Love, a simple four letter word that strikes fear or admiration into the heart whenever it's spoken. Love defies every form of life for the species we classify as humans. The Ancient Greeks even invented eight words just to convey the specific meaning of the kind of love one would invoke on someone else. Eros, named after the God of Fertility, is classified as the love that produces romance, and most notably associated with lust. Philia, taken from the word platonic, this love's meaning translates to "love without a physical reaction," a friendship type of love. Agape, love that is bigger than oneself, it is the love we feel set on our hearts when we meet strangers. Storge, love that flows through blood, a specific type of loyalty and faith to one's family. Mania, obsessive, pure jealousy depicted as what the venom of the tongue describes as love. Ludus, playful, this is the type of love we all know as our first crush, silly and nowhere near a full commitment. Pragma, endurance, this love is never ending, it has been formed through hard work and even longer amounts of time. The last kind of love is Philautia, perhaps the most looked over, it is the love of oneself.

There is not a single person involved in a person's life that does not invoke an inkling of any type of love from one person. Peter Pan can often be classified as a form of childrens' entertainment, but it is so much more than that. Peter Pan is a story of love, the type of love that transcends from just the romantical kind. Peter Pan loved Wendy, Tiger-Lilly, and TinkerBell. There is no evidence that says he loved one more than the others, in fact all the evidence just points to different instances where Peter Pan loved all three of them. Peter loved Wendy with Philia, Tiger-Lilly with Eros, and TinkerBell with Storge. You can never love someone the exact same way you love another person but you can love them in an equal amount.

I could literally read the entire paper to my Mom without even having to glance at it once, but watching her face as she reads is priceless. Nia Krovopuskov can not for the life of everyone who is dear to her, which includes her kids, can not control her facial expressions. Whatever the first thought that resonates in her brain is the exact expression that chooses to materialize on her ebony face. I'm not entirely sure which expression I find funnier, the way her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline, how her mouth pushes up to curl beneath her nose, or the way she purses her lips together to roll her eyes.

I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for her judgment, well technically my knees. She's got my paper in one hand and is steaming her shirt with the other, completely devoted to both tasks. Her eyes drift from the paper to me, with her face expressionless as she waves the paper in the air. I can feel my heart grow cold with disappointment, her approval was one I hellbent on.

"You didn't like it," I frown before pushing myself off her bed.

Mom's whole face erupts in a smile bigger than I've seen in the past few months. She's practically beaming as she returns the steamer to it's holder and approaches me. "Didn't like it? Nes, this is fantastic!" She envelopes me in a hug that rocks me side to side, as best as she can being five inches shorter than me. "Your writing has completely grown since that clinic you went to this summer. I mean it was good before but this," she lets me go to hand over my paper, cradling it between both our hands. "This is a pure work of brilliance. I hope you have a couple of copies of this. I'm going to put one on the fridge, definitely take one for Jenna to read-. Oh, your grandfather, he needs to be sent a copy!"

She's rambling, and Mom only rambles when she's too excited to comprehend that maybe she won't be understandable. I've only seen her this happy a few times, one being when my brother Dj got offered a full academic and athletic scholarship to FAMU, when my little brother Laki got accepted into the magnet school, and now. I hadn't done anything big like the other two, but you wouldn't know that with how much she's dotting on me. I'd made her proud and there was no other feeling in the world that amounts to the pride of a parent that you received from a job well done.

"You know, this semester was the first time I've ever read Peter Pan." Mom halts her praises to look at me with a perfectly sculpted eyebrow raised. "It's classified as a children's book, but neither of us have even read or seen the numerous adaptations of it."

Mom purses her lips together before glancing down at the paper she still holds in her hands. "Yeah, I wasn't exactly a fan of Peter Pan myself, therefore I didn't expose my children to it." She shrugs playfully before folding the paper and sticking it in her purse. "Enough judgment, go get dressed for school." She gently pushes me out into the hall, plants a kiss on my forehead, and shuts her door after backing into her room.

