“I’m sorry about walking out the other day…” Moet starts. Leighton shrugs and picks a piece of grass from the field they’re sitting on and starts to twist it this way and that. The truth was, Leighton was actually a bit hurt by her actions the other day… which was absoultely ridiculous and he knew it. Moet was obviously upset and had other major things to deal with besides the trivialities of Leighton’s affections towards her. He understood that. It didn’t make it any easier to deal with though. It was probably the first time he ever actually willingly displayed a sign of affection for another. Excluding family, of course. Great, now he sounded like a whiny child. Noticing that Moet’s hands are fiddling with something at her side, he leans in closer and catches a whiff of the naturally warm, sweet scent she carried around wherever she went. It was nice. She was nice.

            “I get a bit peckish in the afternoon,” she makes a nervous giggle as if Leighton would ostracize her just for the idea of her body needing food.

            “May I have one?” From the very moment he could talk, his mother lectured him on the importance of using “may” and not “can” when asking others for favors or for a snack during recess during grade school.

            Nodding her head, Moet reaches into the plastic bag and picks out a ripe, dark red cherry for Leighton. He takes it and smiles his thanks, before popping it into his mouth. A few moments later, he spit out the seed into a tissue he procured from his pocket. Having nothing else to do, the pale-haired girl watched him eat. All of a sudden, Leighton’s face lit up with a smile and he stuck out his tongue with a newly tied cherry stem. Moet’s eyebrows arched a bit and she laughed. Her laugh was very nice; like crystal glasses being played with silver.

            “How do you do that?” Moet asked. The barely-there tension between them was long-gone, replaced by laughter and smiles shared between the two.

            “You sort of have to use your tongue and your teeth to bend the cherry stem and make sure it’s bent at a sort of U-shape…” Leighton takes another cherry from the plastic bag that Moet had moved between them. He picks the stem off and pops it into his mouth. “Then, you cross over one part of the stem over the other and push it through the hole. Just like a regular knot.”

            Moet took a moment to pop a cherry stem in her own mouth and moved it around a bit. Leighton’s eyes kept sliding down towards Moet’s full, pink lips. Shaking himself out of it, he adjusts his glasses with a flick of his finger and watches Moet’s attempt at his party trick. She sticks out her tongue.

            The cherry stem was still intact, barely bent at the middle. “Dih ah do et?” Moet asked, her protruding tongue marring the pronounciation of her words. She looked so damn adorable right then that Leighton couldn’t help but smile. He picked the stem off her tongue and showed it to her. A small frown appeared on her face before it was wiped away with a good-natured smile.

            “Oh well, I tried.” She looked back up a Leighton’s face and stared for a bit.

            “What?” Leighton asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious. Did he have something in his lenses?

            Moet bit her lip for a moment, drawing Leighton’s eyes back to her goddamned lips again, before leaning over and landing a kiss right on his cheek. Of course, he blushed. Serious, stony-faced Leighton Bakker blushed because his crush pecked him on the cheek. Oh, if his classmates were here, he’d never live it down.

            “Ah…” Leighton faltered for a moment. Oh dear God, he didn’t have any words. Thinking up a solution, he leaned right back over and pressed his lips against hers as a means of making up for the conversation. Needless to say, it was quite the intelligent idea. Startled, Moet stiffened at the sudden action at first, but immediately afterwards relaxed into the kiss. Breaking apart, they stayed like that for a while. Forehead to forehead. Breathing heavily. Eyes closed. It was what Leighton’s mother would’ve called a “capital-M Moment.” Touching a hand to her cheek, he slid his thumb over it smoothly while looking over her brown-green eyes, the little mole she had right on her right cheekbone, the adorable smile of satisfaction that stretched across her pink lips. She was so lovely, he couldn’t stand it.

            Suddenly, Leighton’s phone rang.

            Almost muttering a curse, he took his hand away from Moet’s cheek while she laughed quietly and checked the caller ID on his phone. Ella. Oh, crap.

