"You can't be serious." Her grandfather stood motionless at the back window of the kitchen, staring at the endless fresh white blanket on the patio and grass. He grumbled a few curses to himself in Arabic, something with more than one khara. "I swear I am going crazy. It just snowed last week. And the week before. And the week before."

"You know it can snow more than once in a month, Fouad," Zaid said, looking up from his bowl of cereal—Raisin Bran.

Talia refrained from commenting on the banality.

Her grandfather whirled around, and for the first time, he looked like he couldn't stand Zaid. Actually, he looked like he couldn't stand anything, save for a hot, sunny day back in his homeland, but she wasn't even sure how warm it was over there this time of year, anyway.

"My apologies." Zaid ducked his head down and busied himself with reading the nutrition label on the box of cereal.

Fouad took a seat across from them, digging both of his palms into the table's surface. "The problem is that the absolute idiot of a snow plower we hire always comes and goes at his will." He grabbed one of his wife's homemade date cookies from the display on the table. Chewing aggressively, he continued, "The driveway is still full of snow and ice, and I promised Salma I would take her out shopping today. She will cut my head off if I keep her from the post-Christmas sales any longer."

"You can't just call him up?" Talia asked, clueless about how snow plowing worked.

You have to pay to get rid of snow you didn't ask for?

"As if he will answer," he said, rubbing his hand down his face. "Now I have to go out there myself, only for it to snow again next week!"

"No, no, no," Talia said, extending her hand across the table, palm up. "I'll do it. Zaid can help, right?" She kicked his ankle under the table, giving him no choice but to say yes.

"Of course," he chimed, shooting her a wide grin. "I've done this many times before. We can have the driveway cleared in less than an hour."

Her grandfather looked up from his snow-induced despair, brown eyes softening. "Oh, thank you so much." Standing up, he planted a kiss on the top of her head and then pulled her into a bone-crushing hug, before mumbling into her ear, "Just try not to kill each other."

***

"So, how many times have you done this before?"

Zaid looked up from behind a mountain of dirt-laden snow, shovel in tow. Neither of them had made a dent yet, too horrified by how much worse the job looked once they'd made it outside.

"Once," he said. "Last week."

"Once?" She marched across the driveway in her black Chelsea boots, the closest things she had to the right shoes for this weather. She slid forward on a frozen patch, catching herself before she head-butted his chest again. "You said many times. 'Many times' doesn't mean once in English."

"It's not rocket science, Talia." He scooped up a small amount and threw it behind him. Half of it landed on his head and slid down his black parka, melting on the warm surface. "Okay maybe it's not that easy. But not hard...yet."

"That's what she said."

Zaid didn't find her adolescent humor endearing, pressing his lips into a firm line and marching past her to the other side of the driveway. Groaning softly, Talia fumbled with her shovel, hoping if she stared at him long enough, she would figure out what she was supposed to be doing.

He began pushing lines of snow down the length of the driveway, having to stop every once in a while when his shovel hit an especially frozen patch. He let out a few groans when he had to clear the new pile onto fun-sized Mount Everest at the end of the driveway, having accumulated since the start of the cold season. After observing him for an adequate amount of time, she began working on the piece of the driveway that jutted out from the garage.

The first few shovels cleared out around a third of the asphalt, forcing her to create a new hill on the other end. But by the time she reached the middle of the expanse, her shovel hit pure snow-covered ice.

"Crap," she breathed out, watching her breath vaporize in the air.

Using her pent-up anger at this entire ordeal, she pounded the concrete-like surface with the other end of her shovel. It didn't budge. A few more curses and exaggerated hand movements later, a few fissures appeared. She soon gave up on the shovel altogether, chucking it onto the grass, and began jumping up and down on the same area.

"What on earth, Talia?"

Zaid stood across from her while she continued assaulting the ice with the soles of her shoes.

"The shovel was useless," she said, calming down and using only one foot as a weapon. "I'm improvising."

