Authors Note's: Okay, so this is my first Walking Dead story ever, and its just an idea that got stuck in my head and wouldn't go away. But there are a few things I need to say really quick. First, Daryl is going to seem a little OOC when it comes to Liberty. I feel like since she's his niece and he raised her, he'd treat her differently than he treated other people. Second, this starts about six weeks or so before the disease started to spread. I think i have the time line right, but I'm not sure.

Disclaimer: I own Liberty Dixon and her classmates and teachers. Nothing else belongs to me!

April 19th, 2011-

"Liberty Belle!" My Uncle Daryl rapped two short knocks on my bedroom door. "If you're wantin' a ride to school from me, you better get your ass in gear, girl!"

I groaned and rolled over, looking at my digital clock. It was 6:30 and he had to be at the packing plant where he worked by 7:30. I had slept through my alarm, again, and if I didn't hurry, I'd be stuck taking the bus.

"Libby?" He knocked again.

"I'm up." I said, struggling to untangle myself from my blankets. "I'll be out in a few minutes.

I listened as he moved away from door and I finally managed to pull my leg free from a twisted sheet. I climbed from my bed and pulled out some clothes from my dresser. As I stood in front of my mirror, I grimaced at what I saw: a mousy looking girl of thirteen, with messy light brown hair, blue eyes, and freckles. Pulling off my pajamas made me even more depressed. There were girls in my eighth grade class who could pass for seventeen or eighteen years old, where as I, flat as a pancake and shapely as a stick, looked like a fourth grader. I'd had my period for over a year, but a woman I was not.

After I dressed and brushed my hair back into a ponytail, I crept, silent as death, down the hallway and past my father's room. I could hear him in there snoring, no doubt sleeping off last night's bender.

Uncle Daryl was waiting for me in the kitchen.

"We have to stop meeting like this." I joked. He raised an eyebrow and pushed an already made bowl of cereal across the table to me.

"I'm leavin' in twenty minutes." He said. I sighed at his lack of humor and sat down to eat.

He sat across from me as I ate, impatiently tapping his fingers against his worn jeans.

"You don't have to wait for me, you know." I told him.

"I have a little time." He said. "And anyway, I don't like you riding that bus."

I nodded as I slurped the last of the milk from my bowl. We lived in Wildflower Ridge trailer park, a stupid name for the place as there were no wildflowers and no ridges. It was the roughest part of Deerwood, the town we lived in, and riding the bus from there could be a scary thing for a pipsqueak like me.

Maybe I should explain something now. I'm smart. I don't mean to sound stuck up, but it's just a fact. The school tested my IQ in the sixth grade and it came back as 196. 160 is considered a genius. I had the highest grades in my class and I always made the high honor roll. In fact, the summer before, I'd made it into the top 1% of the kids in the state and had been invited to a special summer camp in Valdosta, where I'd spent two wonderful weeks at the university there with other gifted kids. My Dad hadn't wanted me to go, but Uncle Daryl had somehow talked him around. I was hoping to get to go again. It was nice to be just a smart kid, instead of another one of those damn Dixon's.

I don't know where I got my brains. My father dropped out of the ninth grade and can barely read, and my mother, who took off when I was four, wasn't too bright either, from what I can remember. Uncle Daryl has a lot of common sense, but he isn't book smart. I used to think that maybe there was a mix up at the hospital when I was born and my parents accidently brought the wrong little girl home. I told Uncle Daryl that once and he actually grinned, a rare thing for sure, and told me no such luck. I was a Dixon, through and through.

"I'm ready." I told him as I came back into the front room after brushing my teeth and grabbing my backpack. I pushed my feet into my worn sneakers and looked up to see my uncle holding out my red hoodie.

"It's kinda chilly out there this morning." He told me as I took it and put it on.

"Thanks."

I sat in the passenger seat of his old pickup and leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the side window.

"You get all your homework done?" Uncle Daryl asked me as we back out of our driveway. Though there was no amusement in his voice, I knew he was teasing me.

"Of course." I said. "I finished my paper on Elizabeth Barrett Browning for English."

"Right." He nodded as we pulled out onto the highway. "I have no fucking clue who that is."

I grinned at his choice of wording. "She was an English poet of the Romantic movement." I explained.

