"Just shine like you always do."
Gwenn Davidson has always known she was adopted, but after clearing up her stuff for her first move out of her parent's house, she finds an old blanket gifted to her by her birth mother that triggers an avalanche of...
GWENN ESCAPED THE CLUTCHES of her teasing friends to sneak into the old, abandoned basketball court near Hales Bay. The location rose her anxiety, but with the wild grass blades surrounding the faded court and the nearest road too far to peer over, it was the best hideout they could find.
"Arthur sent me the results," Ronan said, typing away at his laptop. His phone was propped onto the roof of his truck for better signal for his hotspot. "Are you ready to know someone related to you?"
She let his words fall over, and her stomach knotted. Her chicken sandwich threatened to come back out into the world, but she gulped in a lot of air and nodded. Ronan turned his laptop screen around, showing the DNA test results. Most of it was gibberish to her, but he tapped on a specific corner.
Lisa Carter.
"Who's that?" Gwenn asked, leaning forward across the back of his truck. His eyes gleamed as the dimming sun began its descent. The way he suppressed a smile meant he wanted her to figure it out, but the more she stared at the results, the more her brain turned to mush. She preferred her psychology textbooks with easy to decipher diagrams and images.
"Alright," Ronan gave up, turning his laptop back to him. "That is your four-hundredth cousin."
Her breath caught in her throat like she accidentally swallowed a fly. "That's one of my cousins?" Tingles ran up and down her arms, and she rubbed at them to calm the goosebumps.
Ronan smiled. "I knew you'd like the sound of that." He typed like his life depended on it for a few seconds before leaning back against the edge of his truck. "Now we climb the other branches of this family tree."
Gwenn grasped at her bag, fumbling with the yellow fabric before raising her eyes to him. "Do you know who she is?" Her voice faltered, but her head pounded, wanting all the information she could find. "What does she do? Where is she from?"
"Give me a few minutes, honey," he said with a wink, and dove right back into his laptop. She nodded and looked down at her lap. Study guides piled up over her light blue jeans, reminding her of her part of the deal.
She grasped onto her pen, and focused again on her textbook she had so easily neglected. The chapter on anxiety stayed open, staring up at the sky. Its glossy pages gave her all the information necessary to differentiate between social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder, and how to pinpoint which one it was on a patient. All the material needed to write the latest paper assigned. Would Ronan know how to tell the difference?
With that in mind, she pulled out her notebook from her bag and began scribbling down the definitions of all the anxiety disorders for class. Half of her brain hyper-fixated on every click and clack from the laptop keyboard a mere inches away from her. The other part of her brain checked that her words were legible and written correctly so as to not confuse Ronan even more.
Her mind flew away from reality, making elaborate tales of the unknown Lisa Carter and her adventures. In her head, she had the same round cheeks as her, even if they were barely related from how far down she was in her family line, but her imagination didn't care about that. She would be the girl that smiled a lot, liked by everyone, and the one who would do anything for the people around her. She could almost see her.
"Okay," Ronan interrupted her daydreaming. "Lisa Carter, thirty-three year old female, lives in California." He raised his eyebrow at the end, then looked up from behind his screen to find her staring with big doe eyes. She blinked, processing the small bit of information.
"Is there more?" Gwenn brought her school material down by her feet, and then crawled over Ronan's side. He watched as she peered at his laptop screen, drinking up all the information she could obtain. Everything he told her was all she could read. "Please, isn't there anything else?"
Ronan cleared his throat and went ahead to scroll through more websites. He went with rapid speed, she missed everything he clicked by the time he was reading Lisa Carter's list of addresses throughout her whole life.
"She was born in Texas," he read, pointing to the top of the webpage. "Lived there most of her life. Wait—I don't think she was even seventeen when she moved to California." He opened another window. Before she could focus on his browser, he typed more about Lisa Carter, finding old records from her high school. "She dropped out of high school," he revealed.
"She dropped out of high school?" she asked as if she hadn't heard correctly. Ronan nodded, going from tab to tab and finding more information on her four-hundredth cousin.
"I thought maybe her parents had to move," he explained, trailing off at the end. "Emancipation." His voice quieted down.
Gwenn gulped. "I wonder what happened."
Ronan said nothing and clicked back on the tab with all of Lisa's known addresses. When he scrolled down to her most recent one, he turned to her, icy eyes bright. "We can go ask her ourselves. She's decently close in Las Alas. We can go tomorrow."
Every cell in her body vibrated. A feeling so similar to when they skipped out to find her adoption center. But her discarded textbook and notebooks brought her back to reality—a college student's reality.
"We have a paper due this week, Ronan," she said, her shoulders slouching. "We need to start making progress if we want to pass this class."
At the mention of their abnormal psychology course, he groaned, scaring a few birds within their radius. They fluttered their wings into the air like danger was among them, disrupting their obvious peace on the abandoned court. Gwenn scratched her forehead to block her view of Ronan, and swallowed down her chuckles.
"We have a lot of work to do," she confessed, looking down at her materials. Not only did they have a paper due, but midterms were upon them. "So I better get your undivided attention for the next hour if you want to pass this course."
He bit down on his lip, closing his laptop and putting it aside. His eyes found hers, and he grinned. "Fine," he said it like he was unhappy about it, but the rise of his lips told her otherwise. "I'm all yours, honey."
"Great," she said. "How about we find my cousin when we finish our papers? We won't be drowning in psychology terms by then."
Ronan studied her before sighing. "Alright, Davidson, we'll wait. But this paper of mine better get an A."
She pointed her pen at his face, squinting her eyes. "That's on you to decide. Now let's get work done."
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