All the characters depicted in ths story are 18 years old or older.
*
Steven and Nadia Adamo were twins. When they were ten an unusual thing happened to them. Their uncle died. Now an uncle dying isn't that all that unusual. But for Steven and Nadia this death was surrounded by strange circumstances.
The twins' mother, Mirela, was from eastern Europe and had emigrated to the States in the late 60's. She had met their father at university in Chicago. Steven and Nadia had asked their mother many times to tell them about her family. But their mother had simply replied that her family had moved around a lot and beyond that she became very vague.
Some years after Mirela had moved, Uncle Luca came over from the old country with his wife Drina. They had come to Chicago because that's where Mirela lived. Mirela never said anything to Steven and Nadia about why her brother left Europe. Then, as it turned out, there wasn't much time to find out about Luca and Drina because three months after they arrived in the United States, Luca was found dead in a park not far from the apartment where he lived with Drina. The cause of his death was never revealed.
It was all very sketchy to Steven and Nadia who were still young at the time. Although they weren't allowed to go to the funeral, they were present at a wake at Luca's home the night before.
Most of the people there the children didn't know and the evening went by in a blur until at one point aunt Drina cornered them with their mother.
She had an ornate wooden box about the size of a cigar box that she handed to Steven.
"This is for you and sister..." Drina intoned gravely in her stilted English.
"It is heirlooms...Is proper word, heirlooms?...from family...for you. Has some value. Not so much. But important for you later. Keep it safe yes?..." Drina said, looking sternly at the children to impress on them the importance of her words.
Of course Steven and Nadia were spellbound and couldn't wait to see what was in the box. And they weren't disappointed.
The box was filled with coins and paper money, a few pieces of jewelry and what looked like some precious stones. It was like a treasure box and the children were awestruck to be entrusted with such a valuable gift.
Receiving that box of treasure was the one thing that Steven and Nadia both remembered about their uncle's death.
Of course it later turned out that the coins and the paper money were all from Slavic countries that had split apart or was currency from European countries that pre-dated the Euro and as such would eventually become worthless. The jewelry and the gems were all costume, pretty to look at but not really worth anything either.
Still the children regarded the box as their inheritance and kept it safe for all the years that followed. Of course it got put away in the back of various drawers but every once in a while Steven or Nadia would stumble upon it and would go through it with the same child like wonder that they had the first time they had seen it.
It was just after the twins eighteenth birthday that Steven happened to find the box again as he was reorganizing his room before he went away to college in the fall. As he idly fingered the stones and coins he noticed that there was the corner of a folded piece of paper sticking out from under the lining of the box. He worked the paper out and opened it.
There was a picture of two rings on it and just a few lines of writing. Steven recognized the rings. They were in the box and had some Cyrillic script engraved on the outside of them just like the rings pictured on the paper.
The writing in the note was in roman characters but in some foreign language that Steven didn't recognize. He went to his computer and got on 'Babel Fish', the translator. He tried a few words in Polish, in Czech, in Russian, but he got nothing.
Then he tried Romani. Bingo! He was getting a translation. He carefully typed in all the lines from the note and this is what it said.
' -The Romani Rings-' When the rightful heir of the Romani Rings comes of age, his dreams can be his reality. For the rest, their reality will be but a dream. For dreams are often more believable than the truth.'
Steven puzzled over this cryptic message for a while. 'Babel Fish' was notorious for being literal and didn't always translate the actual meaning of a word or phrase. But try as he might, he couldn't twist anything more fathomable out of the words on the note.
So Steven put the paper back in the box and figured that he might try one of the rings soon. They were kind of striking in an understated way and he was curious, if pretty skeptical, to see if wearing one was going to change his life.
The following Friday Steven fished a ring out of the box to wear. He didn't really put it on with any kind of plan in mind. He just felt like wearing it.
The only plan he did have in mind was to talk to Lindsey O'Meara. Lindsey was one of the hottest girls at school and David had a long standing crush on her. So much so that when she asked him out of the blue if she could take a look at his chemistry term paper before he handed it in, he didn't have the heart to refuse her. Being a whiz at math and sciences had branded him as pretty much a nerd and he didn't get a lot of chances to interact with the really A-list girls at school. He just asked Lindsey not to copy his work too blatantly or they'd both get in trouble. Lindsey gave him a quick peck on the cheek in thanks that made him blush mightily.
Apparently she hadn't really been paying attention to him though because not only did she turn in a nearly perfect paper, so did Danielle Spencer and Mike Monaghan, her airhead girlfriend and airhead boyfriend respectively. The likelihood of this happening was so remote that Mrs. Blain had come to question David about it, the only boy in the class who was actually capable of such excellent work.
Fortunately Steven had had a premonition that something like this might happen so he had dumbed down his own paper considerably before he turned it in. Mrs. Blain might have had her suspicions but she didn't really have any grounds to prove that there had been a conspiracy. David had gotten away with some glib remarks like "Even a broken clock is right twice a day...and...Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while, miss" but Mrs. Blain made it clear that she'd be keeping an eye on him.
So David felt that Lindsey owed him an explanation or an apology or something and he wanted to talk to her.
Oddly enough Danielle came up to him just after the lunch break with a big smile on her face. She was irrepressibly good natured and everybody loved her. She wasn't overly tall and had her dirty blonde hair swept up in a kind of a swirl on her head, presumably to look taller. She was wearing her blue and gold cheer leader outfit and her sneakers and was looking pretty cute. There was a pep rally after lunch and Danielle was on the squad. She said Lindsey wanted to talk to him. Steven looked around but didn't even see Lindsey.
