by M. C. Frank
“Don’t give me that, Phelps,” he says. “I know I said that thing about the duck, but I didn’t mean it. I’ve seen you surf, remember? You were fierce. And from that to this? This isn’t right, Ari. It’s not normal, okay? I tried to explain it away, but. . . Now I’m beginning to think something is seriously wrong and if you don’t tell me, then so help me—” his voice cracks.
“Hey,” I say softly. “Thank you for today, I’m so sorry you had to see that. . . Nothing is going on, okay?”
He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m going crazy here,” he whispers.
“So am I,” I whisper back.
I don’t know why we’re both whispering, what we are trying to hide from. Is it the ugliness he just witnessed in the bathroom, all this darkness coming out of me? Or is it ourselves?
“Have dinner with me.”
“Thanks,” I try to smile. “But I have this splitting headache. . . ”
“I have painkillers,” he answers immediately, watching me.
“It’s really massive,” I say.
“I have tons,” he replies.
“I’m sorry. I just need to go home.”
“You’re not seriously going to leave without an explanation, nothing?”
“What needs an explanation?” I ask.
“Ari you. . . you keep nearly dying in my hands,” he almost yells and I flinch more at his words than the tone of his voice. “Now I’m good enough to save you but not good enough to hear about it?” A vein ticks in his forehead, and his Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he swallows. “Can’t you just give me a chance here? I know I’m not the sort of person you. . . But I thought at least. . . Argh!”
He makes an exasperated gesture, giving up. I feel tears prickling my eyes again.
“Wes, listen, I can’t. . . right now I can’t even begin. . . ”
“Took you long enough to say my name,” he says vehemently, turning to stare at me with anger flashing in those brilliant eyes. “Too bad you won’t have the chance to ever say it again.”
“Wait, so you can behave like a jerk all you like, but I can’t refuse to tell you what you want the second you want it?”
He freezes.
I didn’t know I had it in me, to try to cover up my fear with aggression. But, there we are. It’s not like this anger towards him hasn’t been building up inside of me since day one. I mean, what was up with all the ‘this-is-no-lie’ crap right before he kissed me for the cameras?
He swallows and then he says the last thing I expected to come out of his lips.
“I’m sorry. For the way I acted in Drops. And for today. I wanted you to be relaxed, to make you act like the kiss was natural, I didn’t think how it might hurt you. . . I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m used to people doing anything to get what they want. It’s no excuse, but I made the decision in that split second, I didn’t think that you’re not what I usually. . . ”
He lifts his eyes to mine and my heart melts in a puddle around my feet. I take a steadying breath.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, taking a tentative step towards me. “Can we start over? I just want to be friends with you, I. . . I haven’t cared to be friends with anyone except Ollie in a long time.”
“You. . . after all this, you’re telling me you want to be friends?” I ask him, incredulous.
He nods.
“Why?”
“Why not?” He looks down, hiding his eyes from me. I wish I could see his expression.
“Okay,” I press my lips together. My head is threatening to explode and I close my eyes for a second, trying to breathe through the pain.
He smiles and turns his head aside. “So, should I order pizza?”
“No, I still have that headache, I think I need to get to bed,” I tell him.
He looks down, hiding a smile. Only it’s not a real smile. It’s that harsh grimace people do when they are preparing to say something hurtful. Crap.
“Man, I knew you didn’t like me,” he says. “Not that you know me enough to not like me already, but I just thought you were different, you know? The good kind of different.”
His words cut me. “Has it never happened to you before?”
“What, someone not liking me?” He snorts. “Actually, it hasn’t.”
“That’s shocking. I mean, it’s so hard to imagine that you haven’t called anyone a ‘twit’, or a ‘gaffer’ or ‘Donald Duck’ ever. Or maybe all three at once.”
He looks at me, his lips hanging slightly open. “Right.”
Without another word, he picks up the phone, his back to me. He calls the reception and orders me a taxi.
“Do you have money on you?” he asks gruffly as soon as he hangs up.
“Yeah. . . ”
He doesn’t say anything else, so I call the elevator.
“Look, I. . .”
“I just apologized to you, Ari!” It bursts out of him. He’d already started walking away, but he turns back to spit a few last angry words at me. “I asked you to just have dinner with me. I asked you. . . Oh, never mind. Huh. It’s obvious you can’t get out of here fast enough.” He grabs my canvas bag from the couch and flings it at me. I catch it instinctively.
The next second he’s gone.
As I get into the elevator I hear the shower running in the bathroom; he’s gotten into the shower. I just stand there, speechless, as the sound of water hitting the marble tiles reaches my ears a bit too loudly—of course, I realize in a second, the door is open, it can’t close since he broke it.
Let’s get the hell out of here.
Just as the doors of the elevator close with a ping, I think I hear a muffled curse coming from the direction of the bathroom. A thud echoes as though he just banged his fist on the wall.