            “Oh God, I forgot to pick up Ella.” Leighton checks his watch. It was 3:34 P.M. They’d been sitting in front of the high school for about half an hour. Without thinking, he takes Moet by the forearm and drags her up with him into an upright position. Then, he takes off in a run to his car, unwittingly dragging Moet along. Luckily, she kept up.

            Once in the car, he buckles his and Moet’s seatbelt subconsciously and peels out of the high school’s parking lot. Little did he know that Moet was secretly laughing at his slightly-comedic panicking in the passenger seat.

            Arriving at the middle school, Moet sees the sullen-looking thirteen year-old girl sitting alone by an oak tree. Looking over to the girl’s brother, she sighs happily at the view of his beautiful gray eyes. A lock of brown hair had managed to escape the messy mass that was his head and dangled in front of his glasses. Annoyed, he kept flicking it out of his face, only for it to swing right back to its original spot. Her fingers itched to comb it back for him. After a bit of internal arguing with her mind, she did just that. Startled at the sudden action, Leighton looks over at her and smiles in return. Moet’s heart skips a beat. His dimples were easily the most attractive feature on him. They were just too dangerous to look at for long periods of time. Averting her eyes to a much safer place, such as the dashboard, she hears the car door open as Ella climbs in.

            “Sorry, Ella. I lost track of time.” Leighton apologizes. Ella just nods in response and eyes the pale-haired girl in the front seat.

            Once the group reached the Bakker home, Moet pulls Leighton aside while Ella clambers up the stairs to lock herself in her room.

            “I need to speak with your sister… about the whole Dakota thing.” Moet notifies him. He nods understandingly, like this doesn’t surprise him at all.

            “Go ahead. Her room’s the second door on the left up the stairs.” Leighton tells her and wanders towards the kitchen for an afterschool snack.

            Walking up the hard-wood stairs, Moet notices the abundance of childhood photos of the two siblings. She also notices how there are almost no pictures of their parents. Reaching Ella’s room, she knocks twice. “Hello? Ella? It’s Moet. I need to talk to you.”

            A few tense moments pass before Ella grumbles a “come in.”

            Moet enters to see a stiff Ella sitting on the edge of her bed. Casually glancing about Ella’s room, she notices a red shirt hanging on the back of a desk chair. She’s seen it before. She swears she has.

            Her shirt is red. Red like blood.

A feeling of dread creeping up on her like a shadow, Moet hurriedly asks Ella, “Did you just say something?”

Ella’s expression doesn’t falter. “No.”

Moet knows she’s telling the truth… but then where did the voice come from? Shaking herself, she tries to forget about it. It’s probably a trick her mind’s playing on her or something.

“I’ve seen that shirt before.” Moet offers as a means of explanation for her strange behavior.

Ella’s face pales a bit. She stomps towards the shirt with big, thundering steps, grabs it, turns around and shoves it in her closet with a big slam of the door.

            Trying to distract herself from Ella’s strange behavior, Moet busies herself by looking around for a spot to sit during their talk.

            “You can sit over there.” Ella points to a chair in the corner of her room, next to her bed.

            “Thank you.” Moet replies and settles herself down. “I want to talk about your problem with Dakota.”

            Ella’s back stiffens immediately and she whips her head around with a near-crazed look in her eyes. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

            Moet’s startled by this question. However, she feels this little place at the back of her mind tugging at her, trying to get her to understand something. What it was, she didn’t know. “Remember what?”

            Ella scoffs. “Nothing.” After a moment of silence, she continues. “What do you want to hear?”

            Fiddling nervously with her thumbs a bit, Moet quietly murmurs, “I just want to know why you… hate her so much.”

            “She bullied me. Your pretty, perfect, older sister bullied me. That’s what she is to you, right? Perfect. God, the way you worship her makes me sick.”

            The last comment makes Moet wince. It stings. A lot. Ella made it sound like she was a follower blindly obeying whatever commands the evil dictator dished out. Moet knew she wasn’t a puppet. She also knew that Dakota wasn’t evil. She was a good person who made a few terrible mistakes. Why couldn’t anyone see that? “What do you mean?” Moet finally asks.

