Driven to Win

Chapter 19- Friendships Grow

This chapter is pretty short and quite insignificant. I guess you could say it's just a filler chapter.

Chapter 19- Friendships Grow

"It's just us girls!" Cruz declared happily.

"Yeah..." Fudge supplied a response. She didn't really know what to say, but she felt like Cruz wanted her to say something.

It had taken them a lot longer than they would've wanted to get going because Guido and Luigi were uncertain about letting Fudge go off with Cruz. Even though Fudge was sixteen, a lot of the time, she acted like she was younger. Could they really trust her to go off into a town with which they weren't familiar without either of them or Lightning with her?

"But I know where the town is!" Cruz had protested. "And I know how to get to Thunder Hollow! I can take her there when we're done! Come on! She's sixteen! In a year and a half, she's gonna be an adult!" (It didn't surprise Fudge that Cruz knew how old she was or when her birthday was; it was probably on the Internet. Besides, she went to her birthday celebrations once.) "She'll be fine."

Reluctantly, the two Italians let their daughter go off with Cruz.

"I'm so glad Luigi and Guido let you come!" Cruz added. She laughed. "They were talking to you like they were your parents or something."

Fudge looked a little embarrassed. "That's because they are my parents."

It was Cruz's turn to look embarrassed. "Oh! That's right! You're adopted." She remembered reading that somewhere.

"Yeah I am." Despite her intense love for her dads, the human girl had never really felt comfortable saying the words, "I'm adopted." Probably because she never really had to say it; one look at her and her dads and it was obvious. Maybe if she had to say it a bit more often, it wouldn't feel weird.

"What happened?" Cruz wanted to know. As Fudge hesitated, Cruz added, "Sorry. I don't mean to pry." Truthfully, the yellow car was especially curious because she hadn't been raised by her parents either. Besides, the RS gang never talked to the press about it because they didn't need to know. Not even Cal or Bobby or Mack or the Rust-Eze brothers knew the story behind Fudge's adoption. They just assumed her parents had died or simply couldn't take care of her and they dared not bring it up with Fudge. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"No, no, it's okay!" Fudge assured her hurriedly. "I just don't really like to talk about this, but my family always tells me I should." This was the most open Fudge had been about this kind of thing with anybody but her family in Radiator Springs and she still didn't talk about it to them that often. Luigi and Guido had sat her down the day after her twelfth birthday to have a long talk about her family (telling her everything they could about her parents and how they'd come to adopt her and reminding her that no matter what, she'd always have a family who loved her very much in Radiator Springs) and she'd bawled like a baby. She took a deep breath. "My mom showed up in Radiator Springs in labour, she gave birth to me and just left."

The human girl made it sound like a very simple process, which it kind of was. A very simple process to hurt her own daughter so badly. It hurt for Fudge to think about being abandoned by her mother and every time she felt unwanted, those awful memories of finding out that her own mother didn't even want her came rushing back to her. The worst part was that Fudge's mother would never know the pain she'd caused her own daughter.

Cruz looked slightly surprised. "That's it?"

"Not quite", Fudge admitted, unsure if she should delve into it. Blinking back tears, she blurted out, "Papà found me in his garbage!" That sick-in-the-stomach, weak-in-the-knees feeling Fudge had experienced when Luigi first told her came back. She hoped this talk didn't cause her to have another nightmare.