Post by Wolf Tears on Jul 6, 2010 1:02:03 GMT -6
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You were turning 'round to see who was behind you
Her name is Aziza Charikar [uh-ZEE-zuh CHAH-ree-kahr]
She'll also respond to Zizi or Azi
She's a mere 8 years, though she sometimes seems older
Though young, she is decidedly female
[.}just another /veil\{.]
The first thing that most people notice about anyone is their face, which is the vector through which humans identify each other, connect with each other, and (often, but unfortunately) judge each other. The thing about Aziza, though, is that even after that, people continue to notice her face. There's something that draws you to it, that keeps you from paying attention to the rest of her.
Perhaps it's that she's cute. Despite the difficulty she's had to see and deal with in her short years, Azi has managed to retain some of that undeniable adorableness that comes with being a child. Wide eyes and soft, pale features indicate a vulnerability that only time will erase, no matter how hard-wearing she thinks herself. She’s not adorable in the sickening, overbearing sort of way that makes you want to gag; she's adorable in the sort of way that makes you want to draw her to you and protect her, because the world is too cruel for anything that small and susceptible.
Of course, she knows that. She may not know the extent of the world's cruelty, but there are moments when flashes or sorrow and anger in her eyes make it clear that she knows it's out there. There's acceptence there in the dark brown depths as well, though- and in some ways that's even sadder than the others, because she shouldn't have had to get used to these things. Later, perhaps- but not yet.
Her face is also interesting to watch, simply because it's very expressive. Those wide eyes of hers help, of course, but the rest of it isn't idle. When she's happy, her smile cannot be wide enough, and it makes her entire face light up. Despair makes her eyes shine desperately and her mouth contract into a small line. Anger sees her unconsciously bring her head forward so that her deep brown bangs drift over her eyes. She has learned a lot of things, but she's yet to figure out how to hide her feelings- or, indeed, why she should hide them. Zizi is an open book that even the densest of atmosphere-readers can decipher; all you need to do to figure out how she's feeling is glance at her expression.
Or maybe that all just excuses. Sure, perhaps people focus on Azi's face because she's cute, or because they want to figure out how she's feeling, or because she's so tiny that it's the easiest bit of her to look at... but maybe it's because they want to avoid looking at the rest of her. Maybe they avoid directing their gaze downward because they know what they'll find, and it isn't good. Aziza isn't gaunt, but it's obvious from looking at her that she isn't as well filled-out as she perhaps ought to be. Sure, she's only three foot nine and she shouldn't weigh a lot, but you shouldn't be able to see the outline of her bones, either. There are nights, you can tell, that she has to give up and go home without enough food for both her mother and herself. She doesn't look beaten-down; she's too strong for that, and she does her best to keep herself clean as well- her hair is smooth if not always shining and evenly cut at the shoulders, and dirt is tolerated only to a certain point. But she's just too short, just too skinny- just too little of anything to be the right size.
Not that that's uncommon in District Twelve, of course. Still, seeing a thousand starving children doesn't make it any easier to look at the thousand-and-first.
And I took your childish laughter by suprise
[.}just a n o t h e r page{.]
Aziza is the head of her family. You may not see it at first, but watch her with her mother, even on a day when Anika is sober and they're out in public together, and it's obvious that the daughter has her mother wrapped around her finger. Gently, oh so gently wrapped, but still- you can see it in the lack of argument when Aziza says something, the chastising tone she adopts whenever her mother looks toward a skin of wine, the proud look in her eyes when Anika walks away. She carries the responsibility well, though; her mother trusts her, and she does her best to earn that trust by taking care of both of them the best she possibly can.
The driving factor of Azi's entire life, you see, is her devotion to her mother. Even after being essentially disowned, she stayed nearby, and returned to the family with no bitter feelings. She doesn't look up to her mother, but she loves her, and wishes she could be the woman she used to be- the woman who people used to call intelligent and confident and worth knowing. She wants to meet that woman someday; she's in there somewhere, probably lonely and lost, and Aziza will find her. Even if that wasn't the case, she thinks she would still love her mother; there's a bond there, though Faranth knows why, and it's one that she will probably never break.