I quietly laugh to myself before venturing into my own room. I pass my little brother in the process, his door is wide open revealing a messy room complete with him lying on his barely distinguishable carpet playing the switch. He's laying on his stomach, with the switch propped up on the floor and his legs kicked up in the air. The sound of Bowser announcing his plans to keep Peach makes him groan before pressing harshly on the buttons to skip the scene.

"A little early to be so impatient in the morning, little brother."

Laki barely spares me a glance before his game picks back up. "A little early to be frightening the neighbors with that mask of yours."

I don't even glorify his statement with a response, instead I cross the threshold, made mostly of lines of abandoned lego creations, and head to the little desk in the corner. Laki's room is always messy but this little space is as neat as a button. There is nothing out of place, every color pencil, marker, eraser, pen, paper and even his books have a designated space. The object of my pursuit is staring up at me from its place in one of the numerous caddy holders that are mounted on the desk.

"I need a pen," I announce with my hand hovering over the one that appeases me.

"What kind and which one?"

Picking up the pen I turn it over in my hand to answer his question. "Gel, Zebra, blue." I click the pen repeatedly, only stopping with a call of my name.

"Nesyyyy, stop it," he grits out while putting his game on pause. "I have no pens in Zebra shape and blue is an extremely vast category, you need to be more specific."

It's the same thing every time I come in here to borrow something. The description is too vague, or not exactly accurate, but so what? Then my annoyance turns into Laki's temper tantrum, which brings Mom into it to play referee, that usually ends with me apologizing for doing absolutely nothing. I didn't have the patience to go through that process today so I just go ahead and grab the green sticky note and jot down the pen's description. When I finish I pull the sticky note up and tack it to the corkboard hanging above the desk, and below the section labeled 'things borrowed.'

"I left you a sticky note, with all the information." I finish before he can interrupt me. "Thanks."

He mumbles something along the lines of no problem before standing up, Switch in tow and heading downstairs. Seven o'clock, Reading Rainbow reruns are on, something he never misses.

Laki, he's quite something. Being the youngest out of five automatically gives you this pedestal standing, especially if the time between the first kid and the last is seventeen years. That big age gap only provides one thing, a spoiled child. Now, Laki isn't a bad kid, he's just a, he's a sour patch kid. At times Laki is the sweetest kid ever, he'll give you anything that you need and he can provide, but then he has these days where he just wakes up to be a menace to society. It's crazy, he'll come in the kitchen after he wakes up and will just roast you for doing absolutely nothing before retiring back to his room for isolation. I call those days, Laki's Twilight Zone, for two reasons, one he absolutely adores The Twilight Zone and those days happen so quickly and come out of nowhere. But despite his neurotic personality I do honestly love him, maybe because he's the only one of my siblings who at one point did what I asked them.

Dj's the oldest and boy does he act it. If there's a dispute that needs to be solved and Mom is a no way- contestant the problem is immediately brought to him, which he solves with as much wisdom as Mom would have. It's those situations, where he's the mediator between siblings and being just an awesome sounding wall, that I miss about him. Dj's in college now, which means he has a little less time to focus on things concerning the home front because he has to focus on the school front. I wish I could have been selfish and begged Dj to attend a college a little closer to home so he could visit more but after him taking a gap year just because of what was going on at home he deserved it.

Then there's my twin, Adam, he's our family's problem child. You know that book NO David, yeah if David was a rebellious teenager he would be Adam. Adam is hard-headed, self-destructive, and completely independent without actually knowing how to be independent. He and Mom have recently, in the past couple of years, started to butt heads, and not in a good way. It had gotten so bad that she had no other choice but to ship him off to boarding school, which he's been there for the past school year and the current one.

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I'm the only girl, and the second youngest, but most notably the most boring, Arnesia Briella Krovopuskov. There's not much to say to describe an introverted scrawny middle child. I stick to the background and let my brothers take the spotlight, nothing wrong with that when it's been like that forever.

When I'm fully dressed I go ahead and make my way downstairs. Like always Laki is lying right in front of the t.v., his arms folded over his backpack to keep his head propped up so that his attention can focus solely on the current episode displaying across the screen. He's seen that exact episode with Billy Cosby and the Author book at least ten times, yet he still sits through it completely entranced like he hadn't.

