I was hoping to have Founding the Foundation ready to go for this weekend, but it's not quite ready yet. First draft of the first three chapters is done, but they need editing and it needs another five or six chapters before it's done.
So, in the interim, a short piece called Contrasts. This is set in the Back in Time for Dinner/Firsts/Founding the Foundation timeline, and features a character who gets more important in Founding the Foundation: Samuel Garcia-Shapiro, Isabella's father.
This is apparently what I write when I'm at Disney World, it's 1am, and I can't sleep.
Timeline: Oh, let's call it about 4 months after Back in Time for Dinner, so October or so in their sophomore year of high school. Isabella and Phineas are both 15.
Isabella sat at the dinner table, looking at the men on either side of her.
To her left: her father, Samuel Garcia-Shapiro. An upstanding family man, and a partner at Smith, Johansen, and Garcia-Shapiro, one of Danville's most prominent intellectual-property law offices. Considered one of the top patent attorneys in the tri-state area. A specialist in tracking down elusive prior art to invalidate dubious patents. There must have been some spark in him once, she thought, to snare the vivacious Señorita Vivian Garcia, but she couldn't see it now. He was, in a word, boring.
To her right: her boyfriend, Phineas Flynn. As close to a pure avatar of creativity as she'd ever encountered. A fount of ideas. A talkative ball of energy whose mind and body were constantly on the go. As far from boring as it was possible to be.
There was even less resemblance physically. Her father was a swarthy, heavyset man with thinning black hair, his face covered by a thick black beard and moustache. Her boyfriend was wiry and lean, several inches taller than her father, and a pale redhead befitting his Irish last name.
She looked back and forth between them, puzzled. Her psychology book said that the one on the right should resemble the one on the left; that she would seek a partner who reminded her in some way of her father.
She sat back and listened to them talk, contributing enough to be polite, but mostly watching their conversation. Across from her, her mother watched the byplay with a bemused expression. Isabella searched for that elusive parallel that would connect the two men she loved the most, some factor they had in common other than herself.
And then she heard it in her father's voice as he was dissecting Phineas's college plans. That need to know, that tenacity as he dug into a question, that unwillingness to quit. Dad had always been inquisitive and stubborn. Maybe that was it.
She smiled, relieved that she'd finally found a solution.
She pondered the same question from Phineas's perspective, and wondered what he saw in her that reminded him of his mother.
And then she decided that some questions are best left unanswered.