name is Alinne. I'm a girl who lives in a small town up in the mountains in the countryside. Being our town is primarily populated by people of german and austrian descent everybody here is really tall, except me. My folks were albanian and italian descent, normal people, not even that tall. Happened that I was born to be barely 1.55 meters tall at sixteen years old and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting any taller... In a place like this town it draws attention, earning me the nickname of Little Alinne or simply "The Little One".
Ok, I don't come to eye just because of it. I have my own particularities, like having silky black hair in a place full of blondes or the way people say I'm pretty. Nothing I consider special, I'm not shallow enough to think that's something else, but enough to make people notice me. I hate to use that, but I know a lot of help I had was due to that. My mother became an invalid from multiple sclerosis when I was just fourteen years old and my father died even before I even was born. People around us were touched and helped us since then but I never liked depending on others, so I started working at fifteen. At sixteen I had two jobs, both of them lacking any kind of contract or documentation, as I was underage. Anything to avoid sending my mother to any medical facility and having some child welfare official trying to send me to other families.
It caused me to be known by almost everybody in our little town, even the rich landlords or the mighty businessmen of a worldwide oil company that has a huge office here, the main employer of our town. I don't know exactly what mix made it happen, knowing that I'm a really quiet and introspective person. Maybe the way I make an ultimate effort to make clear I'm really thankful for any help someone gives us from good will or the way I struggle to show the people I like, that even being how I am, I like them. Well, I don't know. What I know is that it happened and I was glad I could work hard to keep me and my mother alive. Poorly, but I did.
When I got the opportunity to work as a servant in the oil company office I thought my problems were close to an end. I was wrong. Less then a month later my mother had a relapse, which made me spend the double I usually had to, so it all was about to collapse. That's when my life changed for good.
Working in that office, serving as an assistant in the kitchen, was where I learned I wasn't good looking only to the impressionable people of the countryside but to some of the big town people too. It was evident the difference between the way they treated the other women of the kitchen and me. It annoyed me, but I would never deny how good it felt when people treated me nicely even knowing that I was poor and that I wasn't able to study since my I was thirteen years old. It was soothing to my hurt self-respect. But it wasn't just that, most of them got surprised when talking to me and finding out that I could talk properly and that I showed an interest in many things other than farms, cows, country music or the local culture as a whole. My mother studied in a university when she was young, she was very clever and she did her best to make me clever too. She always said the worst thing that happened for her was that she found her perfect love, my dad, and abandoned everything else. Mama insisted that she never regretted that decision because she loved him and she loved being my mother too, but that she should have thought straight and kept studying and working, so today I would have a life instead of wasting mine to keep her alive.
I couldn't have a lot of friends there, I was just a servant after all, and always too shy or to introspective to keep a conversation flowing, but it wasn't hard to notice people liked me around them. Especially the men. When they acknowledged the way people in town used to call me, soon Alinne didn't exist anymore, just the "little one".
"Hey, little one, can you bring me some sugar please?"
One of the physicists called me like that once while lunching and as I did what he asked, everybody did the same. They liked the way the quiet and short cute girl answered to that nickname. As a matter of fact they seemed to like me more as they figured it didn't bother me at all. They expected me to get angry, as I never made any jokes, never laughed or talked to anyone without motive. I think they were glad to know I was a nice and easy person after all, which was quite true. In no time everybody knew me at the company too. Which brought me to Mr. Kevin.
