Sweet Romance12 min read
He Calls Me "Sister" — So I Called Him "Brother" Back
ButterPicks14 views
"Move a little, please. I can't get in."
I pushed his shoulder and he did not move. He was asleep, head on his arm, hair cropped short like someone who hates fuss. The whole class watched me like it was a show.
A rough laugh from the back. "That's Griffin Reyes. Wake him and he bites."
I jabbed his shoulder again. This time he blinked, slow like a cat that doesn't like being nudged.
"You're in my spot," I said.
He looked all sharp angles—dark brows, a straight nose, tired eyes. For a beat he just stared at me and then said, flat, "Then sit."
I slid into the seat by the window. The sunlight hit my face and, for a second, his look softened. "You okay?" he asked when I wiped the desk with a wet wipe. My fingers left gray smudges on white wood.
"Yes," I lied with a small smile. "Thanks."
"Don't thank me. Just don't be loud," he muttered, then dropped his head and played with his phone.
They called him a handful of things—schoolhead, tyrant, trouble. I didn't know yet which label fit. I only knew one thing for sure: I had come back to this year for a reason. I had one chance to not repeat my last life.
My mother, Lenora Luna, had made me switch schools quietly. She hugged me at the school gate and whispered, "Be careful, Ellie." Her hands smelled faintly of jasmine and engine oil; she drove a black car that always seemed too big for her.
I sat at the back row, ate my breakfast quietly, and watched the boy across the aisle. He blinked at the board now and then but was mostly hands-off. He looked like he had drifted through life and landed in chaos, and I wanted nothing to do with both.
But life had other plans.
A week after I transferred, I found a small orange kitten under a bush. It was scrawny and too quiet. I gave it the sausage from my lunchbox. It purred and curled into my lap like it had been waiting for me. When I flipped it over, its belly had marks—thin, dark scratches—and dried ink from a pen.
"Poor thing," I whispered.
Then I heard the noise from the alley: boys laughing, the clank of trash, and a sharp animal cry. I peeked around a corner and saw a thin kid, hair covering his eyes, on the ground. A blond boy was shoving the kid, then shoved him into a green dumpster. Someone else stood back, smirking.
I started to film with my phone. The kid on the ground was terrified. The boy hitting him had a small blade. My breath stuck in my throat.
"Stop!" I cried before I could think. The three boys froze. One of them looked up and I saw him. Griffin Reyes, leaning against the wall with a lollipop in his mouth. He watched them, bored. When the blond pulled the knife, his face changed. He didn't move fast at first. He took his lollipop out, cracked it with his teeth, and then—he stepped forward.
He didn't shout. He didn't run. He stepped, grabbed the blond's wrist and knocked the knife away. It clanged into the trash. Without huffing drama, he shoved the blond's shoulder and he fell. Griffin flicked his chin like it was nothing, then crouched by the trembling kid and patted his head.
I backed away so fast my hands were shaking. The orange kitten leapt from my shoulder and darted into the light. I ran. I couldn't stop recording.
My phone lit up in the taxi on the way home. Griffin's name flashed in my chat app.
"Where are you? Are you okay?" he typed.
"I filmed it," I typed back. "He had a knife. The kid—"
"Don't post it," he wrote.
"Why?"
He sent one simple line: "Because if you do, things get worse here."
He did not explain. He had the kind of look that meant 'I will handle it' and that terrified me more than the boys in the alley did.
The next morning, at assembly, the PA system cracked: someone had reported animal abuse. Everyone looked around; the rumor machine started chewing. "Who did it? Who reported?" someone whispered. I kept my head down.
They named names. They called out Griffin. Someone shouted "He's a monster!" Later, we packed into the auditorium. A school speaker made broad, loud statements about values and consequences. The principal—Freeman Edwards—said things meant to terrify.
"I won't have such behavior in my school!" he thundered. "The student involved will be disciplined!"
Griffin did not shout back. He sat as if he had nowhere to go. I sat too, and when the hall cleared, I felt something cold and unfair in my chest. I had the video in my phone and my finger hovered over upload. I thought: one push and the world would slice him or free him.
I walked into the principal's office while my legs moved on their own.
