Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
“Say what again?”
“Yep. I can hear it. It’s… North Africa. Morocco… Marrakesh.”
I look over at Irina. She’s got her eyebrows up in a little bit of a panic. “Did I forget to mention that Nandy is a linguist?”
“Oh.” I look back at Nandy and reassess. Well, shit. Two minutes in and I’ve presented her with a spectacular question—which comes popping right out of her mouth.
“How did that happen?” She’s talking to me, but here’s what’s weird. She’s looking at Irina when she asks that question.
Irina is not good at this. Her slight panic of raised eyebrows morphs into open-mouth shock. Forcing me to jump in with a lie. “My father was a sailor. On the Mediterranean. So we spent a lot of time in Morocco.”
Which doesn’t really add up, or answer her question, because Marrakesh isn’t on the fuckin’ sea.
“Hmm.” Nandy is looking at me with a very critical eye. “Yes. I can hear the Casablanca too. So what took you to Marrakesh? Shopping?”
It’s a half-serious question. The ‘shopping’ part was sarcasm. “You’ve got a good ear there.”
“That’s not an answer. But yes, I do.” Nandy is tipping her chin up as she speaks, kinda challenging me. “There are many different types of geniuses in this world. Some are fluent in equations. Some paint heavenly pictures or compose music that can make you cry. I decipher speech. I can detect a hundred and twenty-one different regional dialects in English, plus ten in Spanish, twelve in Portuguese, three in Russian, nine in French, and nineteen in Arabic. I’m working on a few others, and for my Master’s thesis I’m using a combination of several English dialects to create a whole new one. Once I’m done with that, I’ll be going into voice biometrics for my PhD. And you, friend, have a very interesting accent. Very unique. Did you know that an accent is like a fingerprint and it can be forensically traced?”
I don’t know what to say, but Irina jumps in so I don’t have to answer. “Come on, Nandy. You don’t have to be so confrontational.”
Nandy smiles at me. Fake. Then turns her real smile towards Irina. “I’m not being confrontational. I’m just curious. You know how my mind works.” Then she looks back at me. “You’re the guy who ruined Irina’s date last week.”
I shrug with my hands. “Guilty. That guy wasn’t her type.”
“And you are?”
“Nandy!” Irina is getting mad for real now. “Stop it. We just came in for some dinner.”
Nandy lets out a breath and forces herself to relax. Then she, once again, directs her attention to Irina. “Argentine rice bowl?”
Irina nods and smiles, placated. “Two, please.”
Nandy slaps her hands on the table and stands up. “I’ll be right back.” Then she disappears the way she came.
I switch chairs and look at Irina. “Did you know she could do that?”
“No. I mean, I know she’s good with languages. And she’s the one who helped me lose the Russian accent. But I had no idea she could tune it in like that.”
“She knows you’re not Russian, Irina. She has to. She picked out two different cities in Morocco. I was only in that country for six months and I was nine.”
“Well… so what? Does it matter?”
“She’s gonna figure out your past. And mine. Do you really want to have that conversation with her?”
Irina considers this, her attention drawn off to the left a little as she tries to imagine what telling her friend the truth might entail. Then she sighs. “No. I guess not. But it’s too late now. And if she figured you out so quick, then she’s known all along that I’m not really Russian. She has to have picked up on the Portuguese. I’m pretty fluent in that one. You can’t live in Brazil for ten years and not pick up on the language. But she never asked me any questions about it.”
“She probably didn’t want to pry.”
“Yeah. Maybe. We didn’t start as friends. She was my language teacher.”
“So you were a client. She wouldn’t ask a client questions like that. And probably, after a while, she just let it go, or maybe even forgot about it. But then I show up talking like a Dubliner from Marrakesh and now she’s probably remembering, right in this moment, that you’ve got the same pattern.”
Irina exhales in frustration. “It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if you hadn’t burst in on my not-date last weekend acting like a jealous asshole.”
“Where the hell do you get ‘jealous asshole’ from? He wasn’t your type. I was giving you an out.”
Irina scoffs. “Right.”
“We were gonna train the next morning and I wanted you fresh. How was I supposed to know that your best friend was a language genius who would use my accent to track down my past?”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. She knows what she knows.”