Sophomore Year Is Greek to Me Read Free

don’t think he ever really intended to stay, and probably he wouldn’t have . . . if my mom hadn’t died right after giving birth to me.
    So it’s been just me and my dad for the last fifteen years. And for the most part it’s been pretty cool, actually. Growing up with a dad who writes for newspapers and magazines is great. He’d take me on all kinds of trips when I was a baby and use my extreme cuteness to disarm tricky sources and interview subjects. I used to hang out at his office and play on the old typewriters. And of course I had a million crazy “aunts” and “uncles” all over the city—local informer types and other writer friends of my dad’s.
    Oh, and his nickname for me is Ace—as in “ace reporter.” Sensing a theme yet?
    World Totally Unsurprised To Learn Of Girl’s Predisposition To Writing, Journalism
    I n a truly unshocking turn of events, Zona Lowell, daughter of acclaimed writer David Lowell, wishes to pursue a career in journalism like her dad.
    â€œYou know that saying, ‘Like father, like daughter’? Turns out it’s a real thing,” said the owner of the deli near the Lowells’ apartment.
    As the masses recover from this extraordinary revelation, we will continue our exclusive coverage of how the sky is blue and gravity is real.
    Filed, 4:13 p.m., NYC.
    Now that I’m older, we’re more like roommates in some ways than father and daughter: we take turns doing the grocery shopping and staking out a machine at the Laundromat down the street, share cooking and cleaning responsibilities, and fight over what makes it onto the DVR. We maintain our piles of important personal property with only a once-in-a-while argument over who stole whose copy of
Newsweek.
We treat each other like equals, really. My friends are totally jealous of me for having a dad who gets so involved with a project that he doesn’t mind if I do whatever I feel like doing as long as I check in. (Not that I’m running around town doing anything particularly nefarious, but still.) He trusts me. And I
used
to trust him.
    But now?
    Forget it.
    Because I knew that this wasn’t just about researching his work. He could stash me somewhere for six months instead of interrupting my sophomore year of high school. I was supposed to be gathering up grades for AP classes and preparing for the SATs. How was I supposed to do that in Greece?!
    No, this was a straight-up trick. Because I knew who else was in Greece: my mother’s family, whom I’d never met and, to be honest, never wanted to meet.

3
    I never knew my mom, obviously. She lived her whole life in Crete (which, according to various accredited sources, is the largest and most populous island in Greece. Also, Zeus was born in a cave there. So, my mom . . . and also Zeus) until the day she ran off with my dad. She died just twenty hours after I was born, and I just don’t feel any connection to her. I mean, I love her, in that sort of vague way you’d love anyone who was related to you and gave you half your DNA. But that’s kind of it.
    Don’t go thinking this is all sad or anything like that. It isn’t. You can’t miss what you’ve never had, and in my family there’s a dad and a daughter and a dog.
    And I like it that way.
    Here’s the thing, though: in the last couple of years, my dad had started tossing around random comments involving me meeting this slew of relatives. I would just laugh and change the subject, saying I was sure they’re fine people, but I didn’t
know
them. I have nothing in common with them. I don’t speak Greek. I pointed out that they’ve never come over to meet us, or even sent a card. I was fine with things the way they were.
    And honestly, I was.
    There’s another part to this story, as I guess there usually is when it comes to family stuff . . . but I don’t like to