So she does what she can. She's a clever girl; she's figuring out, bit by bit, how to keep a family together and how to manage assets without destroying her mother's trust. She's good at it; she hasn't yet betrayed that trust, though she's sometimes had to place that responsibility for her mother above honesty. It's okay, though; she's good at finding new ways, better ways, to do things. She has to be, almost as much as she has to be resilient- because sometimes those ideas fail, and life and its people knock her around. She can't let it bother her for long, and generally she doesn't; she's not as strong as she'd like to be and sometimes finds herself unable to stand against some trials, but even if they blow her off her feet, she never stays on her knees long. She gets up, and she keeps going- because she's Aziza, and that's what she does.
Most children are prone to one form or another of innocence, and Aziza is no exception. She knows that life is cruel, but she firmly believes that it is fair, and that enough hard work will carry you through whatever challenges you face. She also believes that people are, at heart, good creatures, though they may not act like it or even know it themselves, and never means to cause harm; she will only fight until an opponent is beaten, and she will only steal as much as the theft victim can afford.
Despite this, she often carries herself with a cynical, world-weary edge. She's done a lot in her few short years, having seen and taken part in transactions that she shouldn't know exist, and even for someone as reilient as Aziza, these things take their toll. Most days she's optimistic, but there are times when it all gets to be too much and she starts making biting remarks about the nature of the world. (Sure, life's fair, but it's its own brand of fair and why can't it think in human terms of fair? Because she's been working at this for years but she and her mother are still in a rotten position. Hmm? Oh, they'll get what they deserve one day? Yeah. Right. Sure. She's been telling herself that for years now, thanks.) Her trust in people always holds firm, but on her bad days her faith in the world starts to shake. Occasionally she even wonders what the point of living is, if there's nothing but hard work and glimpses of happiness that she can't have- but then she remembers Anika, and she carries on in the hopes that one day, they can have that happiness. It's a slim hope, one she doesn't really believe a lot of the time, but it's there, and sometimes it and Kamen and her mother are all she has.
A pragmatic child, Zizi tries to avoid doing stupid things and will often pause to weight a situation's merits before deciding on the best way to go about things. She tends to be very matter-of-fact about things, making it hard to embarrass her, but also making it hard for her to get a lot of jokes, which often leads others to think that she has no sense of humour. This isn't true; it's just that humour is a novelty, and she only allows herself novelties when she knows the necessities are taken care of. (Happiness, mind you, is not a novelty. Happiness is needed; happiness is a reason to live, and everyone needs a reason to live.)
Aziza is careful with how she uses things, and how she allows her mother to use things. Too much money and too many possessions are traded away for alcohol as it is; indeed, if Anika had her way they would never have anything, and so it falls to Azi to make sure that she brings in not just food, but anything else they need as well- clothes, soap, oil for the lamps, and so forth. She never wastes anything, and it's an unspoken rule that Anika has to bring things to her first before throwing them away, in case there's some way to use them, even if the only way to do so is to put it on the compost heap and mix it in with the soil in the garden later. Spending your entire life finding ways to use and reuse and conserve things makes you very good at it, and much of the time when something is trashed it's because it's starting to literally fall apart.
Unusually aggressive for her age, she will rile instantly to any insult. While it takes a lot to actually make her throw a punch (people are good, remember), when she actually does she is largely fearless. In some ways, that's a good thing; she has to fight with children her age sometimes, usually to keep other street urchins from stealing what's [illegally] hers. For the most part, though, it just gets her in trouble when she gets mad and tries to take on someone twice her size. Anger is one of the only things that can get her to stop thinking about what's practical and allow herself to act on impulse.
Aziza's trust is a funny thing. She doesn't mind telling people about herself, and she finds it easy to trust others with her life, but the moment the conversation turns to her mother, her nonexistant father, or the way her household is financed, she locks up. That knowledge is the one thing she doesn't trust others with, because those that mean ill will take advantage of it, and those that mean well will take her away from her mother in an attempt to put her in a stable home- and then who will take care of Anika? It's taken a long time for her, who her mother loves, to start weaning her off the alcohol; a stranger can hardly be expected to know how to handle her, and the stress would probably make her relapse anyway. (This is the same reason Anika doesn't apply for aid. She could get it easily, but when she's is sober enough to be in any state to go downtown she's also sober enough to realize that if they figure out she's an addict there's a high chance her daughter- her last family member, the last person who loves her- could be taken away.)