Mom is standing in the kitchen, preparing Laki's lunch, her eyes flicking occasionally between the tv and the front door like she's waiting for someone to just waltz right in, which is highly unlikely. Since we've moved to Fort Pierce we'd vastly have neighbors just pop up. Like me my mother tended to keep to herself, which meant that she didn't have a plethora of friends. Sure she had the parents of her kids' friends that she talked to and the occasional co-worker but none so close that she actually invited them over or out. If she hung out with someone at all it was because they'd made the first step, they'd begged repeatedly to meet up. Nia Krovopuskov was not an outgoing person in these recent years, in fact the only two people that she's talked to on a regular basis in the last five years was Aunt Natasha and Pop Pop.

Aunt Natasha was not Mom's sister, in fact she is not at all biologically related to us in any way but she's one hundred percent family. Aunt Natasha and Mom had met a long time ago, when the both of them were just starting primary. Apparently one of their classmates was picking on little Natasha and little Nia was not having it, out of pure adrenaline Nia decided to pure the apple juice the guy had stolen from Natasha and pour it on his head. Did Nia end up having to sit out on two days of recess, yes, but she also ended up with a lifelong best friend who sat beside her each day at recess. Times have definitely changed because now it hardly seems like Aunt Natasha would let someone pick on her, not just because she's a grown adult now, but because she's a total baddie and Mom is a total pacifiest, who backs away from any type of confrontation.

Pop Pop is Pop's father, though the two of them have a less than cordial relationship. Apparently Pop Pop wasn't such a great dad, which is why he's a completely hands on grandfather. I used to find it surprising with how frequently Pop Pop started visiting us when we moved to Florida, always popping up claiming he was just checking in on Mom. I suppose he was just trying to offer a sense of familiarity, like our lives weren't completely uprooted in just a couple of days. Pop Pop was a good person like that, putting his own responsibilities on hold to make sure his family was okay, he knew it was hard for us being without Pops and he tried his best to fill that void as best as he could.

Dallas Krovopuskov is not dead, he's just in a tricky situation as Mom likes to say. The whole reason we moved without him was to keep us safe. Like usual parents don't tell their kids every excruciating detail, just the basics and the basics happened to be that it wasn't safe for us in Montanna any more. The solution that had been agreed upon was that Mom and the kids would move while Pops tried to get a handle on the situation. It's been five years so there's no telling exactly how things are going. All I can say is that things are definitely different in these past couple of years than in the first ten years of my life.

Plopping myself down at the bar I reach my arms over and pluck a strawberry out of the cartoon. "Can I have some money for lunch?"

Laki's lunch box has contained the exact same ingredients since he started pre-k last year, strawberries, pretzels, roast beef and havarti sliders, and a kool-aid jammer. Mom doesn't even need to look at her hands to assemble the lunch and instead chooses to glance at her phone that is buzzing on the counter.

"Yeah, there's some on my dresser."

I nod and kiss her cheek before darting in front of the tv, earning a groan from Laki, and making my way upstairs to her bedroom. I like to think of Mom's bedroom as being the aftermath of some kind of natural disaster. Clothes are strewn out over the floor, shoes concealing every inch of carpet she has, and the covers on her bed tangled until they're threatening to fall off. I didn't understand how she did anything in this mess, yet she always says she can find anything she needs within two minutes. Her dresser though is the only clean surface in the room and the clip of money sitting on top of it is the needle in the haystack.

Before I can grab it my gaze flickers over to an off white folder sticking out of the top drawer. The seal that was tasked with keeping the folder closed is broken, a silver wax stamp with a K insignia made up of an olive branch. The stamp is unmistakably that of Skorpa Kastellanos, Pop Pop. He only uses a seal when whatever it encloses is important, money for Laki's magnet school, booster donation for Adam's boarding school, and Dj's trust fund information when he went off to college.

I know I shouldn't, that it's a complete invasion of privacy but my fingers clasp around the rough material and gently coerce it out of the drawer. It's bigger than a letter envelope but slightly smaller than a pony envelope and it has a bit of weight to it. It's full of papers but one sticks out from the rest due to the yellow sticky note sticking to it with Pop Pop's unmistakable Russian cursive.

