You're too gorgeous to be with them damn Sharks, he thinks. You're guilty by association, apparently, given your only affiliation to the gang is the fact you're Anita's younger sister. Joined at the hip with Maria, who shares your sentiment about how stupid all this is. Territory this, territory that. Who cares? The place is getting knocked down in the next few months, anyways.

Wasting breath on nothin'.

Doesn't stop Riff from ambushing you every chance he gets, though. 'That one spicy PR girly,' he always calls you. Never to your face—apparently he made a comment in passing to Pepe, who passed it down to a very annoyed Bernardo. Dios mío, that lecture lasted for hours.

How is it your fault he keeps talking to you? If anything, your sister is to blame, given she's the one that keeps sending you to Doc's on errands. One of the only places that doesn't charge extra for Puerto Ricans. Valentina is a darling, and Tony isn't half bad when he's ringing up the till.

It's after you've left that the trouble comes.

"Pretty lil' Shark like you shouldn't be 'round this part of town. S'reallll dangerous, y'know," Riff says around the toothpick in his mouth, pushing himself off the shutters of the pharmacy. Hands in his pockets as he approaches you, giving you a not-so-subtle onceover, dimpled smirk on display. "Heard there's a lottt of miscreants 'bout here," he adds.

As if the most dangerous thing around here ain't him and his damn friends, who Bernardo insists are harmless while in the same breath warning you not to go anywhere near this part of the city. But hey, low prices are low prices, and you're not exactly loaded, the four of you cramped into that two bedroom apartment.

Riff must be a masochist at this point. Riling you up just to hear your pretty lil' accented curses at him. He asked Valentina to translate them once, but either they were too foul for her to repeat, or he wasn't repeating them adequately enough for her to understand.

Maybe he'll remember better this time.