Anna is even more beautiful when she’s flushed. She’s sitting on the window ledge with her hands on her waist, giving me one of her looks, like lightning cracking. Will she get angry if I try to cheer her up by saying how smart we look in our uniforms with the Mao collar? “We’re perfect little Maoists,” Anna says when she’s in a good mood, “full of contradictions.” That’s how she talks this year. She reads Hegel and Marx and uses words like “alienation,” “capital,” “problematics.” But before leaving school each day, we always touch up our lip gloss in the girls’ room and run a hand through our bangs. At least this year we have a girls’ room. In the eighth grade we just had to hold it in until we got home. With thirteen hundred boys and only sixty-five girls, it wasn’t easy for us to convince them that we have bodily needs, too.
“Come on, Anna, don’t pay any attention to that woman, she’s just taking her own problems out on us. .”
“Don’t pay attention? People like her are going to decide our future!”
As dramatic as always. I just bite my lip if someone insults me. When they first sent us for gym class to the square by Agios Nikolaos church — sit-ups on the sidewalk, between parked cars — I made a face, and our harpy of a gym teacher saw me and said, “Are you too high-class for us, Maria?” I just bit my lip and kept quiet. But Anna is touchy, a fly landing on her sword is enough to set her off.
“I’m going to tell Antigone,” she says.
“What do you think she can do?”
“She’ll come to school and teach that fool how to behave. First of all, she has no right to lay her paw on me.”
Antigone comes to school at the drop of a hat — because the religion textbook says The working wife fills the house with tension and worry, as she is unable to fulfill all of her duties, or Many people, including young people, followed the illogical ideas of Sartre, or Foreign tourists bring into our country the unbridled liberties of their own lands (morals and customs, sexuality, the absence of public shame, styles of dress, etc.). In the end she asked for Anna to be excused from religion class altogether. I watch through the window as Anna walks around in the schoolyard and am annoyed that I’m missing out on so many hours of conversation with her, just so I can sit there and listen to crap about Jesus. But what can I do? Mom turned religious. She spends whole days going from church to church making offerings. She’s even fatter now, and puts all her faith in God and Weight Watchers. As for Dad, he has no faith in anyone or anything. He opted for early retirement and spends his days in the coffee shop on the ground floor of our building, Sundays at the stadium. Fortunately I have school during the day, and afterward I have French lessons at the Institut Français, so I can forget for a while that my parents have become religious and weak, respectively. When I get home I call out a hello, then head straight for my room. I read whatever I can get my hands on, and listen nonstop to The Cure. The world could crumble around me and I still wouldn’t leave my room.
No matter how wrong things go in the world, salt never gets worms.
Now why did I remember that again?
“Stop making faces! Don’t be so squeamish,” Anna says.
Over the summer we used pillows, or put our hands over our mouths. Now she insists on our kissing for real, with our tongues, so we’ll know what it’s like. Locked in the bathroom in Plaka, Anna is perched on the washing machine, and I’m standing in front of her.
“Close your eyes, merde! It’s not the end of the world.”
First her lips, like kissing a peach. And then a cool tongue, which gets warm and soft when it touches mine. Just when I’m starting to get used to it, Anna pulls back. She wipes her lips furiously with her hand.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why did you stop?”
“You liked it, huh?” she says, and laughs. “Aren’t you the least bit ashamed?”
“Give me a break! It was your idea.”
“Yeah, so we don’t seem totally inexperienced. But we don’t have to turn lesbian!”
She says we should place bets on who’ll be the first to kiss a boy from the Varvakeio. “There are so many of them! We can experiment, a different one each day.”
Anna starts her experiment the very next day, when school lets out. She’s completely shameless, goes right up to a boy from the high school, Philippos, and asks if he’ll take her home on his motorbike. Then she lingers there, straightening and unstraightening the mirror on his bike, laughing at nothing, stroking her elbow. I’m perched on a low wall across the way, biting my nails, because the bet is only good if the other person actually sees the kiss. Anna slides onto the seat of the motorbike, up on her knees with her legs crossed under her. Philippos is very tall, but that way they’re more or less the same height. And of course they kiss. What else are a boy and girl supposed to do when their noses are practically touching? Anna makes the victory sign at me behind Philippos’s back. She won, merde.
I hope I find someone before my birthday.
His name is Kostas! He’s in my French class at the Institut Français.
“What a boring name,” Anna says, sighing.
“Yeah, but he’s a good kisser.”
“Like how?”
First he holds your face between his hands. He concentrates, looks at you with a smile in his eyes, as if telling you not to be afraid. And he kisses slowly and gently: first with closed lips, then they part a little, then they’re totally open, and finally there’s his tongue. Then he does it all in reverse and ends with a gentle kiss on your lips. Then he puts his arm around you and you walk together down Sina Street with all of Athens glittering in the background.
“What kind of crap is that?” Anna says.
“He’s so polite, Anna, like a real Frenchman. Maybe, you know, it’s because he’s learning French. .”
“First of all, it doesn’t count. We said a boy from the Varvakeio.”
“But he’s the one I found!”
“And you can lose him again just as easily. We’re not going to turn into your mother. I mean, really! One man for your whole life?”
“But I like him!”
“He’s already given you whatever he had to give. If you can’t dump him now, when will you? After your third child?”
Kostas waves to me from his desk during our next French class. I see him in church, too, with the priest chanting, Mom wiping her eyes with her monogrammed handkerchief. But it’s all ruined; kisses aren’t just a game anymore. They lead to something else, something serious and scary.
“This is our last kiss,” I tell him after the service, just at the point when he’s kissing me gently on the lips, about to put his arm around me so we can walk together down the street. It’s nearly winter, the days are getting shorter and a person naturally has a greater need of hugs and kisses. But even more than my ears, it’s my heart that has frozen, at the idea of marriage. I’m not even fifteen!
“What’s wrong?” Kostas asks. “Did I do something?”
“No, I just don’t like you anymore.”
It sounds harsher than I would have liked, but there’s no way of taking it back.