Round 2: Fish

Aurelia Fish is an Elder. Her grandson Dmitri Fish is a Teen, and her granddaughter Dzika Fish is a Child.

* * *

Dmitri didn’t know why he was having so much trouble keeping up in school. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. In fact, it was only after his grandmother had made him start concentrating on academics that he had started to realize how smart he was. But just because it was easy didn’t mean it was interesting. And the more bored he got, the more mistakes he made on his homework and the more he daydreamed in class, until any progress he had made on his grades was gone. And while he was trapped under a mountain of boring work, he didn’t have any time to do the things he actually wanted to do.

Dzika, on the other hand, was thriving. Despite the trouble Dmitri was having, it made him happy to see how well Dzika was doing, and how much more confident her success was making her. And with their grandmother’s encouragement, she had thrown herself into her art. Dmitri could see how good she was getting already, and she was starting to talk about being an artist when she grew up.

Dmitri still had a crush on Liss, but although their friendship was stronger than ever, he had begun to give up hope of anything beyond friendship ever happening. She was a lot touchier lately, because of the way her sisters had been fighting, and although sometimes she acted like she might be interested, she would only withdraw again.

Dmitri had begun to wonder whether it was time to give up on the prospect of romance with Liss. She was his closest friend, after all, and while he’d had a thing for her from the first time he saw her, their friendship had grown to be much more important to him than the possibility of anything more. He didn’t want to do anything to risk what they had together.

He would make one more try, he decided, and then he would let it go. He would find a different girlfriend – not that he had time for that, with all the homework he had to do – and he and Liss would stay best friends, staying up until all hours of the night trading stories of family drama and sharing their crazy ideas.

So he asked her one last time. And her answer was the same – no way.

So be it, then. He could live with that, as long as it didn’t mean losing her.

To distract himself from his disappointment, Dmitri threw himself into other pursuits. He promised himself that he would find at least one fun mental challenge to balance out the sheer boredom of his homework. He decided to teach himself programming, and worked on it a little every night. Aurelia approved – it was a skill that could take him far in life, she said.

Liss loved the idea. They would create a franchise of mobile games and get rich, she decided. He would handle the programming, and she would do the art. Dmitri knew he wasn’t nearly good enough for that yet, but it was so much fun listening to Liss’s ideas that he went along with it.

It was a fun idea in theory, but in practice Dmitri hated programming. At least it kept his mind engaged better than his schoolwork, though, so he decided to keep at it, at least for now. Besides, it made his grandmother happy to think he might have something he could do with his future besides opening a bar.

It also meant he could get away with playing games while telling his grandmother he was working. Not that he would do something like that often, of course, but sometimes he needed a little fun.

Wanting Dzika to be able to try out a variety of different art forms, Aurelia used some of her meager savings to buy Dzika a child-size violin in Dzika's favorite color. Dzika didn’t take to that nearly as naturally as she had to her art, but she valiantly kept practicing. At times, Dmitri and even Aurelia sort of wished she wouldn’t.

Dzika was also getting to be friends with Winter Li. Winter had recently moved to a house a couple of blocks away, and her mom had just had a baby. Dzika hadn’t really had a close friend since she had moved in with her grandmother, and she had forgotten how good it felt to have someone to talk to who wasn’t a family member. But Aurelia disapproved of her friendship with Winter, although she wouldn’t explain why.