"No, you're going to give yourself a heart attack." He clamped her shoulder and pulled her down towards the earth, then grabbed her other arm and forced her to look into his eyes. "Unless hypothermia hits you first. Where's your hat, Talia?"

"I f-forgot it inside."

Before she could justify herself, Zaid had yanked off his black beanie and pulled it down over her head, halfway over her eyes. She giggled and pulled it up, finding a small grin on his face, too.

"Take over my side of the driveway, and I'll work on this."

He kicked around the ice shards with the toe of his boot before attempting to break through the remaining layers with his shovel. She left him to discover that impossibility by himself and marched to the spots he hadn't finished.

A few neighbors drove by on the main road as she worked tirelessly, giving her that awkward half-wave each time, some part of unspoken suburban courtesy. She ignored them all, not because she wanted to be rude, but because the strangeness of this activity was finally catching up to her. The worst forms of precipitation she got back home were mild rainstorms, and she always found a way to stay inside on those gloomy days.

"Khalas, I give up!" Zaid's shovel clattered against the half-cleared asphalt, startling her. "I give up, I give up, I give up!"

He clapped his hands with a boom, getting rid of the ice flecks and water droplets on his gloves, and began kicking the center of fun-sized Mount Everest with the toe of his boot, letting out his rage and frustration with every calculated blow.

She didn't have it in her to tell him that by the tenth kick, the snow plower was waiting at the end of the driveway, watching Zaid's fit from inside his truck.

***

"Never again."

Talia collapsed onto the other side of the sofa where Zaid had been switching between his phone and a small book for the last hour. She rubbed the length of her shoulder and upper back. Zaid passed her the ice pack wedged between his T-shirt and the inside of his sweatshirt, something she hadn't noticed when she'd first sat down. She took it without question, not realizing he was sore in a different spot.

"Wait, so you weren't kidding about the broken rib?"

He shook his head, flipping a page. "Old sports injury. Never really healed."

"Then you should take this back."

She dropped the ice pack onto his lap and dragged her aching body to the kitchen before he could shove it her way again. There were no ice packs in the freezer, but she figured a pack of frozen peas could do the same job.

Who even likes peas?

"Were you good?"

He looked up, pushing his glasses to his head. "Good at what?"

"Good at soccer," she said. "Or football. Whatever." It still sounded weird rolling off her tongue, because football equated to the 49ers in her head.

"Football. And isn't that a stupid question to ask?" His words felt like a stab to the chest, until he continued, "Of course I'm going to say yes. The real question, did other people think I was good?"

She huffed. "Well, did they, asshole?"

"Yes," he said, smirking. She rolled her eyes, pulling back when he turned onto his side and rested his elbow on the top of the sofa. "But even I knew I was no Cristiano Ronaldo, so I became best friends with my textbooks for the rest of high school—for what feels like nothing at this point."

She wrinkled her brow. "What do you mean 'nothing'? There's no way you're failing out of college."

"And neither you, but is that the only way you define yourself? Grades? There's so much more to life than a transcript."

"No," she bit back, boiling at his haughty tone. "I do not. But I sure do when I have a career to work towards and don't have a year to waste in a foreign country exploring myself like an out-of-touch asshole."

He sucked in his cheeks and picked up his book again, aimlessly flipping through the pages. He didn't seem to have an answer prepared this time, or maybe he did, but it would involve divulging more information about his personal life, and it was clear by now that that wasn't his preferred pastime.

He soon turned on the TV and put down the book, while she took it from the sofa, hoping he wouldn't stop her. When he didn't, she began flipping through the brown pages, the old-book smell wafting through the air. She soon realized the indiscernible text was upside down, so she cracked it open from the other end.

The words remained unclear because the words weren't English.

"You can't read, can you?" Zaid asked, eyes focused on the Sunday Night Football game—actual football.

Not his football.

"You don't understand what you're watching, do you?"

"No," he said.

"No," she said.