Page 14 of The Summer Show
Ana’s eldest aunt dismissed me with a sniff and moved on to Ana. Within seconds, Ana’s cheeks were splotched with saliva and matte orange lipstick. Her jaw unhooked itself and began flapping at a breathtaking speed. When she stopped to draw breath, Ana managed to break out of her grip and gravitate back toward me.
“Greece’s Top Hoplite is definitely filming on Nera. They’ve put out a casting call, and they’re looking for something different this time. Usually the cast is all beefcake and babes. This season they want real people.”
“You should try out,” I said. “Although you’re definitely a babe.”
“Can’t. Thanos and I are both teaching summer school this year. But maybe you should try out.”
I was about to tell her I’d rather eat a sack of hair than be on television, when Irini One started to cackle.
“You on the TV?” Apparently the idea was hilarious. “You are very skinny. One hit and … crack.”
I pressed my heart to my chest. “Say it again. Tell me I’m skinny.”
“Like the spaghetti.”
six
My first day on Nera passed in a blur. Names smeared across my memory until they faded to nothing and were forgotten. Faces had more luck, especially since so many of the island’s residents came with their own visual cues. The barrel-chested baker with ropes of tattoos snaking up his arms. The man who carried his chicken in his shirt. The woman with one distinctly fake eye. (The fake eye was a walnut shell.) And then there was Nick and his grey sweatpants, still sitting in the same spot, hunched over his phone when we started dressing to go out, hours later. If he had moved at all since he had arrived, it didn’t show.
At some point I took him a glass of water and reminded him to stay hydrated. He grunted at me.
“Is that caveman for thank you?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, sidestepping my question about his lineage. “I’ll take the couch tonight.”
“I can take the couch. There’s more of you than there is of me.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “I said I’d take the couch.”
“And I said I would.”
He made frustrated noises and stood, unraveling to his full height.
Nick Merrick wasn’t the tallest guy on the planet. That honor currently belonged to a Turkish farmer, whose 8’2” inches meant that he bumped his head on a lot of doorframes. Fun fact, the tallest woman in the world right now was also Turkish. Given that I was in Greece and the two countries were still embroiled in a war so cold that it had devolved into stink-eyes and name calling, I kept my knowledge to myself.
Why stoke the fire?
On a good day, as soon as I flop out of bed, I’m 5’7”. This evening, the top of my head reached Nick’s nose. One head butt and he would be crying on the ground. The thing is, Ana’s brother seemed bigger. His physical presence toyed with reality in a way I couldn’t quite understand.
Maybe there was a Scholastic book to explain the phenomenon.
“I can sleep anywhere,” he insisted.
“Yeah, I know. You slept on my shoulder most of the way across the Atlantic and some of the Mediterranean, and my hoodie has the dried drool to prove it.”
If he was surprised or even horrified, it didn’t register on the marble carving that was his face. He processed my words the way a computer might. Or a robot. He remained impassive, cool, disinterested.
Then he dispensed a receipt. Or rather, an IOU.
“If you want it cleaned, leave it on top of my bags.”
He took his glass, his phone, and his grey sweatpants inside, leaving me alone with a potentially homicidal goose.
“Those sweatpants should come with a warning label,” I told the bird.
Murder Goose pooped on the ground and waddled away, evidently not ready to slaughter me yet.
Toying with her food.