As long as they don't mention those forbidden topics, though, Zizi is quite happy to meet and talk to strangers. They fascinate her, especially children her own age; she's never been able to have that carefree innocence, only her own strange brand of it, and she spends as much of her limited free time as she can trying to figure out how they manage it. She knows she can't have it, of course- few of the children she's met who have lived normal lives would be able to handle hers, so she can't be like them- but she can wonder. She also enjoys (if you call morbid fascination enjoyment) to listen to adults talk about the Games and the rebellion, but for her these are distant topics. Even the new Games, which could claim her or her mother, are secondary threats. Her world is her little family (herself, her mother, and Kamen), and it's hard for her to break outside of that.
Kamen, incidentally is Zizi's best friend, and he is nonexistent. Well, he exists, but he's not a person, or even alive at all- he's a stuffed golden retriever. Azi, however, doesn't care. Kamen, like anger and candy (she has an insane sweet tooth, but she almost never gets to have candy, so she jumps at the chance), is one of the things she's impractical about. He listens to her, and even though he doesn't ever talk she can tell what he would say if he could. He is her best and only friend and the third piece in her family's puzzle. She and Kamen take care of each other, help each other, and protect each other. He. is. real.
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you,
Aziza was born in District Twelve, and has lived there since
Her mother is Anika Charikar
As for her father, she neither knows nor truly cares
[.}just another child of the /journey/{.]
Teenagers do stupid things. That fact of life is hard to get around, no matter what time period that teenager is in- and most people, teenager or not, tend to either get much smarter or much stupider when they happen to live in an oppressive world where death is held over them like a whip. So while it's not exactly something to look up to, it's also not that surprising that seventeen-year-old Anika and her friend, nineteen-year-old Deyr, decided to get completely wasted one night.
Anika was beyond embarrassed about it, and got Deyr to agree never to tell anyone about the incident. She put it out of her mind, and life carried on as normal until the poor girl realized she was pregnant. She attempted to self-abort (she hadn't the money to go to a surgeon), but medicine wouldn't take and she didn't want to cut her stomach open; eventually she couldn't hide it anymore, and her boyfriend figured it out. He assumed, logically enough, that she was cheating on him (which, really, she had, albeit only once and under the influence at that); he left her shortly afterward, leaving her bewildered, heartbroken, and several months pregnant. Her parents, unamused with her unplanned pregnancy, disowned her shortly afterward.
After childbirth, Anika did the best she could on her own, but she honestly didn't have a clue what to do; she wasn't a very good mother, partly because her irrational side couldn't help but blame Aziza for what happened. By the time Aziza was five and a half her mother was unable to handle the stress of losing her boyfriend, being disowned, watching all her friends drift away, and raising a child she didn't want on very limited finances without telling the child she didn't want her. She resorted to alcohol, digging herself even further into the financial pit she was already in.
Unfortunately, that made the situation worse. Anika still couldn't figure out how she was supposed to raise a child, and she began taking out her frustrations by verbally abusing the girl. Aziza, however, quickly recognized that this only happened when her mother was drunk, and never really took anything to heart. She ignored Anika's ravings about not wanting her, turned to Kamen (her stuffed golden retriever) when things were too hard to handle alone, and did her best to keep the wine away from her mother, not that it did any good.
Shortly after Aziza turned six, Anika decided that she couldn't deal with her anymore and kicked her out of their home. Aziza left, but she didn't go far; she hung around nearby, watching the house and her mother, unwilling to truly leave until she was sure that she wasn't needed. Anika did better at first, but eventually her guilt caught up with her and she relapsed. Upon observing that her mother was hopeless on her own, Aziza invited herself back into the house and the family, this time as the head of both. Anika hadn't the heart (or the sobriety) to refuse, and hasn't tried to get rid of her daughter since.
Nowadays, Aziza spends most of her time doing whatever she can to support herself and her mother, whether it's considered appropriate or not. (And, honestly, it's not. There are a lot of ways for an eight-year-old to make money in a financially bereft district, and none of them are exactly legal.) She doesn't tell her mother these things; she doesn't see anything wrong with stealing, which is her main source of income, but Anika would be horrified. She's trusted, though, and even when sober her mother never asks where she gets the money. Meanwhile, she's trying to convince Anika to leave the alcohol alone, but it's a losing battle. It's a hard life, and not a happy one, but Aziza's resilient, and she's doing okay.