"The only poem I know is 'There Once Was a Boy from Nantucket"." He told me and I wrinkled my nose.

"I've never heard that." I told him. "How does it go?"

He cracked the window and lit a cigarette. "Never mind."

I shook my head and sighed. I would ask my best friend, Hilary. She had four older brothers and would most likely know.

We pulled up in front of the Deerwood Junior High.

"Here." Uncle Daryl fumbled for his wallet, handing me a five dollar bill. "For your lunch."

"Thanks." I said. I slid across the seat and gave him a quick kiss on his stubbly cheek. "Love you, Uncky." I said, reverting back to my baby nickname for him.

He tugged on my ponytail. "Love you too, kid." He said, gruffly. He looked at me as I climbed out of the cab. "I'll be here when I get off work, okay?"

I smiled. "All right. Have a good day."

"You too."

I watched as he pulled away from the curb and then I turned and headed inside. Since I usually got to the school at about 7:15, there were hardly any other students there. I made my way towards my favorite place, the library.

"Good morning, Libby." The young librarian, Ms. Fischer, smiled at me from behind her desk.

If I had to pick a favorite staff member, it would be her. She was young, only in her mid-twenties and very pretty. Uncle Daryl and I had seen her once when we were grocery shopping at Deerwood Superfood Town and his eyes had nearly fallen out of their sockets.

"Hey, Ms. Fischer." I said, pulling up a chair at my favorite table.

"Did you finish your paper on Barrett Browning?" She asked, coming over to sit beside me.

"Yeah, I got it done." I told her. "My Dad was out last night, so it was easy. The house is always quiet when it's just me and Uncle Daryl."

"Oh," Ms. Fischer's face went pink, as it always did when I mentioned my uncle. "And how is your uncle doing? Fine, I hope."

I hid a smile. It was obvious to me that she thought he was cute and I wasn't surprised. A lot of women did. It used to bug me that we couldn't go anywhere without some woman flirting with him. Now I think it's funny to watch him squirm.

"Yeah, he's good." I answered. "So about my paper…"

We spent the next twenty minutes looking over my English paper, until I heard my best friend's voice.

"Libby!"

Hilary Compton had been my best friend since kindergarten when Bobby Cortez thought it would be funny to whip out his boy part to me in the lunch line. I, having never seen one, was speechless. Hilary, who shared a bathroom with her older brothers, just raised her brows and said "I've seen bigger." Bobby never tried to whip it out again and Hilary and I had been inseparable since.

"Hey, Hil." I said, gathering my things. "Thanks for the help, Ms. Fischer."

"Oh, you're welcome, Libby." She told me.

Hilary and I walked out of the library together. Hilary is about three inches shorter than me, slightly chubby with red hair and green eyes. Her face is sort of smushed and she kinda looks like a pug.

"So guess what?" She said as we entered the hallway.

"What?"

"Josh asked about you on the bus this morning." She told me. My heart tripped a couple of beats.

"What?"

Hilary grinned, her braces flashing. "Yeah, he was like, what's up with your friend Libby? And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like; does she have a boyfriend or what?"

"What did you say?" I asked her, my voice a few octaves higher than normal.

Josh Danvers has been the object of my affection for the past three months. I noticed how cute he was when I saw him playing his trombone during lunch one day. When I told Hilary, she said he rode her bus and then made herself my official spy.

"I told him you weren't going out with anybody." She said. "I didn't tell him that it was because your Dad and your Uncle would shot any dude who comes near you."

I sighed. This wasn't strictly true, but my both my uncle and father had joked about it more than once. Although, now that I'm older, I'm not so sure they were joking.

"Did you get your paper done for O'Neil?" Hilary asked and I nodded.

"Yeah, did you?"

She nodded too. "Yep. One thousand words on Robert Frost." She shook her head. "I'll be glad when this poetry shit is done with. It's boring."

I shrugged. "I like it." I said. She rolled her eyes.

"You would."

"Speaking of poems, I gotta ask you something." We were at our lockers now and I lowered my voice. "Do you know this poem 'I Once Knew a Boy from Nantucket'?"

She grinned and recited quickly. "I once knew a boy from Nantucket, who had a dick so long he could suck it. As he wiped off his chin, he said with a grin, if my ear was a cunt, I would fuck it."