"You—what are you doing here?" Freeman barked. He was a man who thought his office came with armor.
"I have proof," I said. My voice was steady. I played the clip on full volume.
The man with the knife screamed in the video. The blond boy was not Griffin. The whole office looked at the screen, then at each other, then at me.
"You want me to publicly clear him," I said. "If not, what you say is slander."
He puffed and sputtered, red in the face. "We must investigate!"
I had my backup. I knew school power and how it bent. I had recorded every word. I knew how to make noise. Ten minutes later, Freeman, faced with the possibility of a complaint getting to the district office, announced the one thing I had asked for: "We withdraw the charge."
"Publicly?" Griffin asked later, surprised. He had been watching from the window. His eyes had a fight in them I hadn't seen before.
"Public," I said.
He smiled at me, quiet. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know," I said. "But you didn't have to push that kid into the dumpster either."
He blinked. "He did it first."
"And you," I said, "didn't have to be alone."
I offered to tutor him. I had the kind of memory that stays after another life, and math and English came back faster than fear. He gave me a look like I had told a joke.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because," I said, "if I can help you pass, you never have to be 'the one they blame.'"
He scoffed but let me help him. That night he sat with his head bent over flashcards I made. He grumbled at physics but memorized the basic formulas because I had found a way to make them simple. Sometimes while we studied, he'd disappear to the balcony to smoke a cigarette and come back calmer.
"Why do you even care?" he asked late one night, when the moon was just a sliver.
"Because someone once saved me," I said. It was the truth in both lives. "Because I can't stand injustice. Because you're not a monster."
He reached out and, without thinking, carded my hair away from my ear. It was a small thing. His fingers were rough and warm.
After that, he would bring little things—if I forgot my umbrella, he'd appear with one leaning against my desk. If I stayed late, he'd show up with two boxed lunches. He never said much, but his actions were loud.
We started playing a MOBA in the evenings. I had never played before, but he added me and guided my clumsy fingers. He used a hero called "Guardian Hook" and I picked a sniper named "Hush." He teased me over chat.
"Call me brother if I save you," he said one game. "It'll be funny."
So I did. "Okay, brother," I typed back. My fingers hovered over the keys. He laughed.
"Now call me sister back, we make a weird duo."
"Fine, sister," he answered.
The team we were with cheered when he carried us, when his hooks landed, when our coordinated plays took the enemy down. After a few wins, people in voice chat started to tease about our relationship. He answered for me once, with an effortless "She's my partner. Deal with it."
Sometimes he was childish. Once at a pool hall, he taught me how to hold the cue. The crowd teased "Let Griffin teach her," and I, flustered, poked at the ball and accidentally sank the white. Everyone fell quiet. Then they applauded and called me a prodigy. Griffin shrugged like it was nothing and draped his jacket over my shoulders when the room got cold.
But then there were other days. The shadow in him was real. He flinched at loud noises. He had scars that would not be seen easily: a story he told by accident that shook me.
"My mom—she was not kind to animals," he said once as we walked the long path to the veterinary clinic. "A hamster, once. They—" He stopped, looked at his hands, and breathed out. "When I found out, no one cared. When I told, they said it's normal. I couldn't sleep. I promised the little ones I would keep them safe."
He carried that while I tucked two injured kittens into a box and rode to the clinic. He knew the nurses. He knew which drugs worked. He had a steady, tender side that showed for the animals and, sometimes, for me.
One day, the rumor machine blew up again. Someone had turned in a complaint: Griffin beat a student. The school board called for disciplinary action. News spread faster than the truth.
I confronted the student who had pushed the kid into the trash. He stuttered, then tried to rewrite the story. I recorded his confession. I handed it to the vice principal with cold calm. This time the school had to act, and they did—publicly. "We apologize," the principal said. "We were wrong."
He came to class the next day with a face that tried to be indifferent and failed. He scavenged in the library for old vocabulary lists like a man making up for lost days.
"Ellie," he said that afternoon, with a small smile. "You really do keep your promises."
"You promised to stop breaking every rule too," I said. "You must try."
He shrugged. "I'll try, for you. But only if you stop being so...heroic."
