She liked to think that all of the advice he’d been handing out that afternoon fell into the category of good advice, though she appreciated his honesty. Not everybody could be right about everything all of the time, though some people, particularly university students, she’d discovered, often pretended that they were.
“I’ve learned from experiences,” she assured him, like being overcharged at Zara and not being able to prove it, for example. “No, it’s not offensive,” she insisted with a dismissive wave of her hand. It was fair to say that she wasn’t easily offended but Naomi found it strange to think that anybody would be offended by somebody asking where they were from. She was curious to know where all of her new classmates were from. Did they come from other states? Other cities? Countries far away? She wanted to meet somebody from Alaska, especially. It seemed like such an unusual place to be, though she understood it was considered a part of the U.S. for some reason. “I’m from Germany, in the North,” she explained, convinced that nobody would recognise her hometown even if she named it. “- and you? You are local?” she asked curiously, charmed by his interest.
Naomi chuckled at his joke sincerely, “The last time I checked, it was not,” she assured him, the American way of life was different to that in Europe but surely not that different. She couldn’t remember the ‘other one’ either, if she’d ever learned it at all, “-and that’s why I’m never going to be anybody’s doctor,” she concurred, “I’m not a masochist,” she added, her skin crawling at even the thought of having to sit through a university lecture about titration or similar. “What do you study?” she had to assume that it wasn’t chemistry but some people were hard, if not impossible to predict.
"Germany!! Oh, nice. I’ve been to Frankfurt and Munich-- nowhere else, though, and I was busy the whole time so I didn’t have a chance to properly sightsee like I would’ve wished,” he gushes with enthusiasm. “Didn’t know a word of German, though, which did make things semi-difficult. Well, that’s not quite true-- I knew two words. Ja and nein. Mostly did a lot of miming and praying that people spoke English. Ha. Are you freshly from Germany? I don’t remember ever seeing you around before.” Not that he knows everyone on campus, obviously, but he does tend to make his way around.
Is he local? It’s funny, thinking about how long you have to live somewhere before you can stake that claim. “I’ve been here the better part of two years now, so I suppose I could call myself local at this point,” Jamie muses, delighted at the realization. “But no, originally from across the pond like you--Brighton-and-Hove, in East Sussex, United Kingdom, most well-known for our gorgeous rock beaches and aggressive seagulls.” But he does love it here, barring certain quirky American-isms. Like their entire political system, and their sub-par biscuits.
Her comment about chemistry being masochistic makes him grin. Clearly they’re of the same mind on that account. “I’m humanities-adjacent, you could say-- dance major, performance track. That falls under that broader category of the human experience, yeah?”