I felt the blush creep into my cheeks. Hilary had no problem with saying stuff like that, but it still embarrassed me. "Oh." Was all I said. She grinned again.

"Why'd you wanna know about that?" She asked.

"I was telling Uncle Daryl about my paper and he said that was the only poem he knew." I shrugged. "But he wouldn't tell me what it was."

"I learned it from Corey." She told me, referring to her older brother. "But he's always saying stuff like that. Drives my mom nuts."

I giggled and we headed off to our first class.

The day sped by fairly quickly for me. It always seems too, and I think it's because I like school so much. When 3:00 came, I grabbed my stuff and walked with Hilary to her bus, and then I went and sat down on the curb under a huge old live oak in the front of the school yard. It was where I sat when it was nice out, waiting the forty-five minutes for my uncle to pick me up.

I pulled the book I was reading out of my backpack. It was called The Uglies and is about a future, dystopian society where everyone is turned "pretty" by extreme plastic surgery on their sixteenth birthday.

I had only read a few pages, when someone sat down beside me. I looked up and nearly swallowed my tongue to see Josh Danvers, carrying his huge trombone case.

"Hey." He said.

"Hi." I replied.

"What're you doing out here?" He asked.

"I'm, uh, waiting for my Uncle Daryl to pick me up." I answered. "But he doesn't get off till 3:30."

"Oh," He nodded. "I'm waiting for my ride too. I was supposed to have band practice today, but Mr. Harrison is sick, so it was cancelled and my Mom won't be here for awhile."

"Why didn't you take the bus home?" I asked. He shrugged.

"I didn't want to." He said. He pushed a strand of his dark brown hair from his face. "And I saw you sitting out here, thought I'd come and talk to you."

"Oh." I felt my face heat up slightly. "Okay."

"Um, well really, I wanted to ask you something." He said, and his face turned slightly pink too.

"What?" I asked, digging my fingernail into the dirt.

"Well, you know that the Spring Fling is coming up in May and I was wondering if you were going with anyone?"

I shook my head. The Spring Fling was a special dance for all the eighth graders, kind of like our own little prom. "No…I'm not."

"Well, do you wanna maybe go with me?" He asked. Neither of us was looking at one another.

"Yeah." I said, and my voice came out in a huff. "That sounds like fun."

"Cool." He said and I finally looked up at him. He was smiling and I realized I was too.

We sat there for a little longer, talking, until I heard the rumble of Uncle Daryl's truck. I stood up and brushed the dirt from my jeans as he pulled up to the curb in front of us.

"I guess I'll see you tomorrow, huh, Libby?" Josh asked. I smiled and nodded.

"Yeah, see you tomorrow." I climbed in the truck. "Bye."

"Bye." He waved as I shut the door.

We hadn't even driven a block when my uncle turned to look at me.

"Who was that?"

"Who?" I asked, playing dumb.

"That kid who was talkin' to you."

"Oh, him?" I shrugged. "That's Josh. He's just a friend."

"Just a friend." Uncle Daryl repeated and I nodded. "You're too young to be runnin' around with boys yet."

"Well, we weren't running." I said. "We were sitting. And besides, I'm almost fourteen."

"I know how old you are." He said. "And don't be a smart ass. I'm serious."

"He…he asked me to go to the Spring Fling with him." I said.

"No." My uncle didn't even look from the road. "No way."

"What?" I turned to look at him. "Why not?"

"I said, you're too damn young to be runnin' around with boys. You could get in trouble."

I sat upright. "What do you mean, I could get in trouble? What exactly do you think I'm going to do?"

He spat out the window, but didn't answer. I sat back, hard, in my seat. "This is totally unfair!" I said. "All the other girls are going!"

"Well, you're not all the other girls." Uncle Daryl told me. "And I said no."

"Why don't you trust me?" I asked. "I've never done anything!"

"Its not you I don't trust." He answered.

"Is this about Josh?" I asked. "You don't even know him! He's a nice guy."

"I was fourteen once." He told me.

"Yeah, like fifty years ago." I muttered. He narrowed his eyes, probably because he was only thirty-one.

"My point is, I know exactly how nice they are and I don't want you gettin' into trouble." He said.

"What is this trouble you keep referring to?" I asked again, but he didn't answer. I sighed in frustration and glared out the window.

We rode the rest of the way home in silence.