I met a new boy in class—Eugene Hofmann, from the top schools. He sat in front of me and smiled like someone who had a plan. He was charming and polished. "So you're the one who got Griffin out of trouble?" he asked, ever so polite.
"Yes," I said. "I did what was right."
He said something about fate with a soft, knowing grin. I frowned. He moved into my peripheral vision too easily. I learned quickly what to keep close: the notebooks, the passwords, my guard. Eugene nodded like the kind of person who kept score.
Sometimes girls at school tried to climb on any ladder. A girl who had liked Griffin and used him as status, Arabella Cline, pushed and lingered too long in my space. She mimed kisses with a full drama and whispered loud enough for me to hear: "He teaches her tricks and she gets top marks."
I slapped her hand once when she pushed past me and the cafeteria spilled soup over Griffin's phone. The class watched. Arabella dropped her eyes. "My hands were dirty," she said, tearful and dramatic. "Someone should teach me manners." The crowd snickered. Griffin smiled like he had been watching a private comedy. I had to bite my tongue from explaining everything: what's right, what's wrong, and what people choose to be.
We trained like a pair—me teaching him equations and syntax, him teaching me how to keep my balance when the world tilted. He taught me how to throw a fist (only for defense), how to run without panting, how to stand when men say you don't belong.
"You're not the kind of girl who shrinks," he said once, half proud and half surprised. "You're loud sometimes."
"I'm loud to survive," I replied.
"Then be loud when it counts," he said. "Be loud when someone needs a hand."
Winter came and we shared a jacket on bad days. He would light a cigarette behind the gym and hand me a wrapped dried strawberry—a silly token he said had become his good luck since childhood. It tasted of sugar and something that belonged to a simpler time. He used that strawberry like an apology and a promise.
One afternoon, a group of older boys cornered me by the bathrooms—the ones who had held the knife. They pushed me, trying to make me give up a recorded file. I felt panic creep in, the one that had visited me in the old life when I couldn't stop people from taking things from me.
Then Griffin appeared, like a shadow that swallowed light. He stood between me and them and said, "Back up. Now."
He didn't yell. He simply stepped forward. They moved, because he was not the kind of boy they wanted a fight with. He had a voice that cut a clear line. They scattered.
"Thank you," I said, breathless.
"Don't do this alone again," he said. "If they hurt you, they go home bleeding."
We were quiet for a long time. He reached out and smoothed my hair. "You remind me of someone I once knew," he said, almost to himself. "She always brought me things. She called me strawberry."
"Strawberry?" I echoed.
He smiled. "Yeah." He looked down at his hands. "She disappeared. I never got to say goodbye."
I thought of the thin child in his memory and the bad things he had seen. I thought of my own last life where a betrayal broke me into pieces—volunteer to poison me, someone who changed my university choices like a cruel joke—and I had felt the same cold emptiness.
That night I met him at the clinic. The gray kitten was bandaged, but the orange one followed me like a shadow. He sat on the curb and said, "You did the right thing. I owe you more than you know."
"I owe you now. You saved those kids. You saved the kitten. You helped me when I needed you."
He tossed me a dried strawberry, the last in the small bag. "Keep this," he said. "As proof you're stubborn."
When the school announced my grades, everyone crowded the board. I had done well—better than I dared hope. My total was high; the teachers buzzed with surprise. Griffin's score was low, but I had a plan. We arranged study sessions and he started to show up more, not because he had to but because he wanted to learn—quietly, with his chin bent over a book.
Still, fear walked with him. After a disciplinary meeting where admin had scolded and then retracted, I saw the way he carried himself: half-defensive, half-guarded. His father and stepmother lived in a far world where money bought silence and complicity; he had once been abandoned by the ones who should have protected him.
"Promise me something," he said one day in the empty library as snow pressed against the windows. He had a softer tone—a small boy asking for permission to be brave.
"What?"
"If anyone uses you to get to me—" He stopped, not wanting to say it.
"I'll tell," I said.
He exhaled and laughed, a small sound. "Loud always helps."
We were learning the lines between friend and something else. He would clasp my hand in front of the crowd and no one noticed. He would steal looks at my essays and then mark them with a heavy hand.
"You should be proud of your work," he said one evening, after I finished a long practice test. "You make things clean and right."
