Ice frozen dreams turned golden

Chapter 4

This one-shot covers how Thea, Betty, and Lizzie met in school and is also about figure skating. I've been obsessed with figure skating for a long time now, and I've kind of infected Laura with it, too. So when she created the character of Lizzie, she made her figure skate...

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It was the first day of school for Lizzie in the US and if she was honest with herself, she had never felt so nervous before. Everything was so different from Germany - the kids, the teachers, the classroom, let alone the language. Lizzie had learned English with her figure skating coach, and since she had been skating for as long as she could walk, it had been a pretty long time. But she also knew that she had a pretty strong German accent when she spoke English - something her Mom was definitely not a fan of and had reminded her of at least thirteen thousand times.

The bell rang and Lizzie couldn't help but notice that it sounded completely different than in her home country. She didn't know what she was supposed to do now - all of the other kids were running outside, happy about the break, but she only stood up reluctantly. At her old school back in Germany nobody had ever really liked her, and she was pretty sure that it would be no different here. Maybe it would be even worse here because the other kids would make fun of her accent...

She was on the playground when she looked over at two girls standing a few meters away from her. She smiled at them when they smiled at her, but her smile quickly faltered as soon as she saw them whispering to each other, looking at her. Lizzie wasn't stupid - she knew that the girls were talking about her, and normally people didn't have anything nice to say about her.

The girls came closer and Lizzie eyed them wearily - were they coming over to mock her? Lizzie bit her lip bracing herself for whatever the girls were up to, but relaxed as she saw them smiling kindly again.

"Hey, I'm Thea and this is Betty. You're Elizabeth, right? We just wanted to welcome you here and wanted to ask you if you would like to play with us?"

Lizzie looked up to them in surprise - they wanted to play with her?

"Ähm..." she replied and cursed herself when she noticed that even that short syllable sounded totally German. "Sure," she said, trying to sound more like a native speaker.

"Great! Do you want to play mermaids with us?" The other girl, Betty, asked and her eyes were shining with excitement.

Lizzie just shrugged - she had never really played anything with other kids, let alone played mermaids with someone. How did you even do that?

"What color is your tail then?" Thea asked her, while she was grabbing her hand, dragging her to one corner of the playground where beautiful, big trees separated them from the rest of the kids.

Lizzie just looked at her, completely lost. What color was her tail? She didn't have any tail...

"Well mine is turquoise," Betty explained to Thea and then swirled around the playground like she was swimming with a tail.

"And mine is yellow," Thea said and raised her eyebrow at Lizzie as to ask her again about what color her tail would have.

"I think mine is purple," Lizzie finally decided and then swirled around like she had seen Betty do it.

The girls played for quite some time before they sat down at a bench a little exhausted from all their spins, and especially the adventures they had experienced as mermaids. Lizzie smiled to herself and wasn't even bothered when the two other girls got out their lunch boxes and ate their really delicious-looking lunch.