I need to leave this car immediately or I am going to do things that will get us both expelled on the first day.
"You..." I clear my throat, trying to recover from the cardiac event she just induced. "You speak French."
She grins, leaning back in her seat like a cat who just knocked a glass off the counter and feels absolutely no remorse.
"A little bit."
I narrow my eyes, deciding to test her. I slip into rapid French without warning.
"Alors, si tu parles vraiment français, dis-moi quelque chose d'impressionnant."
She pouts immediately, her lower lip jutting out in a protest that makes me want to do incredibly inappropriate things in this parking lot.
"Well, that is not nice. I said a little. You just lobbed an entire paragraph at me. Do not be rude."
I huff, amused.
"But you understood enough to know it was not nice, so you clearly speak more than a little."
She shrugs, that mischievous energy radiating from her in waves.
"You have to when you are trying to be an international sensation. French, Japanese, and a smidge of Italian. The judges respond better when you can charm them in their native tongue during press events. Trust me."
International sensation. She was training at that level. Multilingual competency for foreign competitions and press circuits.
And she had to surrender all of it.
"Why did you stop?" I ask, quieter now. "If you loved it so much. If you were training to compete internationally. What happened?"
She sits with the question for a long moment, her gaze drifting to the windshield. The morning sun has crept higher, casting golden light across the parking lot that makes her dark hair shimmer.
"I honestly do not know," she admits, her voice stripped of its usual bravado. "That is the truth. I wish I had a clear answer like money or injury or timing. But it was more like the joy just drained out of it. Slowly. Drop by drop. Until one morning I looked at my skates and felt nothing."
She swallows.
"Maybe it was the weight of everything else. The rejection. Surviving on leftovers and pity. Trying to keep myself alive tookevery ounce of energy I had, and there was nothing left for the thing I loved most. Skating requires your whole heart, and mine was too busy just trying to keep beating."
She looks down at her hands, turning them over like she is examining them for evidence of the girl she used to be.
"I used to have calluses on my palms from gripping the boards during stretches," she murmurs. "They are gone now. Smoothed over. Like that version of me got erased and replaced with someone who just knows how to survive."
She blinks, then shakes her head like she is dispersing a cloud of memories.
"But I would like to find out. What really happened. Why I stopped. Maybe do some soul searching and figure out if the passion is still buried in there somewhere, underneath all the survival mode and the fear."
I nod, understanding in a way that resonates deep in my own chest.
"Maybe that is what made this school so enticing," I say. "For both of us. A new beginning while trying to find ourselves. Who we actually are, underneath the labels and expectations everyone else stacked on top of us."
She looks at me, and the smile that crosses her face is different from the others. Not teasing. Not guarded. Just warm and genuine and real.
"Yeah," she agrees softly. "A new beginning."
We sit in the quiet for a moment longer, letting the weight of everything we have shared settle into comfortable silence. Her scent fills the car, my scent fills the car, and the combination of evergreens and vanilla sugar creates an atmosphere that makes me want to stay right here forever.
But we have class.
I check the time on the dashboard and wince.
