Page 24 of Afterglow
“I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t have to do that. I was gonna ride my bike.”
“You can’t ride that thing. The wheels are all messed up.”
“Nah,” I dismiss him with a wave. “It’s fine. I’ve been riding it these past couple weeks, no problem. I have to pedal harder, that’s all.”
“Well, now you don’t have to.” His mouth tightens. “You could get yourself hurt.”
And why does he care?
“I’m a grown woman.” Barely a functioning adult, but okay, Behraz. “I’m not your responsibility.”
Fletcher frowns. “Doesn’t mean you’re allowed to risk getting hurt.”
“Fine,” I say through a sigh. “You can drive me.”
He goes upright and folds his arms across his broad chest. “Good.”
My index finger wags. “But this is not gonna be an everyday thing.”
Chapter 9
Overdue for a Good Wallow
Fletcher
DrivingBehraz around every day is my favorite part of the day.
I could listen to her talk forever.
And to think, this brilliant woman thought she was stupid. A tragedy, really.
It’s nice not to worry about initiating conversation or if I’m asking too many personal questions when she offers it up herself.
In a matter of a couple of weeks, I’ve learned so much about her. And I don’t want to stop.
“Wait, did you not know I was Parsi?” she asked when I commented that the language she spoke with her parents on the phone was similar to what I’d heard Indi use with her family.
I didn’t know. The Google search for the word gulabi had inconclusive results, spanning across the languages of Hindi, Urdu, and Farsi. And I misspelled Parsi as Farsi, confusing me further.
“Seemed rude to ask.”
She clapped her hands together as we idled in traffic. “Time for a little history lesson. Parsi basically means Persian.”
Oh, so she’s Iranian?I thought to myself.
“But my ancestors fled Iran during the Islamic conquest, because we’re Zoroastrians and were being persecuted.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Please, it was hundreds of years ago. Anyway, my ancestors basically ended up on the west coast of India and were given asylum by the then-king of Gujarat. There was a lot of assimilation, so we speak Gujarati, too, like Indi, and a lot of our culture is the same, but there are differences in religious customs and traditional food.”
“That’s cool.”
Unlike that response, numbnuts.
“And like many other Gujarati business people during the British rule of India, Parsis found themselves in various colonies where the opportunity arose. My great-grandparents moved from Mumbai to Uganda, then my grandparents shifted to Tanzania, where my parents were born. My brother and I were born there, too.”
