Coming up with dozens of puns every day was not an easy feat. It might have been easier if Luan's family appreciated her comedic brilliance, but sadly that was left to her 9th grade Advanced English teacher.

Dozens and dozens of perfect scores on her essays, hung on the fridge with letter-shaped magnets next to the twins' finger paintings and Lisa's college diploma. It was common knowledge, but usually remained unspoken around the Loud house. Luan had a gift with words.

And it was an unspoken rule that if a Loud sibling, older or younger, needed help in English, they went to Luan for tutoring.

Lisa spoke and wrote eloquently, but used such large words that her siblings couldn't understand her most of the time. Additionally, nobody would have expected Lynn to turn in an essay with the word "auspicious" or "penultimate", or really any Loud sibling for that matter. Luan was good at simplifying the English language, and although one had to suffer through some truly awful puns it was worth it because her tutoring worked wonders.

Which is why Luan couldn't figure out why she was struggling. Usually English class was simple, and then they'd gotten into prose. Rhyming, Luan had no problem with, but 'interpreting the subliminal message within the text' was not her forté. Subliminal message? The poem was dark and gloomy. Was that a subliminal message?

Luan groaned, shaking her head. No, that was the mood and the tone of the piece. What was a subliminal message anyways? Obviously the poem was trying to get across graphic details of a particularly gruesome death. That much was obvious.

Luan spun around in her desk chair for a minute, stopping in the doorway and nearly having a heart attack when she noticed Lucy standing there.

"Hey, Luce! You scared me." Luan said cheerily, and her sister sighed.

"It's a talent." Lucy replied. "I was told you would help me with my assignment on figurative language."

"You figured correctly!" Luan said, laughing, and Lucy turned around, starting to walk out of the room. "Wait wait wait no no no no no! I'll help you."

"Sigh." Lucy muttered, taking a few sulking steps and placing her worksheet on top of Luan's disturbing poem and its analysis. "It's nothing big. I just need to know what a metaphor is and where to use it. And a couple other terms." Lucy said, and Luan looked at her sister's homework, thinking.

"Well, what a metaphor is used meta-FOR is comparisons. It's different from a simile because you can't use 'like' or 'as', and metaphorical comparisons are impli-Lucy, are you even listening?" Luan sighed. "I can't give you 110% if you're not going to pay a-TEN-sion."

"This poetry is beautiful, and your puns are distracting me." Lucy said, and Luan realized that Lucy had picked up the very poem she was procrastinating from analyzing. "It's about love and the despair that follows. I've never read something more true."

"Woah there, little miss gloomy." Luan said, snatching her paper back from her sister. "We're working on your homework now."

"Sigh." Lucy replied. "Your comments were terrible, by the way. You can't look at such a profound poem through Groucho glasses."

Luan gripped her pencil tightly. She was trying to pretend that didn't hurt, simply because Lucy was eight years old and Luan was supposed to take the high road as the older sister. "Where were we?" she asked, looking back at Lucy's paper. "Metaphors?"

"What's the point of metaphors when everything is destined to die? You can't compare death to death." Lucy said, and Luan looked at her sister disdainfully.

"You had so many opportunities for a pun in that sentence and you didn't take any of them." Luan scolded, and Lucy shrugged.

"I look at the world in black and white, and you see the world through vibrant colors. Yet we're both human, destined to end in suffering."

Luan's mouth fell open. "Lucy, that was a metaphor." Luan said cheerily. "Write that down! You need three examples! This assignment is going to be a piece of cake! Ooh, there's another one!"

"Can it be black cake?" Lucy asked, and Luan shrugged.

"Tomato, to-mah-to, little sis!" Luan replied, her eye catching on the poem yet again.

"You write poetry, right?" she asked, and Lucy nodded.

"It's how I express my pain in the written word."

"Maybe you can help me with my homework then." Luan said. "I'm supposed to find the subliminal message and the only thing I see is brutal, gory death."

"Brutal, gory death?" Lucy asked, suddenly interested. Luan passed her the paper, writing down the metaphors they'd come up with on Lucy's worksheet.

"You're looking at it wrong." Lucy said bluntly. "You wrote puns about internal organs in the margins."

"I didn't want to forget them!" Luan protested. "I had some good ones."

Lucy sighed. "You have to see the poem through dark lenses."

"Like sunglasses?" Luan asked, and noticed Lucy's loud sighing. "I can't help it! I'm a comedian. I'm supposed to make people feel happy! I don't know how to be all gloomy and depressed."

"Maybe you don't have to." Lucy replied. "I can look at it for you."

"Lucy, I appreciate that, but you can't do my homework."

"You just did mine." Lucy retorted, and Luan looked down at the paper. Oh.

"We did it together." Luan replied, and for the first time Luan could remember she'd gotten a small smile out of Lucy.