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes
---------------
You were turning 'round to see who was behind you
Her name is Aziza Charikar [uh-ZEE-zuh CHAH-ree-kahr]
She'll also respond to Zizi or Azi
She's a mere 8 years, though she sometimes seems older
Though young, she is decidedly female
[.}just another /veil\{.]
The first thing that most people notice about anyone is their face, which is the vector through which humans identify each other, connect with each other, and (often, but unfortunately) judge each other. The thing about Aziza, though, is that even after that, people continue to notice her face. There's something that draws you to it, that keeps you from paying attention to the rest of her.
Perhaps it's that she's cute. Despite the difficulty she's had to see and deal with in her short years, Azi has managed to retain some of that undeniable adorableness that comes with being a child. Wide eyes and soft, pale features indicate a vulnerability that only time will erase, no matter how hard-wearing she thinks herself. She’s not adorable in the sickening, overbearing sort of way that makes you want to gag; she's adorable in the sort of way that makes you want to draw her to you and protect her, because the world is too cruel for anything that small and susceptible.
Of course, she knows that. She may not know the extent of the world's cruelty, but there are moments when flashes or sorrow and anger in her eyes make it clear that she knows it's out there. There's acceptence there in the dark brown depths as well, though- and in some ways that's even sadder than the others, because she shouldn't have had to get used to these things. Later, perhaps- but not yet.
Her face is also interesting to watch, simply because it's very expressive. Those wide eyes of hers help, of course, but the rest of it isn't idle. When she's happy, her smile cannot be wide enough, and it makes her entire face light up. Despair makes her eyes shine desperately and her mouth contract into a small line. Anger sees her unconsciously bring her head forward so that her deep brown bangs drift over her eyes. She has learned a lot of things, but she's yet to figure out how to hide her feelings- or, indeed, why she should hide them. Zizi is an open book that even the densest of atmosphere-readers can decipher; all you need to do to figure out how she's feeling is glance at her expression.
Or maybe that all just excuses. Sure, perhaps people focus on Azi's face because she's cute, or because they want to figure out how she's feeling, or because she's so tiny that it's the easiest bit of her to look at... but maybe it's because they want to avoid looking at the rest of her. Maybe they avoid directing their gaze downward because they know what they'll find, and it isn't good. Aziza isn't gaunt, but it's obvious from looking at her that she isn't as well filled-out as she perhaps ought to be. Sure, she's only three foot nine and she shouldn't weigh a lot, but you shouldn't be able to see the outline of her bones, either. There are nights, you can tell, that she has to give up and go home without enough food for both her mother and herself. She doesn't look beaten-down; she's too strong for that, and she does her best to keep herself clean as well- her hair is smooth if not always shining and evenly cut at the shoulders, and dirt is tolerated only to a certain point. But she's just too short, just too skinny- just too little of anything to be the right size.
Not that that's uncommon in District Twelve, of course. Still, seeing a thousand starving children doesn't make it any easier to look at the thousand-and-first.
And I took your childish laughter by suprise
[.}just a n o t h e r page{.]
Aziza is the head of her family. You may not see it at first, but watch her with her mother, even on a day when Anika is sober and they're out in public together, and it's obvious that the daughter has her mother wrapped around her finger. Gently, oh so gently wrapped, but still- you can see it in the lack of argument when Aziza says something, the chastising tone she adopts whenever her mother looks toward a skin of wine, the proud look in her eyes when Anika walks away. She carries the responsibility well, though; her mother trusts her, and she does her best to earn that trust by taking care of both of them the best she possibly can.
The driving factor of Azi's entire life, you see, is her devotion to her mother. Even after being essentially disowned, she stayed nearby, and returned to the family with no bitter feelings. She doesn't look up to her mother, but she loves her, and wishes she could be the woman she used to be- the woman who people used to call intelligent and confident and worth knowing. She wants to meet that woman someday; she's in there somewhere, probably lonely and lost, and Aziza will find her. Even if that wasn't the case, she thinks she would still love her mother; there's a bond there, though Faranth knows why, and it's one that she will probably never break.
