When former beauty pageant queen, Ellie Wilde, hears of her grandmother's sickness, she's the first to offer to drive her to her chemotherapy. What she didn't know she was agreeing to was an obnoxiously cheerful blond boy somehow nudging his way int...
The sick boy says nothing, his eyes only shooting to Ellie briefly before finding his friend's once more. "Okay. Fine." He looks back to her, a slight frown tugging at his lips. "If you're all right wheeling me around, I'm all right getting a wheelchair for the day."
She considers this for a moment. She's not sure he should even be in a different country with how sick he seems to be, but it's clear this is what he wants, and who is she to deny him what he wants? Deciding that it's a good compromise, she nods her head in agreement.
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"I can't believe how scary the border patrol was," Cooper comments, laughing from the passenger seat as Ellie looks for a place to park in the crowded garage. "I don't even want to know what American border patrol will be like. I thought Canadians were the nice ones."
"I can't believe I didn't know that their speed signs would be in kilometers." She smoothly pulls into an open space, thankful to finally be able to get out of the car. Driving in a foreign country, even when that foreign country is only Canada, is terrifying. "That really tripped me up. I forgot our system is different from the rest of the world's."
"Well, we made it. We're here. We're officially Canadians."
"Oh?" She laughs. "That's how it works? We just come to Canada and we're officially citizens?"
"As far as I know, yeah." He smiles playfully before reaching for his door handle and making his way out of the vehicle. Ellie follows suit, being sure to lock the car before following him towards the entrance of the mall they parked under. Cooper reaches for her hand, locking their fingers together and giving it a quick squeeze.
Suddenly every squeeze has a much deeper meaning since Cooper revealed his past with hand-holding. Ellie's lips curl up into a smile as she gives his hand a squeeze in return, catching him by surprise.
He turns to her with a goofy smile and red-tinted cheeks, but it all but fades when Ellie says, "Let's go get you a wheelchair."
"I'd almost forgot," he says under his breath, though he doesn't argue against it.
They make their way out of the parking garage and find themselves in a brightly-lit shopping mall—much like a mall they'd see back home. Gazing around, they wait for something to strike them as 'foreign' but all that seems out of place to them is the lack of American flags.
"So this is Canada," Cooper says as they make their way through the crowd, his grip on Ellie's growing tighter with each bump of a shoulder.
"This is it," she says. "You know what's weird?"
"What?"
"All these people," she gestures to the crowd around them, "are Canadian."
He turns to her, eyebrows pulled together as a grin takes place on his lips. "Of course they're Canadian, Ellie."