            Ella shifts her eyes towards the other girl with a mean-looking scowl on her face. Facing her bookshelf, she takes a deep breath. “It started out little. She’d jump out at me when I was walking home from school. Tease me a bit. Nothing serious. Just little things about my hair or my clothes. But then, it got worse.” At this point, Ella turns around and grabs a pencil off her desk. She twirls it around as she talks as a nervous gesture of some sort. “She started getting physical. Pushing me around. Calling me meaner things. It doesn’t sound like much, but once somebody calls you and treats you like the ugliest fucking thing they’ve ever seen, you start to feel like it, you know?” Ella slams the pencil back on her desk and bites her lip to keep her unshed tears from flowing down her face. Her voice shook a little. Moet could see the extra shine in her eyes threatening to spill. “It got really bad when she started to bring friends. She dangled her boyfriend in front of me even though she knew I had to biggest crush on him. Don’t act surprised, I know you know about it.”

            Moet wipes off the slightly shocked look that appeared on her face when she realized Ella just admitted something slightly personal to her mortal enemy’s younger sister. Walking a few paces away, Ella continues.

            “She’d make out with him, feel him up and stuff just because she could. And I knew she was his girlfriend and he was her boyfriend and I never tried to break them up or anything, but she just kept shoving it in my face and I got so upset over it because when you’re thirteen, you have little crushes that last for a week, and then you have huge crushes that border on love, you know? And those go away after sometime, but they never really do. It hurt, is what I’m saying.”

            Ella stopped talking for a while. Moet didn’t quite know what to say.

            “I’m sorry,” she finally whispers. Ella nods her acknowledgment to her apology, still not looking directly at her, but out the window. A solitary tear was beginning to trickle down her cheek. “But you have to understand, Dakota would never do that unless she had a good reason. She doesn’t bully twelve year-old girls just for kicks. She’s not like that.”

            Angry, Ella turns towards her and nearly shouts, “I know she’s not like that! You think I don’t know? Of course she doesn’t bully innocent twelve year-old girls just for kicks. However, she does bully twelve year-old girls that know stuff she doesn’t want anyone else to find out.”

            “What do you mean?” Moet felt like a parrot. “What did she not want you to know?”

            Ella runs her hands through her hair in a frustrated gesture, looking much like Leighton at that moment, turned around, stared directly into Moet’s eyes for the first time since their talk began and said, “I saw her do it. Whore herself. I saw it all.”

            Moet’s mouth felt dry. She didn’t know what to say. She was speechless.

            “I went for a walk at about two in the morning.” Glazed over with haunting memories, Ella’s eyes portrayed something Moet could never begin to imagine. “I have insomnia. Don’t tell Leighton; he’d kill me if he knew about these walks I take. They help me… It was terrible, Moet. She was screaming and crying, and the guy was just horrible to her and before I could scream for help or anthing, they were finished and I saw the guy hand her something and leave. She stuffed it into her pocket and before I could take off, she saw me. She limped over and once she got into the streetlamp I could see everything. The bruises all over her barely-covered body, the scars in the crook of her elbow where she jabbed one too many needles, and she came over to me and said, ‘Don’t you ever fucking tell anybody about this.’ And the thing was, her voice wasn’t even scary. It was weak, and she sounded like a lost little girl and I just wanted to cry for the both of us. I really did.” Sobs wracked Ella’s body and across the room, Moet was shock-still, her mind barely registering these horrible words being said.

            “No,” Moet whispered, her voice coming out like a broken minor chord.

            “You don’t understand. I was going to help her, but the very next day the bullying started and I just couldn’t help to hate her. Hate this poor, poor girl who had everything and threw it all away because of something as trivial as drugs.” Anguished turned solemn, Ella’s words rang out across the room and was the only thing that propelled Moet to get up and leave this goddamned horrible place with this girl with the horrible words and never come back again.