Not following, I gripped the postcard so tightly I felt it crinkle in my palm. “But, Mom, Atlantis is a hoax. Why would you want me to get dragged down into Dad’s delusions again?”
“Delusions” was the wrong word. Pain flashed across her face before she smoothed it away, moving into lecture mode. “Liv, I don’t care about Atlantis. I care about you. Despite what your seventeen-year-old brain is telling you, you don’t have all the time in the world. One day you’ll wonder where all that time went.”
Her eyes met mine again, and the resolve in them frightened me. Now I knew exactly what was going on. She was thinking of her relationship with her father. They’d been close for most of her childhood, but after my dad entered the picture, things had turned rocky. He’d died before she had a chance to make things right with him.
She looked at me pleadingly. “Besides, I think you’ll actually really like this project.”
A vague, uncomfortable suspicion crept up on me. “Mom, how do you know what the project is?”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve been talking to him.”
“What?” I yelled. My hands were shaking again, the postcard flopping around. It all felt too… much. “Are you being serious?”
The ends of my mom’s shoulder-length hair brushed my arm as she stood next to me, her voice steady in my ear. “Yes,” she said firmly. “And I promised I wouldn’t tell you what the project is. Honey, he’s in a great place in his life. I talked it over with Ali, and she thinks this could be a good idea. I know you’ve been having the nightmares again. I can hear you all the way downstairs—”
“You told Ali I’m having nightmares again?” I yelped. Now I sounded like Julius when confronted with the prospect of a bath. Ali is my mom’s best friend from childhood and an adolescent psychologist. She lives in Maine, and I can always tell when they’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone together because my mom will use phrases like “assertive anger expression” and “self-defeating patterns.” If she’d called Ali about me, then she really was worried.
Ali was the one who had suggested that my mom and I get scuba certified as a way to combat the dreams. Maybe if my waking mind knew the ins and outs, my dreaming brain could calm down. I’d thrown a massive fit, but we’d done it anyway, taking a certification class at a local pool and then completing our certification on a family vacation to Mexico. Once I got over the panic part, it hadn’t been too bad; I had actually really enjoyed the feeling of freedom that came from breathing underwater. But my dreaming brain had not gotten the memo. Dreaming Liv drowned. Every. Single. Time.
She cupped my hands in hers, the band of her diamond ring pressing into my wrist. “This could be a good chance to reconcile, put some things to rest before you go out on your own.”
“Reconcile?” I sputtered. In our context, what did that even mean? We were not two warring countries needing to work things out. We were two countries who no longer had anything to do with each other.
Her face softened. “Also, honey. Your list. I keep thinking about your list.”
“Mom.” I twisted away from her. Now I was angry. That list was private, and I had asked her not to talk about it ever again. I was about to remind her of that when a James-intense knock made us both jump.
“Ellen?” James boomed. “Liv? Dax says you have a tennis court appointment with his sister at eleven.”
“Ten forty-five,” Dax said, clearly right next to him.
Without meaning to, I made a face. Dax’s twin, Cora, is not my favorite person in the world. Her name is cute, but she’s always stomping around in her ugly combat boots and glaring at people with her blue-green eyes. I’m almost 100 percent sure that she can see straight through me. That she knows that up until recently, I had never fit in anywhere.
But Dax claims that Cora wants to get to know me, and so we’ve been meeting up with her and her best friend for weekly tennis matches, a sport she excels in—mostly because she’s intent on murdering the ball—and I fail. Under the circumstances, tennis sounded laughable. Claustrophobia coiled its grip around me.
“We’ll be out in a minute. You two go have more cinnamon rolls,” my mom called.
“I can’t go. Mom, I can’t go.” I sounded like I was hyperventilating again, only this time I had to keep it down. And I wasn’t sure which place I was talking about. The tennis club? Greece? Both? I had plans after tennis to meet up with my friends to pick out what we were all going to wear at my school’s end-of-the-year bonfire, which I was hoping to talk Dax into attending with me. Nowhere in my plans was there fly to another country to confront the thing that hurt you most.
She pushed the bangs out of my eyes. “Honey, I really think you could use some time away. I’m worried you’re getting caught up in… distractions.”
Distractions? A second surge of anger surfaced, this one big enough to bring me to my feet.
“Mom, this isn’t about Dax,” I said.
“No, it isn’t,” she agreed. “This is about you. You don’t have to forgive your father, and you don’t have to help him with his project. But you do need to go.”
Panic built, hot and fast in my chest. “Mom, no. I can’t.”
“Yes. You can,” she said evenly. Her blue eyes met mine, and for a moment it felt like it did in the devastating years right after my father left, when it was the two of us, bumping into each other in one of our cramped, noisy apartments. We’d been through a lot together.
She set her cool hand on top of mine. “Ten days. You have to go for ten days. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to once you get there. But I do want you to go.”
Anyone listening in would assume she was making a request, but I knew my mother, and this was not a request—it was a nicely worded demand. My mom was what you’d call determined on a good day and stubborn on all the rest. She had to be. We wouldn’t have made it through the bad years otherwise. I knew that if she said I was going to Greece to spend ten days with someone I never thought I would see again, looking for a city the world didn’t believe ever existed, then that was exactly what I was going to do.
“But… senior trip. And I have plans with my friends, and…” I looked into her eyes and I knew. No matter what I said or did, I was going to Greece.
My entire summer shifted on its axis. Gravity lost meaning. I was falling, plummeting, with nothing to stop me or break my fall. End-of-year parties? Balboa with Dax? Any semblance of normal?
Gone. And all because of this ratty bit of paper. I stared down at the postcard, anger burrowing deep inside me as I read the line that felt worst.
I’m working on an exciting project, and I could really use your help here in Santorini, Indiana Olive.
Since when did he ever need my help? That was a game we used to play, and the fact was, in real life when I’d actually needed him, he hadn’t been there. He’d let me down. Even if he sent me a million postcards, that fact would never go away.
They could make me go, but they most certainly could not make me like it.
Chapter Three