So she does what she can. She's a clever girl; she's figuring out, bit by bit, how to keep a family together and how to manage assets without destroying her mother's trust. She's good at it; she hasn't yet betrayed that trust, though she's sometimes had to place that responsibility for her mother above honesty. It's okay, though; she's good at finding new ways, better ways, to do things. She has to be, almost as much as she has to be resilient- because sometimes those ideas fail, and life and its people knock her around. She can't let it bother her for long, and generally she doesn't; she's not as strong as she'd like to be and sometimes finds herself unable to stand against some trials, but even if they blow her off her feet, she never stays on her knees long. She gets up, and she keeps going- because she's Aziza, and that's what she does.
Most children are prone to one form or another of innocence, and Aziza is no exception. She knows that life is cruel, but she firmly believes that it is fair, and that enough hard work will carry you through whatever challenges you face. She also believes that people are, at heart, good creatures, though they may not act like it or even know it themselves, and never means to cause harm; she will only fight until an opponent is beaten, and she will only steal as much as the theft victim can afford.
Despite this, she often carries herself with a cynical, world-weary edge. She's done a lot in her few short years, having seen and taken part in transactions that she shouldn't know exist, and even for someone as reilient as Aziza, these things take their toll. Most days she's optimistic, but there are times when it all gets to be too much and she starts making biting remarks about the nature of the world. (Sure, life's fair, but it's its own brand of fair and why can't it think in human terms of fair? Because she's been working at this for years but she and her mother are still in a rotten position. Hmm? Oh, they'll get what they deserve one day? Yeah. Right. Sure. She's been telling herself that for years now, thanks.) Her trust in people always holds firm, but on her bad days her faith in the world starts to shake. Occasionally she even wonders what the point of living is, if there's nothing but hard work and glimpses of happiness that she can't have- but then she remembers Anika, and she carries on in the hopes that one day, they can have that happiness. It's a slim hope, one she doesn't really believe a lot of the time, but it's there, and sometimes it and Kamen and her mother are all she has.
A pragmatic child, Zizi tries to avoid doing stupid things and will often pause to weight a situation's merits before deciding on the best way to go about things. She tends to be very matter-of-fact about things, making it hard to embarrass her, but also making it hard for her to get a lot of jokes, which often leads others to think that she has no sense of humour. This isn't true; it's just that humour is a novelty, and she only allows herself novelties when she knows the necessities are taken care of. (Happiness, mind you, is not a novelty. Happiness is needed; happiness is a reason to live, and everyone needs a reason to live.)
Aziza is careful with how she uses things, and how she allows her mother to use things. Too much money and too many possessions are traded away for alcohol as it is; indeed, if Anika had her way they would never have anything, and so it falls to Azi to make sure that she brings in not just food, but anything else they need as well- clothes, soap, oil for the lamps, and so forth. She never wastes anything, and it's an unspoken rule that Anika has to bring things to her first before throwing them away, in case there's some way to use them, even if the only way to do so is to put it on the compost heap and mix it in with the soil in the garden later. Spending your entire life finding ways to use and reuse and conserve things makes you very good at it, and much of the time when something is trashed it's because it's starting to literally fall apart.
Unusually aggressive for her age, she will rile instantly to any insult. While it takes a lot to actually make her throw a punch (people are good, remember), when she actually does she is largely fearless. In some ways, that's a good thing; she has to fight with children her age sometimes, usually to keep other street urchins from stealing what's [illegally] hers. For the most part, though, it just gets her in trouble when she gets mad and tries to take on someone twice her size. Anger is one of the only things that can get her to stop thinking about what's practical and allow herself to act on impulse.
Aziza's trust is a funny thing. She doesn't mind telling people about herself, and she finds it easy to trust others with her life, but the moment the conversation turns to her mother, her nonexistant father, or the way her household is financed, she locks up. That knowledge is the one thing she doesn't trust others with, because those that mean ill will take advantage of it, and those that mean well will take her away from her mother in an attempt to put her in a stable home- and then who will take care of Anika? It's taken a long time for her, who her mother loves, to start weaning her off the alcohol; a stranger can hardly be expected to know how to handle her, and the stress would probably make her relapse anyway. (This is the same reason Anika doesn't apply for aid. She could get it easily, but when she's is sober enough to be in any state to go downtown she's also sober enough to realize that if they figure out she's an addict there's a high chance her daughter- her last family member, the last person who loves her- could be taken away.)
