The first of September marked the first day of school all over the world. Beth, Bri, and Fia were attending school for the first time. Indy on the other hand was already familiar with the concept of school thanks to the two years she'd been attending a daycare.

   Indy led the girls through the long hallway while their mothers left instructions to the caretakers and teachers.

   "This is your class, Beth and Bri- the Red Fox classroom. Fia and I are over there, the Blue Whale classroom."

   "Indigo?" A boy came up to the girls. "It's nice to see someone familiar."

   The kid wore a button-up short-sleeved shirt tucked neatly in his pants held up by a belt. The bow around his neck made Beth smile.

   "Patrick," Indy said in shock. "I thought you weren't coming to this school."

   "Mom kept telling me to go here since my brother went here too. As you know, I was hoping to attend the Sunny Coast Kindergarten."

   "He speaks funny," Bri whispered to Fia.

   "I like it," Beth grinned again.

   "Silverleaf can be a good school for you too, Mr. Patrick Boyle like it was for your brother." A teacher walked by, greeting the kids as he passed by.

   "Oh my Eros!" Beth gawked at the teacher.

   Beth was attracted to most pretty things not only her clothes or the decorations in her room, but people too. Her mother attributed it to her having great taste.

   "I have to go to work, Fia. Be sure to behave!" Greta called out before leaving.

   "I guess, we'll see you two after school."

   Indy didn't make a big deal about being in separate classes, so neither did Beth and Bri. However, after an hour in, Beth realized, she wouldn't be seeing Indy and Fia for a while. She was also unlucky to not be in the same classroom as the cute Patrick she recently met or the handsome teacher.

   Patrick ended up in the third classroom, the Brown Bear class. It was closer to the Red Fox classroom, but not close enough. There were two other classrooms, the Yellow Ducks and the Green Turtle where the handsome teacher taught.

   "Now that we've introduced ourselves to each other, I want all of you to pair with someone you didn't know before." The teacher especially looked to Beth and Bri who were practically stuck together the entire hour. "And I want you to make a name card for your new friend."

   Beth confidently left Bri to introduce herself to the girl wearing green corduroy overalls while Bri struggled to make a sound.

   Meanwhile, Indy and Fia were busy making paper mache bowls as their icebreaker.

   They were split into four groups and in charge of making a bowl about whoever they wanted, leaning towards Eros, whom the teacher was personally interested in.

   "I like the god of war," one boy started to paint his bowl that hadn't yet dried, "he's also red like Eros."

   "Oranges and yellows are a good choice too, Steven," their teacher commented. "I like the shape of your bowl, Indigo."

   "Eros is my favorite," Beth told her new friend Joanna.

   "Mine is God Minos because of his pretty hair."

   Beth looked at the booklet all about the god Cupid that their teacher Mrs. Windmiller passed around.

   God Eros had short white hair, gold jewelry, and red flowy fabrics in every one of his pictures. He was the epitome of everything pretty to Beth and set the expectations she had for her fated one.

   "What should I draw on your name tag?"

   "Name card, Beth. Card."

   "Right, card. You're so good at remembering this stuff, Joanna."

   "Thanks!" Joanna relaxed a little after hearing the compliment.

   "So, where do you live, Joanna?"

   Beth was eager to get to know her new friend. She briefly glanced at Bri to check on her best friend's progress.

   Bri was close to silent next to the boy she'd been paired up with as a default.

   "So, your name's Brianne," he wrote the name down haphazardly on a piece of paper, "mine is Louis, the es is silent."

   Bri wrote his name down as prettily as she could right on the tag but wrote "Loe" instead.

   Louis looked over, "Uh..." he said.

   He gulped before scratching his head, wondering how to correct her.

   "Oh no," Mrs. Windmiller said when she passed by. "You'll need a new tag, won't you, Louis."

   "Uh, yes Ma'am."

   Bri looked up, only shortly confused as Louis helped her to spell his name a second time. Her face was flushed the entire time, her eyes cast down, unable to ascertain whether anyone else had seen her blunder. No one else in the class had needed a second name tag.

   "You like Eros too?" Louis had returned to decorating her name tag, forgetting about the incident entirely.

   She hesitated to answer.

   "Um, yes. Beth likes to talk about him."

   Truth be told, she didn't know much about God Eros to the same extent that Beth knew him. She'd only listened to little bits from her parents and Beth because, like Fia, she wasn't as interested in the red string on the days that weren't about birthdays. She was only five after all.

   "I'm not into him either," Louis told her. "I hear about him all the time. It's boring."

