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—— CHAPTER FOUR ( STAND BY ME. )
A slow drawl resonated from the door in a patterned notion. Annie, hunched over her desk, looked up briefly from the scattered homework distributed before her. Her tired eyes considered for a drawn-out moment before she brought her eyes back to the sheet of math problems before her. "[Come in]," She beckoned with a betrayed yawn.
With a creak of the rusted hinges, her bedroom door cracked open with a turn of the handle. The lanky figure of her eldest brother slipped through slyly, holding the panels of wood in place to muffle the screeching groans. He loosed a sigh of relief as he carefully closed the gap between him with a soft touch.
The girl of seven years boredly rested her against her palm and scratched at the thin paper, etching the answers to the equations with little attention. A challenge, her teacher had claimed when she pulled her aside when the day concluded. Weren't challenges meant to be difficult? Professor Fontes had been set against her the day she entered his classroom last September and clawed onto the crumbs of her errors. Her mother explained to her that to be bested by a seven-year in academics is humiliating as a graduate of a prestigious university and reminded her little daughter, a peculiar ball of intellect, to never give him the satisfaction of her failures.
"[Are you still pouting?]" inquired Sam, boasting a drolling smirk. He sauntered over to her, leveling himself to his knees with folded arms over the painted-pearly pink lumber. His chin prodded his arms as he replicated the miffed expression on her face.
She briefly looked at him. "[No]," She tried to lie.
"[Then I guess you don't need this]," He shrugged after a moment as he brandished to her a perfectly ripe and purple plum–a rare delicacy in their home, her favorite. Satisfaction adorned him with the reaction he sought from his little sister, his plans unraveling in the perfect motion. He lightly chuckled with a retract of his hands as he dodged her futile attempt to snatch it from his hands. "[I got this from Kurt next door to cheer you up, but if you're fine...]"
The fruit vanished in the blink of an eye, or so it seemed to the girl. A well of tears shimmered in Annie's cerulean eyes as she struggled to stifle the tremor in her bottom lip, her chest rising and falling with shallow, uneven breaths. She had been intelligent for her age, but even at seven, she was still too naive, too young, to distinguish between a joke and a lie.
The mistake had been his own for forgetting himself. He knew her to be of a sensitive sport, prone to sorrowful tears and distinguished periods of her medicated silence where she punished herself and her words for failing to defend her. "[Shit]," He murmured under his breath, a hush of a whisper to not meet her keen ears–a continuous, near tradition, of her picking up on words not meant for her had advised him.
Her distress prompted a whistle to pierce the air as he regarded her. He had been unsure of the best way to approach her–one wrong word and he would drown in the pool of her tears or worse. An unwilling shudder racked his body.
