#3. CLOTH NAPKIN FROM CONSTANTINE’S FINEDINING, STOLEN EITHER BY MY MOTHER OR MY FATHER, DEPENDING ON WHO YOU ASK
My dad had moved out of the deli owner’s aunt’s cousin’s house and into an apartment with two of the chefs from Hermes, and he had to pick up a second job to make rent. A restaurant made sense—he could practice his English. Plus, the more he played up his Greekness, the bigger the tips were.
One night he was assigned to a table that housed a University of Chicago student named Ellen Williams, who was spending the summer working as an intern for a local politician. She was tall with long blond hair and the kind of laugh that made you look twice.
My dad said she spilled the pitcher of water on him on purpose. She said he was misremembering, though she’d always have a tiny gleam in her eyes when she said it. And, honestly, I wouldn’t put it past her. In the photos of them from that first summer—there aren’t many—my dad was handsome, with thick dark hair and his overeager smile, and my mom was so happy she looks dizzy.
A SHORT LIST OF RULES given to me by my mother regarding my trip to Santorini, Greece—a place I did not want to go to in the first place:
Call her morning and night.
No talking to strangers. Impossible, seeing as every single person on that island will be a stranger, including, at this point, my own father. I literally don’t even know what he looks like these days. And the last time he saw me, I had a Frida Kahlo–esque unibrow and was usually wearing a fake microphone headset because I believed myself to be in active training to become a Disney Channel star. And yes, all photographic evidence of this period of my life has been destroyed.
No talking to boys at the airport, regardless of how cute they may or may not be (see rule two). According to her, these boys may actually be part of an elaborate crime circle with plans to kidnap me and reenact that Liam Neeson movie. And I don’t exactly have a gravelly voiced ex-assassin for a father. I have an absentee Atlantis hunter for a father.
I told her that the fact that this rule was even on her list was proof that I shouldn’t go. Mom said that Santorini is actually very safe and that I’ll be fine. But how does she know? Despite having once been married to someone from Santorini, she’s never set foot on the island.
Should I at any point feel in danger of any type of neglect or harm, then I am to phone her immediately and she will fly me home. This one came with the following caveat: in order to activate the Get out of Jail Free card, it must be a grave emergency, not just uncomfortable silences or challenging conversations. Grave. Again with the morbid.
Take some time to “find myself.” Or, in other words, take some time away from Dax. Of course, she didn’t come out and say this directly because she’s trying not to be her parents, which might actually be the goal of every person who ever lived. They desperately did not like her boyfriend, and look what happened there. She dropped out of school, married him at Chicago City Hall, and got pregnant with me. Live and learn.
And for the record, I resent being told to “find” myself. I’m not lost. I’m right here.
Give my dad a chance. (No comment.)
Wear sunscreen. Really. That made her list of rules.
I had one rule for her: go along with the story I came up with for Dax. The last thing I wanted was Dax—and everyone at school—knowing that my father was on a decades-long search for Atlantis, a city that he 100 percent, unflinchingly believed was real, despite the fact that only a few internet weirdos seemed to agree with him. The thought of everyone knowing made me feel weak in the knees, and not in the good way.
I was Liv now. The Liv who got invited to parties, and prom, and put on the nomination ballot for homecoming queen, and I needed to be the person everyone thought I was. That probably sounds shallow, but when you feel invisible for most of your life, feeling seen starts to matter. That’s who I was now. Not Indiana Olive, and definitely not the daughter of a man whose lifework put him in the same category as a UFO hunter with maps and charts and a pile of books on alien abduction. End of story.
So instead, this is what I told Dax: My Greek father is an amateur archaeologist! He studies ancient civilizations! How weird I never mentioned that! I know it’s last-minute, but my mom is making me go!
“Amateur archaeologist” was a bit misleading, but it sounded a lot better than “professional myth chaser.”
This is what Dax said: I can’t believe you aren’t coming on the senior trip! My friends will be so disappointed because they like hanging out with you so much, and I’m so disappointed because I was dying to spend a week on the beach with you!
Or at least I’m sure that’s what he’d say if he were still speaking to me. Which, after my last-minute cancellation of our trip, he wasn’t. Dax likes to have a plan, and me skipping his senior trip had thrown everything off. Also, in the stress of the past few days, I accidentally let slip that I may have forgotten to apply to high school day, and it had been exactly as dramatic and earth-shattering as I’d imagined. According to Dax, our relationship was at the very end of a list jammed at the very bottom of my very messiest bag. In other words, every other aspect of my life came before him.
That wasn’t true. But the fact that I couldn’t tell him why this trip was such a big deal most definitely did not help my case.
And now I was here. On the plane. Trying to breathe as I regretted literally every decision that had led me to this moment. In less than an hour I would be in Greece. Greece. Why hadn’t I fought harder against my mom? It wasn’t like she’d physically carried me onto the plane. I could have run away. I could have… Oh no.
I’m going to throw up.
I wanted to put my head between my knees, but the Santorini-bound plane was way too tiny for anything, much less sprawling panic attacks over the unfairness of being an almost-adult who doesn’t actually have control of her own life. I couldn’t even be that mad at my mom. She was so pregnant and so sure that she was right—so sure that for a moment there I’d begun to believe her too. Maybe I should give my dad a chance. Maybe this is a good idea. But… no. Clearly we’d both suffered a lapse in sanity.
Almost unconsciously, I grabbed one of the in-flight magazines out of the pocket in front of me and automatically began yanking out interesting-looking images to add to the envelope I keep stashed in my bag. My art teacher, Ms. Martinez, said that cultivating your mind to constantly collect images is the important part of being an artist—not that I’d call myself an artist. Well, not yet, but if I wasn’t drawing, then I was cutting out images and stuffing them into envelopes I carried everywhere with me. Think of it as visual hoarding.
Right now it was also acting as a much-needed calming technique. A distraction from all the rippling ocean I’d been flying across for what felt like an eternity. I was probably the first person in aeronautical history to be happy to have not been assigned the window seat. There was so much ocean out there.
I focused on my hands again. This was airplane number three, and ever since Seattle, each airplane had gotten progressively smaller and smellier. Add to that, I was on hour twenty-three of no sleep, unless you count the twenty minutes that occurred after takeoff from New York City (airplane number two), which was right before the woman sitting in 28B spilled her entire coffee on my T-shirt. Her hot coffee. And then, in penance for not only burning me but also making me smell like a human Starbucks, proceeded to show me twenty-plus photos of her bulldog, Winston Churchill. At least I was on my final flight.