No, please just call me Louis. My parents named each of their children after the cities they were born in. It goes Dallas, Chicago, then me, and finally Colton. You have no idea what it took for the three of the older kids to convince them that they shouldn’t spell it exactly like Coaltown. It’s bad enough my baby sister is walking around with what’s traditionally a boy’s name, but to have it spelled exactly like the name of the town? They would have named her the full Blast City had Dallas not stuffed my mom in the car, and sped down the highway to the nearest place that was at least moderately acceptable. She’s pregnant again, so we’ve already picked out a nice, lovely secret hospital in the great city of Jordan. It’s about two hours away, but we think we can make it, even if we have to get a police escort from Sallie’s brother. That’s what we had to do last time. Or rather, we started a little high speed chase, until Chicago called him up in real time, and explained why we were driving so fast. So yes, technically my name is Saint Louis, but you can imagine how much trouble that can cause me. I’m not eighteen years old yet, but the very day I turn, I’m going to the courthouse and getting this changed. Those two insisted on using my full name on all of my official documents, so it’s kind of this huge joke all around the school. Every time a new teacher comes on board, I have to explain myself. Most of them are pretty good at accommodating me, but there was one substitute who absolutely refused to call me by what I wanted. What was on the list, was on the list, and it could not be altered. That was a tangent, I know. Though, can it be a tangent if that’s the first thing I started talking about? Yeah, probably still. You’re here for Viola, who had a lovely name, by the way. It just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it? Viola Woods. Viola Woods. If I thought I could get away with it, I might have considered changing mine to that. There I go again getting off topic, so let’s just jump right into it. Viola, she taught me how to swim, which is kind of ironic, given how she died, but not really. Like I said, my parents are crazy. They think they’re the best caretakers in the world, but I would probably be dead ten times over by now, if not for Dallas and Chicago. Oh, that’s a really insensitive thing to say in this situation, I’m sorry. But still, because I was raised by my brothers, there was no way for me to legitimately learn how to swim. They didn’t have time to do it, and my parents don’t actually know themselves, because they don’t think it’s natural. I don’t know what kind of school they attended that taught them how to be hippies, but humans have had an extremely long relationship with water. Anyway, even though we were the same age, Viola took me out to Masters Lake when we were in elementary school, and gave me lessons every day for two weeks, until I was comfortable enough to go off on my own. And that was pretty much all the time we spent together. They should make a TV show about us; call it
The Adventures of Saint Louis and Angel Viola.
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