Day 11 - Dinosaurs

I got my laptop fixed! And I'm back at home from vacation!! And best of all, SCHOOL STARTED!!!

This is actually draft one of my submission for HKYW, if you steal it, well... if they ask why there are two replicates or very similar things... I'll just show them this. SO, nice try mate, but you can't outfox the fox.

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Dinosaurs, Georgie thought, were a lot like humans. 

They walked around, most at an excruciatingly slow pace, just like most people did. When Georgie tried to navigate the Mid-Levels escalators during rush hour, with all the people coming back from work, trudging along in not much hurry, she wanted to kick something. Dinosaurs also ate a lot, like the average person. To Georgie, three meals a day plus tea and snacks was far too much food, she could barely hold down lunch and dinner, how could she be expected to eat more than that? Some dinosaurs made careers out of stealing eggs, just like how some people burgled for a living. The same type of dinosaur also ate their friend’s corpses. Again, a lot like humans, but not quite literally. Plenty of seemingly innocent members of society waited until their peers were at their weakest to strike. Georgie had experienced that first hand, and it was certainly not pleasant.

Sighing, she turned to another display, her classmates getting further and further away, but she ignored them. Having been reluctant to go on the field trip in the first place, she regretted not faking sick now that she was at the museum. Staring up at an information board on the Sinosauropteryx, she criticised each sentence she read. “‘The China dragon bird,’” the brunette scoffed, “Looks more like a red panda ripped off a tree from the uncanniest of valleys.” Turning, she found that the crowd of students from her school was almost out of sight, and took leisurely strides, still making sure not to be irritatingly slow. Georgia Dao was a lot of things, but a hypocrite was not one of them.

Just before she caught up with the group, her school-assigned peer counselling mentor tapped her on the shoulder. The dark-eyed girl turned around to face Maryam, tilting her head questioningly. “I saw you looking at the Sinosauropteryx,” the redhead smiled softly. Everything about the girl seemed delicate, almost like porcelain; one punch and she would break into tiny little pieces, scattering across the ground in a shower of china.

Nodding in response, Georgie continued on at the same pace, despite the fact that her classmates were now further away. She refused to hasten or slow her pace for anyone. It was a massive roadblock in her path to a healthy social life, but she really couldn’t care any less. She had herself, and that was all she needed. The last time Georgie began to think otherwise, she had gotten painfully betrayed, and following that incident, promised to never rely on other people again. “Georgia,” Maryam called out, “When are you going to start talking to me? Or to anyone except yourself, for that matter?”

Turning on her heel, Georgie stared her mentor dead in the eye, raising her hands to sign, When someone gives me good reason to. Arms crossed, she looked back in the direction of her schoolmates and took a few more strides towards them before she was, irritatingly enough, stopped once again by a light hand on her shoulder; the grip holding her back was so weak Georgie could just barely feel it through her dress shirt and blazer. Wrenching her arm away, she signed over her shoulder, Don’t touch me. The counsellor had assigned her with the only other person in the school who knew sign language, and it just had to be someone who seemed to have no respect for personal space.

Sighing, Maryam rushed in front of her mentee, blocking her way, “Georgia, come on. Let’s talk about the dinosaur you were looking at.” Georgie pursed her lips slightly. It wasn’t the older girl’s first attempt to distract her with small talk to get her to open up, and it nearly offended her. Did her mentor really think she would fall for a well overused trick that hadn’t even worked the first time? Irritated, she sighed, shrugging her shoulders in reluctant agreement, OK. What about the- Georgie dismissively gestured towards the information board, not bothering to fingerspell out its name, Also, it’s Georgie. Pleased that she had managed to convince her, Maryam began to speak, albeit uunexplainedly pulling a slightly odd face at the last comment, “My older brother actually saw a Sinosauropteryx fossil in person before, out in nature.”

Is he an archaeologist?

“He is. He loves his job,” the redhead nodded, “I don’t think he will be for long, though.”

Why not? Georgia did her best to disguise her genuine curiosity, keeping up her perfectly structured poker face. People rarely quit a job they truly cared about without a good reason.

“He was diagnosed with a terminal illness eight years ago, and he’s hospitalised right now in critical condition. It causes an unusually early decay of nerve cells in the brain-”

Holding up her hand in a ‘wait’ gesture, the younger girl interrupted, “Huntington’s Disease.”

Blinking away the shock of hearing her speak, Maryam nodded, “They say he doesn’t have long to live,” she didn’t seem too upset, apart from the barely detectable sadness in her tone. She had already accepted her brother’s fate, unlike how Georgie had been unable to accept her parents’.

“My parents had Huntington’s.”

“Oh.”

There was a stretch of awkward silence, settling over the two like fog in San Francisco. Georgie had only been to the city once for a couple of days with her family, and they hadn’t even gotten to see the Golden Gate Bridge because her brother Evan was sick for three out of the five days they were there, but she had seen the amounts of fog that came in on the average day. Maryam cleared her throat, “Anyways. My brother really liked the Sinosauropteryx. It was the first feathered species of dinosaurs humans discovered that weren’t directly related to birds. It’s also the first dinosaur that scientists are sure about the colour pattern of. It was special.”

“Humans tend to get a lot of things wrong,” Georgie pointed out.

“True. But that’s beside the point. The team he usually works with and a museum curator is putting together an exhibition about them and various other Chinese dinosaurs, but mainly the Sinosauropteryx. They’re going to have the skeleton display in the centre of the room be a memorial of sorts to my brother. They’re naming it after him.”

“Oh,” Georgie didn’t know what to say, “What’s his name?”

“George. We called him Georgie. He refused to be called anything else by friends and family,” Maryam jogged to catch up with the group, but Georgie stayed where she was. ‘Georgie.’ Just like her. Turning to the information board, she examined the creature again, tilting her head slightly. “Goodbye, Georgie 1.0.” After taking one last look, she took off after the redhead, trudging on at her preferred pace.