know that you feel bad about losing and losing Galux, and – I wish there was something I could do to make you feel better... I-if you feel like talking about it, I'm there if you ever need me..."
Because she was like a sister to him, too.
Ah, cheesy endings. Kid Zephyr was not very good at endings in general. I couldn't think of a way to tie this ending together without adding some cheese to the plate, sorry.
And I was serious. I really did believe Kevin as an orphan.
You can thank a friend of mine for the fact that I'm uploading this at all, because I'm seriously not too sure how I feel about it. :P