Sophomore Year Is Greek to Me Read Free Page A

think about it. Not if I don’t have to.
    Anyway, I put my journalism skills to good use and came up with a theory about why Dad had been pushing the Greece angle: he’s afraid of something happening to him and me being left alone.
    I know, super morbid—but I’m not an idiot. I mean, why else would he be doing this? And of course I’ve thought about the possibility of him . . . dying. I can’t even imagine life without my dad, much less being an
orphan.
It’s just . . . too much. And maybe that’s an immature attitude, too, but I’m only fifteen, for God’s sake. This is the time to
have
an immature attitude, isn’t it? And besides, I don’t think fear of something that hasn’t happened is a reason to just pick up and move to another freaking country to hang out with people I happen to be related to.
    So when he said we were moving to Greece—
moving!
Not even just taking a vacation!—I saw through the whole scheme right away.
    Hilary knew all this stuff, of course. (Well, almost all of it—the part I don’t like to think about is the only secret I’ve ever kept from her. More on that later.) But I just knew that, somehow, I’d think of a way out of this mess. And then it’d all just . . . go away. And I wouldn’t have to talk about it at all. Right? Don’t things sometimes happen that way?
    So. Back to Starbucks and me not taking the news very well at all.
    â€œMaybe he’s just testing your level of loyalty to the
Reflector.
See how hard you’ll fight to stay here, you know? Like, a co-journalistic ethics and devotion test or something . . .?” Hil trailed off. I raised my eyebrows skeptically, and she wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I guess that sounded better in my head. Ugh, this is so unfair! What am I going to do without you?!”
    Hilary Bauer and I started hanging out at the beginning of fourth grade, when we got partnered up for a book report project involving hand puppets. (Seriously, where do teachers come up with this stuff?) Hil was new in school, and we bonded immediately over her notebook, which had pictures from the
Narnia
movie on it. Before we met I’d been really shy and mostly kept to myself; I was used to things being quiet at home, with just one parent and no siblings. Plus, I go to a pretty swanky private school with mostly well-off Manhattan- and Brooklynites. My dad and I are considered . . . eccentric, to put it nicely. Poor, to put it bluntly. The parents of my kindergarten classmates weren’t rushing to set me up with playdates once they found out we lived in a less-than-pristine two-bedroom rental apartment in a (gasp!) non-elevator building—at least, not until they figured out my dad is
that
David Lowell, the one who wrote the famous piece on 9/11. And by then I’d kind of learned to do my own thing, anyway. I never minded sitting by myself with a book, but meeting Hilary was just . . . serendipity.
    (In case you’re wondering how I could afford to go to a Manhattan private school, the answer is: after my mom died from blood toxemia, the hospital settled out of court with my dad. He was pretty messed up, obviously, and didn’t want to touch the money. He had a lawyer put it in a trust for my schooling, and that’s the only thing it’s ever been used for. Again, pretty morbid . . . but like I said, it’s the only life I’ve ever known. No pity parties, please, okay?)
    Anyway, my friendship with Hilary has not only been awesome and silly and
necessary,
but it survived the middle-school-to-high-school transition, mutual crushes on at least four guys, her parents almost getting divorced last year, a terrible text message misunderstanding in eighth grade involving one of the above-mentioned mutual crushes (too long and boring to explain), and one of us growing boobs and the other not (I’m the