Hi folks! This is a story that I am writing partially based of two one-shots that I wrote called Promise.
Lizzie is an independent girl who is entering med school at Stanford. Financially, she does very well. She also has a daughter. How she got her is kind of a secret, although she is adopted.
Darcy is also independent. He is stepping into the role of running his father's branch of the business in Silicon Valley. Georgiana (Gia) lives with him and is 4ish. There is an eighteen year age difference. Unrealistic, I am quite aware, but essential.
I also can't get my computer to put the write accents over the Chinese words and names I use, so excuse my mistakes. I do know that they are there, I speak the language.
...
"I want to meet the new neighbors!" Gia begs, pulling at my arm. She has been begging since the cookies came out of the oven five minutes ago. I had just been trying to finish an already stressful business call.
"Thanks David. I will call you back tomorrow. Yes, I will remember the time difference." I say, finally finishing the long phone call. If I had it my way, I would have had another twenty minutes, but Gia was extremely pushy.
"Let's go Gia." I tell her, only a little frustrated with her for not allowing me to finish the call in peace. She runs over to the door and opens it with all the strength she has. I smile slightly and grab the plate of cookies off the counter. I follow her out the door where she is running across the yard to their house. She is already on their front steps by the time that I am in their yard. She stretches her arms and hits the doorbell. Just as the door opens, I land on the doorstep.
"Hello. We're are your neighbors in that house." I tell her, indicating the direction of our Brownstone. I hold out the cookies afterwards.
"thank you. Why don't you guys come in and we can all split these?" She smiles the whole time, and it is a little weird to me that she can talk and grin like the chesire cat.
"Sure." I say. She opens the door and gestures us in. As we sit down on the couch, Gia beside me she calls up the stair case.
"Lí Fāng!" She calls up the stairs. She turns back to us.
"Is rice milk ok?" She asks as feet come padding down the stairs.
"It's all we drink." I tell her. She smiles again, even wider than before if that is possible, and walks through the door and into the kitchen. In a moment or two she remerges, carrying three glasses of rice milk.
That's when a little girl appears at her leg. She wraps her arms around her and stands behind her, painfully shy. Gia crawled onto my lap and sucked her thumb, nervously eying the other girl.
The neighbor bends down and whispers something to the girl.
"Nî Hao." She says shyly. Her mother laughs.
"In English sweetheart." She prods.
"Hello." The little girl says and comes out a little from behind her mothers leg.
"My name is Gia." Gia says from my lap. She crawls off slowly and goes to stand in front of the girl.
"I'm four. How old are you?" She asks demandingly. The girls mother smiled again.
"Sì." She says.
"English." Her mother says sternly.
"I'm four too." The girl says, nervously pulling her bottom lip in and out of her mouth.
"What's your name?" Gia demanded.
"Lî." The girl states. She crawls out completely from behind her mom's leg.
She looks about four, but is three or four inches shorter than Gia. She looks Asian and has bangs cut evenly across her forehead. She messes with the strap to her pink overalls.
"Do you want a cookie sweetheart?'" Asks her mother. It occurs to me that I don't know her name yet.
Lî crawls up onto the couch, and Gia follows her. They sit side by side and dive into the cookies. Her mother looks up at me, noticing that I was watching her. I tried to avert my eyes but I didn't do it in time.
"I'm Elizabeth by the way." She say. She sticks her hand out in front of the girls and I shake it.
"Will." I say. She nods with a smile and starts watching her daughter again. She brushes her unruly black hair behind her ear while carefully listening to her daughters speech.
"Lî, only English." She prods. Lî nods and turns back to Gia, and she speaks slower now.
"She has a hard time switching back and forth between Chinese and English." She tells me conversationally. I nod.
"When I was younger I used to get my French and English mixed up all the time." I tell her.
"Did you grow up in France?" She asks in a genuinely interested voice.
"During the school year, yes. Until high school probably." I tell her, reminiscing about all the years I spent in our comfortable Parisian apartment. She nods.
"You always miss it, even if you're only gone for summer." She says it more as a statement than a question so I ask.
"I lived in New York during summers, but attended boarding school in Minnesota during high-school." She tells me before I get a chance to ask. I nod.
"I spent my summers in NYC." I tell her.
"Really?" She asks with a smile. Sensing that the topic could head towards my parents, I change the subject.
"So what do you do?" I ask her. She looks confused, but she goes along with it.
"I write Spanish and Chinese exams and online learning foreign language programs. I'm also going into med-school at Stanford." I smile at Stanford.
"Really?" I say.
"You?" She asks.
"I just finished Law School at Harvard." I admit. She smiles.
"Good for you. I did my first year of Biology there." She tells me.
"Really?" I ask.
"Why did you leave?" She laughs at what must be a shocked expression on my face.
"Stanford offered my full-scholarship and I couldn't keep up with tuition after I adopted her." She tells me, gesturing to her daughter. Now that I thought about it, I realized that neither of them looked alike.
"I thought about transferring out of Harvard after I got custody of Gia." I admit.
"Normally, I would be weirded out by a stranger sharing so much information with a stranger, but I did start it and I don't think that either of us are in a place to judge." She says with another chuckle at the end. I laugh too.
"When I tell most people that I adopted a baby my freshman year of college, they go slack-jawed and assume that I'm lying and she's really mine."
"When I tell people I fought for custody against my aunt for my sister and won they also think that she's mine." We laugh together. That's when I realize that Gia is no longer sitting right there. My eyes widen and I look around for her.
"Relax." She says with another laugh.
"They are right over there." She says, pointing to the corner of the living room. My eyes finally land on the two playmates. They are both holding a doll and laughing. I turn to see her smiling at her.
"Normally she doesn't have a lot of friends because of the language barrier." Elizabeth tells me.
"Gia doesn't ever get to have her friends over because all her preschool buddies parents thought that I was a weird frat boy. They all thought I was her father too." Elizabeth laughs.
"I had to explain it to this guy that asked me out, and it was so awkward." She giggles. I laugh too, and it occurs to me that she isn't trying to show off, she is sharing a story about getting judged, something we both have in common.
"I personally think I have it worse than you." I tell her with a teasing grin.
"Why is that?" She asks with a smirk.
"America just got used to the idea of single mothers, single fathers still needs to sink in." I say. She laughs.
"If there is one thing that this experience has taught me, it is that you can never judge a person." She says it with a slight smile and I turn sober also and agree.
"If only I could find myself that says, Big Brother, Just Trying to Help." I say. She laughs.
"Unfortunately, I don't think that it would matter. In my opinion, Americans are some of the most judgmental people in the world." I laugh with her, but secretly think of the truth of her statement. People will think what they want to think, it is unfortunately inevitable. And as I sat there, I was glad that I had found someone who understood.
...
Review please!
Also, I understand that my writing and dialogue in general is not the best. My apologies.