Chapter Three
When I was in sixth grade, my teacher taught us to annotate our books by looking for what he termed signposts in the text. One of them was called again and again. See something come up over and over again? Underline it with your green pen.
All this to say, being sweaty already by nine-thirty in the morning has green pen all over it.
Liam and I lean against each other as Ms. Barlowe herds us over to a waiting area so that she and Ms. Galanis can collect our group passes from the Acropolis ticketing booth.
The leaning isn’t out of affection but sheer necessity.
If he weren’t there to prop me up, I’d fall over from exhaustion.
It’s a bright two-thirty a.m. in New York right now, and I understand why Ms. Barlowe is obsessed with melatonin.
My eye bags are digging canals across my face.
Melanie slumps over to us. She’s clutching an iced coffee as big as her head (curls included). She makes eye contact with me as she takes a long sip. “I had fun last night, but right now I’m sort of regretting running into you people at the elevator.”
“I’d say I’m sorry,” I say, shrugging, “but I’m deeply not.”
Melanie touches her fingers to her chest in mock tenderness. “That glad to spend the night with me?”
“More that my morning misery loves the company,” I say with a grin.
She laughs, and I fight off with a spiked chain the thought that she has the cutest laugh ever. Paige says that OCD can come with intrusive thoughts, aka upsettingly unwanted thoughts my brain allegedly has a hard time fending off. That must be what this is.
Probably.
Before I can investigate this theory further, Ms. Barlowe and Ms. Galanis return with our tickets.
“Who’s ready to see the Acropolis?”
Despite my exhaustion, I join in with the cheers that erupt from the rest of the group.
I mean, it’s the Acropolis. We all saw it from afar on our drive through Athens yesterday (and of course on our sneaky terrace trip), but now we’re about to see it up close.
Athena ranks high on everyone’s list of favorite goddesses, and her most iconic temple is here.
Next to me, Lucy is practically vibrating. She’s doing a chunk of her project on the Parthenon Marbles, and she’s been talking nonstop about seeing the Acropolis in person. It might even outrank the food.
To get to the Parthenon, we hike up a marble-paved pathway that’s already crowded with a thick line of tourists, even though we got here pretty early.
I wait in line with my head on Liam’s shoulder, taking in the views of the city as we make our way to the top of the rocky hill.
The higher we climb, the more we can see of Athens unfurling below us.
The Acropolis is surrounded by a large patch of greenery—tall, thin trees shooting straight up at us from below.
Beyond them, the city sprawls outward, a collection of white buildings crowded together around the array of streets cutting through them.
We keep making our way up the sloped pathway to the Acropolis, the crowded line shuffling forward.
The walkway is made slippery by the white marble paved over it, worn from the years of tourists forming the same line.
Eventually, we reach the top. The slope flattens into a wide, rocky space that houses the ancient temple.
As soon as we’re past the entrance framed with columns on both sides, Lucy loops her arm around mine and pulls me straight for the Erechtheion, the smaller temple on the north side of the Acropolis. Because of course she does.
“Are you ready to see the caryatids?” she asks, referring to the statues of women who serve as the temple’s columns.
“These are the copies,” I remind her, and she shoots me a look that screams Duh.
“It’s still the Erechtheion,” she says, pulling up short when we reach it.
Even though I feel slightly silly standing with my back to the Parthenon, it’s hard to deny the beauty of the smaller temple tucked in a corner of the wide-open space at the top of the hill. It’s held up in part by the replicas of the six caryatids.
Five of the originals now live in the Acropolis Museum down the road, which opened in 2009 in an attempt to convince Britain to return all the Parthenon Marbles they stole. They did no such thing, because of course, and so the sixth caryatid still stands alone in the British Museum.
I know it’s that thought that has Lucy choked up right now.
“They have to give her back.”
“All of it,” I agree.
The caryatid is the most famous of the missing marbles, but the British Museum is also holding on to 247 feet of the original Parthenon frieze—the intricate marble sculpture that decorated the upper part of the temple.
It depicts a Panathenaic festival, in which Athens celebrated the birthday of their patron goddess, Athena.
The whole temple is dedicated to her, after one of my favorite stories.