The documents have been finalized and stored in the appropriate places with a copy to make sure your wishes are both respected and honored. Though I am unmistakably upset it has come to this, as always it is my utmost duty to respect whatever you may come to terms with, though I wish there were any other way that could benefit us all and not just a select few

-For eternity your Napea, Skorpa.

The document the sticky note is attached to is typed up in a polished beige piece of paper, the characters drawn perfectly as if by a brush. It takes me a moment to recognize it as a copy of Mom's script and even longer to realize what the document actually is.

In the event that I am no longer able to care for my children, Dj, Adam, Arnesia, and Laki should be handed over to Skorpa Kastellanos with full and complete custody. In the event of my death, Liam Mcknight should be informed and given the entirety of my estate to do with it as he sees fit. In the event of my passing, Meraki Academy should be handed over to Natasha Alimes and Leonard Nahum. In the event that I am in a near death situation, when the only reason I am living is due to the support of machines or medical intervention I, Iphigenia Krovopuskov, being of sound body and mind, requests to not be resuscitated and peacefully laid to rest. I wish to be cremated and then and only after may you inform Dallas Krovopuskov of my death and relinquish my ashes to him.

At the bottom is Mom's signature and Dr. Rolloki, the first doctor that treated her. I know I should be overcome with sadness at reading my mother's last will and testimony but for some reason a sense of gratitude fills me. The date listed on the paper is almost two years ago. Two years ago my mother was advised to write down her last wishes because of her diagnosis. My throat clenches tightly before I slip the document back into the folder and put it back where I found it.

"You should not be in someone's room if they are not there to invite you."

Laki's voice makes my heart speed up and I jump to turn around and see him. He's standing at the threshold with a stern look in his eyes as his gaze flickers from the folder and back to me. His throat bobs a little before his eyes narrow on the folder.

"You definitely should not be meddling in personal things." His tone is deathly even, like it was his own personal effects I was going through. "You have no right! None," he's growing more emotional when his voice gets higher and his words turn into rambling.

Not today, please dear god not today. Before he can fully break down I pull him into my arms, ignoring the way he tries to squirm to get away and just hold on tighter. His breathing is heavy as he keeps fighting and I can hear the frustration of his coming out in tears. His tiny fists are beating against my chest, as hard as they can as his neck strains back to get further away from me.

"No, I don't want this!"

I know, I want to say but that would be too much. Talking over him would just make it worse.

"I want out, out, get out!"

All I can do is nod as the pounding of his fist grows less chaotic. His breathing has evened out into small huffs and he even feels cooler to the touch. It doesn't take long until his arms just fall limp at his sides and he begins taking deep breaths on his own.

"Let me go now, please." His voice is much softer now and for reassurance his hands maneuvers to the outside of my body to gently tap my own back, once and then two more times.

It takes more convincing on my own part to accept that he is okay now. If I don't let him go when he's ready then we'll have a bigger meltdown, one that I wasn't actually good at handling. Smaller meltdowns were easier to handle, just a couple of moments of pressure and quietness got him back down to earth, anyone could do it really. But a bigger meltdown required more, a gentle touch that I only saw Mom capable of calming. So I convince myself that he's better and slowly unhook my arms from around him.

His chocolate eyes are rimmed red, still damp cheeks streaked with saline makes them appear even more doey. His braids are falling over his forehead, the ends gently brushing over those long beautiful lashes of his. He's avoiding eye contact, embarrassed for having a moment in front of someone who isn't Mom. He swallows slowly before lifting his eyes up to meet mine.

"Mommy already left," he whispers.

I nod, not trusting my own voice to not throw him back into disarray.

He glances at the clock on the nightstand and his hand reaches up to settle itself in mine. "It's time to go." Is all he says and I let him lead me downstairs to get our stuff before heading out.

A lot of people have triggers that invoke different reactions. Drug addicts can get sweaty when approached by their pharmaceutical of choice. Survivors can go still at the sight of their abusers. Likewise, Laki has meltdowns when he's exposed to one of the worst moments of his life, and it's reasonable for a five year old who witnessed what he did.