   Quickly after, they were silent. Bri and the new boy she was getting to know continued to focus on their name tags. Once in a while, they would look at each other's work, make a few corrections, and return to their own work.

   "Brianna, Louis, you're almost finished," Mrs. Windmiller was glad to see them working, "but why don't the two of you get to know each other more? Did you talk about what you did over the summer?"

   Louis glanced at Bri.

   "I visited my mom and my brother."

   She nodded then said, "I have a brother too. He's still a baby."

   He laughed before adding, "My brother looks like me."

   She didn't know what that meant but didn't ask.

   "I went to birthday parties," he said when she didn't continue.

   "So did I!" She gasped, her eyes shining. "I went to more parties because of Indy."

   "Who's that?"

   "A friend," she answered.

   He found her answers to be too short like she was avoiding talking with him, which she wasn't.

   "Not that one though," he pointed to Beth, who smiled at him.

   "No, that's Beth. She's my best friend."

   "My best friend's in a different class."

   "Do you also sleep over at his home?"

   "We do. Do you guess play cops and pirates?"

   Bri had never heard of the game before. She turned her body to give her full attention.

   "We play princess and castles."

   Louis grimaced and said, "I can't play that with Arian."

   He shrugged and returned to making the name tag, losing interest in the direction of the conversation. Bri wasn't all that eager to continue it either after his show of disinterest.

   The rest of the morning was spent in silence, which wasn't any better than Fia getting into a fistfight with the boy from her group two classrooms across.

   "Sofia Östberg, you'll spend the rest of the day in this corner. I want you to think about why it's not okay to punch your friend-"

   "He's not my friend."

   The teacher frowned. "Even if they aren't your friend, it is still not okay."

   "He started it, Mr. Yuto," she told him.

   Mr. Yuto turned from the boy to Fia to the boy again, awed by Fia's audacity to lie.

   "I can't imagine," he muttered under his breath then in a louder, more assured voice said, "Tell me how it happened then. How did it start, Sofia?"

   "Well, Mr. Yuto, Alfonso pulled Indy's hair, so I pulled his hair too. Then he pulled my hair, but I wasn't going just to pull his hair again. So, I pushed him. He punched me. And I punched. Then he punched-"

   Mr. Yuto brushed his thumb over the growing creases between his eyes. He didn't know who to punish just yet, so he turned to Indy for corroboration, but the one who answered was a different boy, Steven.

   "She's telling the truth, Mr. Yuto. Alfonso pulled Indigo's hair."

   Alfonso glared at him through his puffed face.

   While Mr. Yuto wrote his first letters to his student's parents, in another class, more troubles were brewing.

   Patrick didn't get along with his classmates. He had a sense of superiority that separated him from the rest of the class, especially from a boy who was just as smart.

   "Patrick and Arian, you'll stay in your respective corners until I say it's okay to join us again."

   Meanwhile, the handsome teacher, Mr. Eamon Coutts struggled to retain his class' attention as his God Eros lecture was less than interesting. Thankfully, he didn't struggle long enough when he caught a break thanks to a girl named Amber, who was more than intrigued by the stories.

   "Mr. Coutts, can you tell us more about the red strings?"

   The question caught everyone's attention as like all the other kids, the stories of the red string were numerous, but never had they heard it from someone, not their parent.

   "Well, I can certainly tell you about the red string."

   Like all the stories of the red string, much of Mr. Coutts's information came from the anecdotes of historians and official research that were only recently found. No matter how long ago the red string was discovered, very little factual information was given to the common people.

   "You may have heard of this from your parents. It's something of a tradition to share stories about the red string as the child turns five, like all of you now. The red string comes from the God Eros, also known as Cupid, the god of love. Cupid sent down a group of angels to tie together the souls- it's a part of you that you can't see or touch, but the angels could. And they tied the red strings to our souls. Every one of us has a red string that gets tied up between the ages of five and sixteen."

   A hand shot up.

   "Why sixteen?" Amber tried to count up but only managed to count the fingers on her hand.

   "We're not sure, Amber," Mr. Coutts honestly answered. "We don't know more about why because the red string can only be seen by the person wearing it. For example, you can't see mine, and I can't tell which of you have gotten yours."

   Fia listened to Mr. Yuto talking about the same topic. She raised her hand, waving it though it went unnoticed by Mr. Yuto who wasn't facing her.

   "Mr. Yuto, Sofia's got a question."

   "Yes, Sofia?"

   "What if not everyone gets one?"