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Astrit knew it was a risky move to stand up to the scary woman like that. He was pretty sure you didn't get that sort of confidence out of nowhere--it took something to back it up. Something that could be very dangerous, in fact.

Still, he judged his choice was the right one. It couldn't go too badly for him, could it? Not in the middle of a fancy crowd like this. There were too many people who could see if things went bad. Just within his field of vision were four people he didn't recognize, someone he identified as another neighbour from the housing complex where he lived, and a guy who worked at the Polish delicatessen.

A cautioning hand on his head brought the boy's train of thought up short. It seemed that Vesna felt it necessary to protect him. When she claimed him as her son, his first reaction was one of quiet startlement. Was it even plausible for him to be her son? He was only about ten years younger than her--an age difference small enough that even the physical possibility was on the scale of "just barely." And he didn't necessarily look all that much like her, either. Still, some people did look older or younger than they really were, and he was pretty sure that he himself looked younger than his actual age because of his hunger-slowed growth.

Processing all that meant that he barely registered the gentle scolding Vesna gave him (yes, he knew he wasn't being all that polite), but he didn't miss the skepticism on the angry woman's face. She didn't believe they were related? Well, Astrit would act as if they were, just to spite her.

"Let's get you something to drink, da?" his "mother" suggested, and it sounded like a good excuse to get out of there, as well as a good idea in its own right.

"Da, Majka," Astrit agreed quickly. The words came almost automatically. He barely remembered his real mother, who had died when he was very little, but he and his sister had spoken in her native language when they talked about her. He had thus found out, entirely by accident when they had had such a conversation in the street once, that many of the words they used made perfect sense in a lot of other languages as well--including the one Vesna sometimes lapsed into. "Yes" and "mother" were exactly the same in quite a number.

He would have just walked off then, but the scary woman wasn't done.

"You don't know how to apologize," she told Vesna. "It should be 'sorry, what can I do for you?'"

Astrit sensed that there was something wrong, and though he was still intimidated, the edge had come off of his fear enough that he found himself growing genuinely angry. What right did whoever-she-was think she had, to order people around like that? He definitely didn't trust this woman.

Clearly, his distrust was justified: this was proven when the woman appeared to be complimenting Vesna's dress, and then made a huge production out of spilling her wine on it.

"Don't worry, hun, it looked cheap on you anyway. It won't make a difference and no one will notice."

Aggravatingly, she then walked away. Astrit's fists clenched, and he was about to yell at her when she turned around and addressed him as well.

"Keep staring, kid. Maybe if you keep pretending, you might be good enough to fool people. For now, you just look a bit pathetic, don't you think?"

The wind fell out of his sails. Pathetic. That was the last thing he wanted to be. Shamefacedly, he turned back to Vesna and suggested, "How about we go find some napkins... and something to drink?

Embarrassing as it was, it was sort of nice to be worried over. Astrit had missed out on a lot of the "important parts" of a normal childhood, including much of what it was to have parents. He had never really had anyone to wait for the bus with before, and he found that he even liked standing here with his motherly neighbour. Talking with her was certainly more interesting than standing here by himself and staring at almost exactly the same things he saw every day.

"Do you like going to that school," Vesna wanted to know, "or would you have preferred something in the neighbourhood? Well, I guess you probably have new friends at that school. You do have friends, right?"

Astrit considered the question. It amused him rather that she kept going on like that; it gave her a scatterbrained air that was rather endearing. "I like what I learn," he admitted. "It's odd to be going to a rich-people school, and I don't fit in very much, but I'm starting to make friends. I get on all right, and if I'm lucky it'll mean things get better later."

The day was rather chilly. Vesna didn't seem to be quite as used to the cold as Astrit was--she had moved here rather recently, hadn't she? rather than growing up here like he had--but she took off her scarf and gave it to him anyway. He looked up at her in some surprise. Didn't she need it?

"You keep that," she told him. "It suits you much better than me."

The boy looked at the end of the scarf curiously. It certainly made him feel warmer, and it was the sort of thing that he could wear to school without being ashamed. But what was he supposed to do when someone did something like that for him?

"Thank you, Miss Vesna," he said. "For everything." That was really all the answer that his question was going to get.

Astrit would be meeting this school day so much better-equipped than usual, and he had no idea how he was going to repay this kindness, but he wanted to do so. Somehow.

Double posting for GIANT TYPO DUMP.

