Generation 1, Chapter 14 - Ayla

Ayla Doe was a complete and utter mess. On the outside she was fine, no, better than fine. She was awesome. She was a nice girl with lots of friends who did well in school, had great self-esteem, and single-handedly kept her family from falling apart.

In a lot of ways, she was that girl. She did like herself. She liked her best friend, Carla. Most of her other friends she could take or leave, but she wanted them to like her. She wasn’t a genius, but she was reasonably smart. What she hated was having to hold her family together.

Really, she hadn’t been all that torn up about her mother being institutionalized. She wasn’t really a big part of Ayla’s life. Maybe it was heartless, but even though they’d lived in the same house, they’d never been terribly close. She knew her parents had taught her basic life skills when she was too little to remember, but she had raised herself from the time she started elementary school. So when her mother went away, Ayla was the only one who wasn’t a wreck.

At the age of nine, she’d assigned herself the burden of making sure her father and brothers got up, dressed, and where they needed to be. They could feed themselves, but she also did a lot of the cleaning. She hadn’t minded it too much when she first started. It had to be done, and she was capable of doing it.

Now, though? She’d really started to resent it. She was twelve years old. She was supposed to be having sleepovers and giggling about boys, getting a phone for her birthday, having her parents give her ground rules about dating. She was pretty sure her dad just thought she was a magical pixie who functioned as an alarm clock and cleaned the house. She was sick of it. She wanted to be the child, not the parent.

So she came up with a plan. If she wasn’t home, they would have to do everything she did themselves. So she decided to join ballet, which would keep her away from home three days a week, and go home with Carla the other three. She would still go home in the evenings, but they would have to spend afternoons by themselves.

There was only one problem. Ballet required a fee to join. That fee was simoleans that they didn’t have. The money that didn’t go towards the bills was spent on food. Ayla knew that, so she decided to have a bake sale. Carla had given her an old toy oven and bake sale table, and she hoped to put them to good use.

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It seemed to be going pretty well. Grown-ups were happy to buy muffins from the sweet little girl who needed money to pay for ballet.

“Can I have two cookies, please?”

This customer, however, wasn’t a grown-up. In fact, it was a kid she felt like she recognized.

“Do I know you?”

“Tony Langerak. And you’re Ayla Doe.”

“Am I that well-known?”

“You’re the closest thing to a celebrity our grade has. Do you do this sort of thing often? I’ve never seen you here before.” He blushed, then. “I mean… not that I was looking for you specifically… just that I would have noticed…” He noticed her growing smile and blushed even redder. “I’m just digging myself deeper, aren’t I?”

She giggled. “It’s fine. I think you’re really nice to say all of that. This is the first time I’ve done this. I’m raising money to pay the fee to join ballet.”

He grinned elatedly, showing slightly crooked front teeth. “I do ballet!”

“Really? I thought it was mostly girls.”

“It is, but there are a couple of us in there. I really like music, and ballet is the only extracurricular our school offers that has anything to do with it.”

“Are there really a couple of boys in there?”

He flushed again. “I might have been stretching the truth a little. It’s just me and Terrance Keaton.”

Ayla stifled another giggle. Terrance Keaton was the most flamboyant person of any gender she had ever met. It was absolutely no surprise that he did ballet, not the way it had been a surprise that this smiling awkward boy did.

“Well, I look forward to seeing you there.”

His eyes widened, and she noticed that they were a deep blue, so dark they were almost purple. He leaned forward a little bit. “Do you really? Because I -”

“Tony!”

He turned around sharply. “Sorry, my dad’s calling. I have to run, but… I’ll see you at ballet practice?”

She nodded. “Yeah, you will.”

He ran off, and she was surprised to find herself grinning like a madwoman, almost giddy from the conversation. Maybe she wasn’t a typical twelve-year-old, but it looked like she could still giggle about boys with the best of them.

Author's Note: Another chapter already? Shocking! I write these whenever I have free time, then take pictures when I'm home and have more than half an hour to spare. I'm tired of being three chapters ahead, so I'm trying to get these out as soon as I have the pictures. This one got done today, so I figured there was no point waiting until tomorrow to post it.

Tony Langerak has really gorgeous eyes. He's the fourth of five Langerak children in my game (The oldest, Parker, has a teenage daughter and the youngest, Shanna, is still a toddler. Incidentally, those two are the only ones who haven't appeared in this legacy so far.), and the only one to get Dustin's eyes, which are this really intense dark blue. I'd tell you to look them up on the Sims wiki, but I just checked and they're really underwhelming, so it might just be my eye defaults that make them so pretty. You can't really see them in this chapter, because it's all at sunset, but he'll be back soon, at which time you can see the eyes that are 80% of the reason he appears in this legacy. His traits are good too, but the eyes are better. Join us next time for Sam and Kaylynn's wedding, along with a slight time skip!