As long as they don't mention those forbidden topics, though, Zizi is quite happy to meet and talk to strangers. They fascinate her, especially children her own age; she's never been able to have that carefree innocence, only her own strange brand of it, and she spends as much of her limited free time as she can trying to figure out how they manage it. She knows she can't have it, of course- few of the children she's met who have lived normal lives would be able to handle hers, so she can't be like them- but she can wonder. She also enjoys (if you call morbid fascination enjoyment) to listen to adults talk about the Games and the rebellion, but for her these are distant topics. Even the new Games, which could claim her or her mother, are secondary threats. Her world is her little family (herself, her mother, and Kamen), and it's hard for her to break outside of that.
Kamen, incidentally is Zizi's best friend, and he is nonexistent. Well, he exists, but he's not a person, or even alive at all- he's a stuffed golden retriever. Azi, however, doesn't care. Kamen, like anger and candy (she has an insane sweet tooth, but she almost never gets to have candy, so she jumps at the chance), is one of the things she's impractical about. He listens to her, and even though he doesn't ever talk she can tell what he would say if he could. He is her best and only friend and the third piece in her family's puzzle. She and Kamen take care of each other, help each other, and protect each other. He. is. real.
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you,
Aziza was born in District Twelve, and has lived there since
Her mother is Anika Charikar
As for her father, she neither knows nor truly cares
[.}just another child of the /journey/{.]
Teenagers do stupid things. That fact of life is hard to get around, no matter what time period that teenager is in- and most people, teenager or not, tend to either get much smarter or much stupider when they happen to live in an oppressive world where death is held over them like a whip. So while it's not exactly something to look up to, it's also not that surprising that seventeen-year-old Anika and her friend, nineteen-year-old Deyr, decided to get completely wasted one night.
Anika was beyond embarrassed about it, and got Deyr to agree never to tell anyone about the incident. She put it out of her mind, and life carried on as normal until the poor girl realized she was pregnant. She attempted to self-abort (she hadn't the money to go to a surgeon), but medicine wouldn't take and she didn't want to cut her stomach open; eventually she couldn't hide it anymore, and her boyfriend figured it out. He assumed, logically enough, that she was cheating on him (which, really, she had, albeit only once and under the influence at that); he left her shortly afterward, leaving her bewildered, heartbroken, and several months pregnant. Her parents, unamused with her unplanned pregnancy, disowned her shortly afterward.
After childbirth, Anika did the best she could on her own, but she honestly didn't have a clue what to do; she wasn't a very good mother, partly because her irrational side couldn't help but blame Aziza for what happened. By the time Aziza was five and a half her mother was unable to handle the stress of losing her boyfriend, being disowned, watching all her friends drift away, and raising a child she didn't want on very limited finances without telling the child she didn't want her. She resorted to alcohol, digging herself even further into the financial pit she was already in.
Unfortunately, that made the situation worse. Anika still couldn't figure out how she was supposed to raise a child, and she began taking out her frustrations by verbally abusing the girl. Aziza, however, quickly recognized that this only happened when her mother was drunk, and never really took anything to heart. She ignored Anika's ravings about not wanting her, turned to Kamen (her stuffed golden retriever) when things were too hard to handle alone, and did her best to keep the wine away from her mother, not that it did any good.
Shortly after Aziza turned six, Anika decided that she couldn't deal with her anymore and kicked her out of their home. Aziza left, but she didn't go far; she hung around nearby, watching the house and her mother, unwilling to truly leave until she was sure that she wasn't needed. Anika did better at first, but eventually her guilt caught up with her and she relapsed. Upon observing that her mother was hopeless on her own, Aziza invited herself back into the house and the family, this time as the head of both. Anika hadn't the heart (or the sobriety) to refuse, and hasn't tried to get rid of her daughter since.
Nowadays, Aziza spends most of her time doing whatever she can to support herself and her mother, whether it's considered appropriate or not. (And, honestly, it's not. There are a lot of ways for an eight-year-old to make money in a financially bereft district, and none of them are exactly legal.) She doesn't tell her mother these things; she doesn't see anything wrong with stealing, which is her main source of income, but Anika would be horrified. She's trusted, though, and even when sober her mother never asks where she gets the money. Meanwhile, she's trying to convince Anika to leave the alcohol alone, but it's a losing battle. It's a hard life, and not a happy one, but Aziza's resilient, and she's doing okay.
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes