Page 13 of Try Hard
I laughed, standing up from my car. “I’m surprised you didn’t take drama with those acting skills,” I said of the accent and attitude she’d put on.
She waved me off. She really was more confident than she’d been in school, but I suspected this version had been inside her all along. For as long as I’d known her, there had been a fireinside her. Sure, she’d been shy and behaved, but she’d also been more than happy to deviate from the peer mentor guidelines to actually engage with Sophie. She’d been carving her own path, even then. You didn’t do that without a little fire inside you.
I checked for moving vehicles before standing in the middle of the path and turning slowly. “I’m going to guess which car in this parking lot belongs to your dad.”
She breathed a quiet laugh, one clearly not intended for me, but I heard it and I turned to face her again.
She bit down on her smile, trying unsuccessfully to hide it. “Carry on,” she prompted.
“Not until you tell me why that’s so amusing to you.”
“It’s not.”
“Do you always laugh at unamusing things?”
“More than you’d think.”
“Oh, of course. It’s just your style to walk down the street laughing at shops, lawns, bins.”
Her smile grew wider on the last word.
“What?” I asked, laughing even though I didn’t know what we were laughing at. I just wanted to be amused with her.
“Nothing,” she insisted, turning back to the cars. “Tell me what your guess is.”
Without thinking it through, I reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her back into me. It was only when she stumbled that I thought through the fact that she likely wasn’t as used to tactile contact as I was. I steadied her and let go. “Sorry.”
She shook her head, her gaze fixed somewhere around my chin. “You’re good.”
“Great. So, tell me what we’re laughing about.”
She glanced up and her eyes looked so brown with the way the light hit them, just the tiniest flashes of green streaking through them. I knew in that moment that hazel eyes would always be my favourite.
“You said ‘parking lot’.” She breathed the words, only loud enough because of my proximity.
“Okay?” I frowned in confusion.
“But you also said ‘bin’.”
“Oh, I see.” The penny well and truly dropped.
“I just think it’s interesting which words and phrases people hold onto from their home language, and the ones they change. Those that stick around even after they go home.”
I smiled. I was enjoying the way her mind worked far too much—the attention to detail, the fact she’d noticed it before, the things she found interesting, the way she really listened to people. “I spent a lot of time in parking lots. There are a lot of them in the US. So, I heard the word a lot and it kind of just… stuck. I said bin, but sometimes I say trash. Heard that word a lot there, too.”
She grinned up at me and I was pretty sure I was blushing, but I hoped she’d just put it down to the cold air.
“Any British words you just straight up forgot while you were there?” she asked, genuinely curious. “I know it’s not a different language exactly, but—”
“Two peoples divided by a common language and all that.”
“Yeah.”
I thought her question through. “There was once a conversation about what everyone on the team called…” I hesitated, laughing, suddenly unsure what to even call them. “Erm… carbonated beverages.”
She smiled widely, the grin reaching her eyes in a way that felt like winning. “Fizzy drinks?”
I nodded slowly, pressing my lips together briefly. “Yeah. Those. There’s some real fierce regional varieties on that one, and, as everyone was answering, I didn’t think it through because I just thought I knew what we called them. But, then… it got to me and my mind went blank. I spent ten minutesdebating different names for it before we all gave up. I did get to tell everyone about Tizer, though, so they forgave me for not knowing what I’d call it.”
