Page 9 of Most Eligible Billionaire

A young woman with wild magenta hair that has a streak of yellow down one side comes by, and Smuckers forgets about his quest for food in favor of stranger petting, which he gets.

Carly arrives and smiles at the woman. “I love your hair! I want your hair.” The woman smiles and walks off, and Carly discreetly snaps a photo. “Did you see that?” Carly says. “That’s the exact hair I want.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I say.

“There’s this cute place on Eighty-fourth that does it. Bess is doing purple there this weekend, and I’m thinking about maybe a change.” She twirls a red curl. “Of the purple and yellow kind…”

“You know the rule,” I say.

“But I want to go with Bess. She’s not going to want to delay.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Twenty-one-day cooling-off period. All major financial and appearance decisions.”

“Colorful hair is not really major.”

“That’s what you’re going with? Hair in two different Skittles colors is not major?”

She pouts.

I grab her backpack. “Come on. That’s our pact.”

“It’s not fair. You never make money or appearance decisions. You have everything the same all the time.”

“It’s our pact. End of story.”

We head down the crowded sidewalk, expertly sidestepping people on their phones and navigating around wandering tourists with the precision of fighter jets in formation.

“I’m going to tell Bess to delay twenty-one days and then I’ll do it with her,” she says when we come back together.

I give her a look.

“What?”

“That’s a commitment. When you’re good for your word, like we are, committing is the same as doing. Telling Bess to delay because you’ll do it with her?” We’ve been over this before. “We keep our word, us two.”

She snorts and huffs. But it’s our thing, and she knows it.

We two sisters keep our word. It’s a thing.

Also, our pact has kept her from quite a few misguided tattoos.

“What was the courier? Was it the Smuckers allowance?”

“Who knows?” I say. “Maybe she put the dog food allowance in her will. I have to take an afternoon off work and trek halfway across town to find out. Rich people have no concept of life.”

Carly zeroes in on another fashionable woman with wild-colored hair and then gives me the side-eye.

“Bird,” I say, which is our sisters version offuck you, from flipping the finger, the bird.

But really, that’s what I want for her—to only have to worry about things like hair and pop music and selfie lighting techniques. I’ll fight to see she gets that. She’s decided to be an actress but she has to wait until she’s a senior in high school before she can be in nonschool productions.

I know I keep her too close. She doesn’t get to kick around town at night like other girls her age. The helicopter sister. But better that than our shipwrecked mom back home in Deerville.

“Tell you what,” I say. “If I get Saks, we’ll go get ourselves two-hundred-dollar blowouts.”

“Hold you to it.”

The preliminary buyers liked my collection of jewelry for humans. Sedate elegance, they called it, which is about right. It’s not the big, wild, exuberantly colorful stuff that I used to be attracted to, but I’m good with that. My life these days is geared for staying under the radar. Coloring inside the lines.

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