Her books are already spread across the rickety coffee table. I pick up and flip through her Econ textbook, pulling it back a little to read notes in the margin.
“You do know you need glasses, right?” She moves her books to make room for mine.
“No, I don’t.” I scrunch my face. “That’s crazy.”
“Are you worried about how you’ll look?”
“No,” I answer honestly.
“Figures,” she mutters, a small smile teasing the corner of her mouth.
“No,” I repeat firmly, maybe slightly defensively because the words do blur a little. “I just don’t need glasses.”
She shrugs and laughs under her breath, flopping onto the couch and digging into her backpack for supplies. Her heavy coat is draped over the armrest of the lumpy couch. Heavy coat. Oversized sweatshirt. Baggy jeans. How’s a guy supposed to know what’s under all that? For the first time in . . . ever, I don’t think I even care.
“Albright will expect you to defend your position,” she says, and I realize I’d tuned out while she sat and cleared space on the table for my books. “You know what he always says.”
“Convince me,” we say in unison, laughing and mocking our professor’s deep voice. He constantly challenges us to prove our points and to thoughtfully articulate why we believe what we say we do.
“I was so intimidated by him at the beginning of the semester,” she confesses, traces of our humor lingering around her eyes and mouth.
“Didn’t seem that way. You answered the man in Russian from the last row of the auditorium,” I remind her. “Seemed pretty confident to me.”
“It’s no different than answering him in English.” She pushes a stray strand of silky hair fallen from the topknot behind her ear. She does that when she feels self-conscious. For all her tells, she hasn’t told me much, and I have no idea where I stand with her, unless it’s firmly in the friend zone.
“Yeah, no different because you speak Russian.” I dip my head and try to catch her gaze, smiling when she sketches on her notebook and refuses to look up. “And Spanish. And Italian. And soon Chinese.”
“Well, Spanish was the first language I heard at home.” She shrugs one shoulder. “Mama thinks it’s a travesty for Hispanic people not to speak it. I grew up bilingual and realized I had a knack for picking up languages pretty easily.”
“You seem to have quite a few ‘knacks.’ Is there anything you don’t do well?”
A wry smile tips her mouth. “Jokes.”
“Jokes?”
“Yeah, I’m really bad at them.”
“Convince me,” I say, using Professor Albright’s signature phrase.
“What?” Eyes wide, she finally looks up from her doodling.
“Tell me one of these bad jokes.”
“Oh, gosh.” Faint color washes under her skin. “Okay.”
She traps her bottom lip and closes one eye, concentrating before clearing her expression and looking back to me and speaking.
“Knock, knock.”
“Seriously?”
“Knock,” she says firmly. “Knock.”
I sigh and bite into a smile.
“Who’s there?”
“Europe.”