Astrit Zupan | Kosovo | An Existential Problem

In some respects, it was probably a good thing that Vesna couldn't figure out how to offer the full extent of her generosity in a language Astrit could understand. The boy was overwhelmed already by the kindness that his neighbor was showing, though not so much so that he would turn down free food. (It was unlikely that he would ever reach the point of being so overwhelmed as to turn down free food.)

He did wonder what she meant, about it being "better to be honest about things." That surely meant, given the context, things such as his needs if they were going unmet. He hated to ask for help for many reasons, but among them was the fact that he had never known it to yield results he wanted. Maybe that would be different with someone genuinely nice to rely on... but, of course, there was also the matter of his pride. He could swallow it for food*, but few other things inspired him to such behavior.

They were getting pretty close to the bus stop now. Apparently Vesna had noticed as much, because she asked if he had a bus pass with him.

"Right here," he confirmed, reaching into his pocket to pull out the well-used card that earned him passage to and from school every day. He was incredibly lucky to have been given an allowance that covered that. There was simply a limit to how much money a child his age could legally earn on his own, and if he hadn't had this his choices would have been back to not attending this school or returning to his old... habits. It wasn't a choice he was particularly eager to make, no matter how out-of-place he felt in his fancy school.

In secret, he was touched that Vesna was willing to help him out. It was overwhelming and awkward to deal with, but he couldn't stop himself liking the idea that somebody sincerely cared about him.

* Yum, tastes like pride!

Astrit really wasn't sure what everyone's problem was. He was enjoying the chance to spend a day largely on his feet, rather than trapped in a desk.

The boy's restlessness, pacing up and down at the back of the group, may have made him look bored, but he was intensely alert. Whenever the teacher's lecture used words like "As you can see here," Astrit looked up to see whatever it was that was being pointed out, before sweeping his watchful eyes back around the room. It was instinct, mostly: he preferred to know what was going on around him, and he found that he understood things better if he was moving while he listened.

So it was that he caught sight of a little dark-skinned girl, perhaps two or three years younger than himself, standing nervously a short distance away from their group. Her big brown eyes were scanning their group, obviously looking for some familiar face, and obviously not recognizing anyone any more than Astrit recognized her.

Nobody else seemed to be looking at her right now, so Astrit approached her. Normally, he would have thought that was a crazy thing to do, but something swayed him. She looked... not familiar, exactly, but more natural to his eyes than his own classmates did. It took him a few moments to realize why.

The girl's dress was, simply put, not as fancy as anything his classmates wore. She wasn't quite as threadbare as Astrit or most of his neighbors usually were, but she still looked more like... like people to the boy. He was aware that his classmates were people, too, but sometimes they struck him as more like the dolls that lived in boxes on the shelves of toy stores, inhuman in their clean perfection.

“Hey,” he greeted the strange girl in his best attempt at a quietly gruff voice. It would probably be good enough, since he was talking to a kid younger than himself. “Who are you, and what are you looking for?

Now that he was sure it was okay, Astrit laughed openly. He always felt so comfortable around his strangely cheerful neighbor, though he couldn't have said exactly why. It might have something to do with her energetic good humor: Astrit usually enjoyed the company of optimists, whether that was because they called to something buried in his nature or just lifted his mood by association. Perhaps it was also because, unlike most of the people he met in school, Vesna never seemed to think she was better than him in any particular way.

Her offer of help with homework came as a surprise, and one that was neither welcome nor unwelcome. Astrit was genuinely unsure what to say about that, so he just commented, "The homework isn't too bad." He was curious about these siblings, but decided against asking too many questions for the time being.

Then Vesna offered something bigger. Food--he loved to eat. The boy's immediate instinct was to accept; he surely wasn't getting as much to eat as he would have liked.

Astrit was a young teenager. He acted on his immediate impulse. "Sure." Even if it was just the odd snack, he could use a little more food to get him through the day. Like many kids in the age group he was now entering, and particularly those who didn't have bottomless food budgets, he was usually hungry.

He wasn't sure what to make of Vesna's advice to not be too prideful. On one hand, he really couldn't get together enough food to feed himself alone, but on the other, he knew it was risky to let too much weakness show. Many people were genuinely nice--like Vesna, for instance--but those who weren't... they warranted caution.

No matter how much he thought about it, though, he couldn't imagine any way to not feel weird about using somebody else's shower.