Poseidon and Athena once fought for the right to make the city theirs.
In their contest, they offered the people two gifts.
Poseidon’s water spring was a massive disappointment, because the sea god made salt water run from the ground.
Athena planted an olive tree, and with its high-quality wood and fruit that would make Greece’s signature oil, it was the easy choice. The city became hers.
Like everyone else in the cohort, I’m not immune to fangirling over Athena.
She’s the goddess of wisdom, among other things, and that makes her an automatic headliner for a group of certified nerds like us.
Knowing that these stones were erected in her honor over two thousand years ago and continue to watch over the city that still bears her name is enough to make me emotional.
Still arm in arm, Lucy and I turn to make our way around the Parthenon itself.
The weight of her arm against mine is a bittersweet feeling.
Lucy and I used to be on the path to becoming much closer friends.
But then she caught me crying in the bathroom at school when I was freaking out about Amanda Goldstein asking me to homecoming.
I made the mistake of trusting Lucy with the whole story—how I’d let myself flirt with Amanda for weeks while we struggled through our algebra problem sets, how her smile gave me butterflies, how it all became too real the second the question came out of her mouth and panic overtook me.
How I’d found myself in the bathroom, overwhelmed with embarrassment at having led her on for so long, indulging my own wants, only to lose myself in the maze of my own fear at the thought of actually going out with her.
It was the moment when, caught crying in the bathroom with the heat of the emotions still coursing through me, I’d let my heart spill to Lucy.
“How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you?” I’d asked her, water running in the sink between us as she encouraged me to dab its coolness on my cheeks. “That they won’t hurt you?”
It was that thought that had sent me running from my algebra classroom. I hadn’t started seeing Paige yet. Didn’t know that I was so fundamentally wrecked, there was no way I could ever let someone truly get to know me deeply enough to love me like that.
“I don’t think you can,” Lucy had responded. She’d said more, about things being worth the risk, but I’d taken it as all the confirmation I needed. No amount of fun at homecoming was worth the risk of ending up hurt because I went with the wrong person.
After that I was too embarrassed to look Lucy in the face, let alone hang out with her anymore. Every time I saw her, the shame of that moment, of having spilled so much of myself, came rushing back.
We never had a fight, but the closeness of our friendship petered out, a skipping stone that sunk to the sandy depths before it could make it out to sea.
I wish I could call it back to the surface, retrace its original path, but I’m not sure how to do that without acknowledging what happened.
And that I definitely don’t know how to do.
“I want to incorporate the frieze into my project somehow,” Lucy tells me now. “Maybe some kind of contemporary element to translate it culturally.”
“You could recast the people on it as modern figures,” I suggest. A voice in the back of my head whispers that I should keep my mouth shut, that I’m just helping the competition.
But then Lucy brightens, and I drop the thought. That can’t be the vibe of this trip. And that’s no way to resuscitate our friendship.
As we make our way to the far end of the Parthenon, pausing to admire the ancient white stones towering above us, we giggle as we come up with increasingly ridiculous ideas for who Lucy should add to her contemporary frieze.
“I’m putting the cast of Mamma Mia! on horseback,” Lucy says, and I collapse into laughter against her shoulder.
We’re both laughing so hard that we don’t notice Melanie walking toward us until I bump into her. She’s still nursing her massive frappé, although an alarming amount of it is gone, considering it’s only been half an hour since I saw it full.
“Want some?” She holds it out to me, grinning. “I see that exhausted, yearning stare.”
I laugh again. “You’re my savior.”
“Once again,” Melanie teases.
I take a long sip. It’s stronger than I expected, though to be fair, my usual order is a chai latte that’s more syrup than caffeine. The coffee flavor jolts through me, a burst of energy that I desperately needed.
“Thanks,” I say as I hand it back to her. “That did indeed save me.”
“Happy to help.” Melanie squints as the sun hits her eyes, transforming them into a pool of amber. I could drown in them.
I blink the thought away. Intrusive. Probably brought on by caffeine overdose.
As soon as Melanie is out of earshot, Lucy turns to me with the kind of grin that makes my blood run cold, even though the rising temperatures and hike up to the top of the Acropolis have made me sweatier still.