"You show me how to survive," I answered, and meant it.
The turning point came not from a school board but from a small, silly thing. On our way back from the clinic, a taxi driver asked if we were a couple. Griffin shrugged, put on a face I had come to know—mischief with a guard—and said, "Kind of."
The driver yelled, "Then you better take good care!" as if he were issuing a prophecy.
Griffin laughed and squeezed my hand. "See? You get praised when you ride with me."
"Stop flattering me," I said, but my cheeks warmed.
One weak spring morning, a fight broke out in the pool hall between Griffin and some boys who had been talking about me like I was gossip. He fought like a man who had kept anger as a tool. He won, but when he came to my locker, blood on his knuckles, his eyes asked the question I had been avoiding.
"Why did you stand up for me?" he asked softly. "You're not from here."
"Because when I wanted someone to speak for me, no one did," I said. "I learned the hard way."
He bent down and kissed my forehead like it was a secret. "Then let's make things different."
That afternoon, I wrote a note and tucked it into his bag: "If someone hurts you, I will get louder." He left a dried strawberry and a lollipop in my desk.
By the end of the year, everyone knew us a little better. My grades kept climbing. Griffin's marks climbed too—not by much, but he tried. He stopped skipping classes as often. He started showing up on time sometimes and didn't fall asleep as much. Friends noticed, family noticed, and the rumor mill quieted down.
Eugene Hofmann, the boy who once nodded too kindly, left for a private intern program. Arabella started seeing someone else. Some people let go; others clung. But our small steady life continued—study sessions, shared lunches, stolen game time.
The last test in June was a quiet ceremony. I sat with the orange kitten on my lap—he'd recovered completely—and watched Griffin from across the courtyard. He had combed his hair, maybe just to look good for the small crowd. He had that old lollipop in his mouth still, like it was a prop.
"Ellie," he said later that day, when the courtyard emptied and the sun fell in long strips, "come here."
I went. He was leaning on our old bench, the one by the tree where we had once watched the sky fall.
He pulled something small from his pocket: a dried strawberry wrapped in clear tape, faded but still red.
"Keep it," he said, voice quiet. "When things go bad, chew it. It will remind you of the stupid little things that made you laugh."
I laughed, stupid and real. "You sound like my grandmother."
"Then keep it. And if speeches are needed, say the loudest ones. If fights need fighting, try not to bleed."
I took the strawberry. "Promise?"
He crossed his heart like a kid. "Promise."
I slid my hand into his and squeezed.
"Ellie," he said, because he had picked a name, chosen a promise. "You saved me."
"You saved me too," I said. "Keep your side of it."
He leaned closer and kissed me—gentle, not like an ending but like a beginning. Students walked by and a few smirked. He smiled into the kiss like it was his first real victory. When we pulled apart, he whispered, "I'm still a mess."
"Me too," I said.
"Then let's be a mess together."
He put his jacket around my shoulders and, for the first time since I came back, I let myself rest. The sun set and painted the courtyard orange, an echo of the small kitten that had brought us to this.
"One more thing," he said, voice low and careful. "Don't teach me to be perfect. Teach me to be better."
"I will," I said, and meant it with everything I had.
That night I inscribed the little red sticky-note I always kept on my desk. On it I wrote one single sentence and stuck it inside his locker. When he found it the next morning he came to class like a boy who had been told a secret.
"You left me a note," he said.
"I left you a roadmap," I answered. "Learn the directions."
He kissed my cheek then, quick and messy, and sat down.
We didn't have a fairy-tale ending with grand gestures and a perfect future. We had something more dangerous and truer: a small, stubborn love that grew from taking each other's bruises and turning them into proof that we were alive.
On graduation night, he pulled me into an empty practice field and handed me a single dried strawberry in a little box.
"Keep this," he said. "Because every time you want to remind me you did right, you can bite it and remember the first time you stood up."
I kept it, and I still do. When the world tries to get loud and unfair, I chew the candy and the little red taste is a reminder.
"You're my sister," he whispered, smiling like an actual confession.
"I guess," I said, leaning my head on his shoulder, "and you're my brother."
We laughed, and the sound filled the field like a promise.
The End
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