✾

"I'm sorry," I say as I walk behind Pierce mindlessly to his car. My hands are tucked into my jacket's pockets and I look at the ground beneath my footsteps.

"Don't be, Princess. I—"

His phone starts to vibrate, so he takes it out of his pocket. "One sec," he tells me, answering the phone and putting it to his ear. "Hello? Who is it? Oh, hi Mom. No, you're a contact on my phone, I just didn't look at it."

I look up for a moment and watch his mood kind of... darken. I stand in front of the passenger's door and wait for him to unlock the door so I can get in. After we both get inside of the vehicle, he sighs.

"I'm with a girl right now, she's — No Mom, god, she's my tutor. What happened?" He sighs again and nods. "We were just heading to the store anyway, it wouldn't be a problem. Where are you at right now?" There's a pause. "How about Tom?" He starts the car, driving for the longest almost-minute of my life while we're both quiet. "Okay, okay, never mind, I'll call you later since I'm driving now. Bye."

He hangs up, putting his phone by his side. "So I have to pick up my sister, but she won't bother us. I figured we could go to the store after I get her."

"Oh, alright. What's her name?"

"Ruby. She got in trouble for something, but I don't know what. Their school day is about to end anyway. She's in second grade."

"Gotcha. I always forget elementary schoolers get out later than everyone else. I didn't know you had a sister."

"Yeah, I know there's a lot of rumors about me and knowing my luck, someone would try to bring her into it. When she goes to her own school she doesn't need every other student telling her about what people said about me from what their older siblings said."

"I've never had any brothers or sisters, but it's good you want to protect her from that. You two are close, I'm guessing?"

"Yeah."

Once we reach the school he pulls up in the parking lot and takes a picture of the school. He sends it to her and tells her where he's at so she can walk over.

"How old is she?"

"Eight in two more weeks."

"And she has a phone?" I raise my eyebrows in disbelief.

He nods. "She needs one. Oh, there she is."

I turn my head to look at her, a beautiful girl with porcelain skin and messy brown bangs spilling over her bright blue eyes. She gets inside of the car with a frown, slamming the door. She buckles her seatbelt, and that's when I notice the pink car seat with flower designs over the handles. She pulls out a cupholder — littered with fairy stickers — and puts a plastic water bottle inside of it. Instead of it being full of water though, it's full of pencil shavings and more cash than I've ever seen all at once.

"Ruby, what happened to your face?" Pierce narrows his eyes. His sister scowls at him, I guess for bringing it up. I notice the different pencil marks on her skin, connecting freckles on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose that say BUZZ OFF.

"The kids said I had a pizza face and I didn't know what they meant. Someone else said I had a lot of freckles, and another person said it would be fun to trace shapes on them. So I said, 'If you connect the dots, it says buzz off. As a way to tell them to go. Then the first person said they actually probably could, so they traced it on my face. Since I like to cut hair, I picked up some scissors from a table and threatened to cut all his hair off. And I said I would cut up his ugly clothes, too."

"That's right, you tell 'im!"

"And then I cut off a couple pieces of his hair to prove a point."

While I started laughing, his brother hit his head on the steering wheel. "Well, no wonder why you were in trouble. Don't do that Ruby, you'll get into lots of trouble later on." He turned to me with a glare. "Stop laughing!"

"Fine, fine, but I would've done the same," I tell him.

"We all know the truth, Princess. You're way too much of a goodie-goodie."

"Pierce, who is that?" Ruby asks. She turned to look at me before something must've clicked. "Oh, is that the girl next door that you were staring—"

He quickly says, "Shut up, Ruby, I was not."

"Don't talk to your sister like that, or interrupt," I scold, before looking at his sister. "What were you going to say? I'd love to hear the rest of that sentence."

"No, it doesn't matter," Pierce dismisses. "Anyway Ruby," he begins, starting the car, and pulling out of the spot he was parked in, "don't do that to people because you'll get into too much trouble. That at least can't be a common occurrence, take it from me. We have to go to the store and she's going to help me out with some school stuff back at home, alright?"

"Okay," she easily agrees, her eyes fixed on the scenery outside of the window.

✾