I hung my head, but no more tears come. I’m cried out.
Well, is all I think. So that was that.
◊◊◊
“Pappou, I need a favor.”
About an hour later, as soon as the taxi deposits me in the yellow villa’s parking lot, I call grandpa from my car before I lose my nerve. He answers on the second ring, as he always does.
“Anything for my doll.”
I love it when he calls me his doll—koukla mou—in Greek. Right now I’m so emotional, even this is enough to start me crying again.
“Eisai kala, Ari mou?” he asks if I’m okay. What should I tell him now?
“I’m fine, pappou, listen, it’s a big favor and I want you to keep it entirely secret from everyone. Don’t tell my dad, don’t even tell yiayia. Promise.”
“I promise,” he answers, his tone changing to serious.
My grandpa is one of the most ordinary-looking people you’ll ever meet. A little balding, not tall but not short either, of medium weight, old corduroy pants and sweater vest. And he’s my hero.
He is the bravest and kindest man I’ve ever met; he’s the kind of person I want to become. He and my grandma practically brought me up, since back when I was a baby dad was really busy working two to three jobs all at once.
Grandma, who I’m named after, is my favorite person in the entire world. When I think of her, I think of home. That says it all.
And it’s not just the smell of fried bacon and loukoumades that I associate with her, or her patient smile as she spent hundreds of hours watching me trying to nail that particular trick shot in our neighborhood’s football court. She always had a word of encouragement ready on her lips, and then she’d wipe my scraped knees as though it was no big deal and stick my muddied shorts in the hamper without a word of reproach. And when I came from school crying because the other kids made fun of me for being too tall or too athletic ‘for a girl’, or—even worse—they bullied me because I had no mom to show up at the PTA meetings, she and grandpa would wipe the tears from my cheeks and make me French fries and ice-cream and take me for a walk down at the pier.
I love them both to pieces.
And now I’m going to break their hearts.
&n
bsp; “I need you to book me an appointment with Spiros at the Health Clinic,” I tell him, as calmly as I can. “Book it in your name, but he’ll know it’s for me and what it’s about, he won’t ask any questions. Can you do that for me, pappou? As soon as possible, tomorrow.”
“Spiros? Doctor Razatos? Ari, why would. . . ?”
“Please, pappou, I’ll explain everything tomorrow. You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
He came with me on all of my first days. Kindergarten, high-school, the first time I met Coach—even though I was old enough by then that I didn’t need him to hold my hand, but it made it easier somehow. And now this. I feel my throat close up again.
“Of course I will, koukla mou,” he answers without hesitation, his voice a familiar, soothing baritone next to my ear.
I send him kisses and hang up.
My vision is blurry from crying, but I get home all right. I sneak upstairs, not wanting anyone to see me crying, grab a snack from the kitchen, and go hide in my room.
Doctor Spiros Razatos is a family friend. (In Greece, pretty much everyone is a family friend, but he’s a really close one.)
He’s the one doctor I’d trust with something like this, because I’ve known him practically my entire life: he was a fixture at my grandparent’s house when he was in his twenties, just starting out as an MD, fresh out of Med School. I remember him playing hide and seek with me in the kantounia, me shrieking with laughter, he all angles and tall as the sky, pushing back his black-rimmed glasses after landing on his face as he rounded a corner too fast.
He’s been keeping my secret for over a month now, and even more importantly, he’s been keeping his word. I have no idea what he’s going to say to me. No matter what he says though, my mind is made up.
Wes’ confused, accusing eyes yesterday convinced me that I’m not handling this maturely. In fact, I’m not handling this at all.
And I said I would stop acting like a child.
So there.
◊◊◊
Early next morning, pappous gives a random excuse to my grandma and walks to the pier, where I told him I’d meet him. I pick him up in my car and we head silently for the clinic.
Spiros does neither of the things I imagined he would. He just looks at me with those serious eyes beneath his thick black eyebrows and nods in approval.
“Come on in,” he says. “I’ve got everything ready.”
With one final look at my grandpa’s tremulously smiling lips, I open the green door to my left, and then I step inside for a CAT scan. A head scan.
“Ari.” That’s the first thing I hear as I come out, dazed, from the radiology room.
Just that. My name.
But the way he says it.
I already know. There’s nothing else he needs to tell me, so I sit down gingerly and he sits next to me, watching me silently.
“How big is it?” I ask, feeling as though I’m floating outside of my body.
He wipes his eyes with his hand and I see that he’s holding his glasses with the other—I don’t think I’ve ever seen Spiros without them. He looks suddenly younger, unsure of himself. His dark eyes are so desperate, I can’t look him in the face any longer.
“Pretty big,” he says, clearing his throat, “the size of a nut.”
What type of nut are we talking here? That’s all I can think of. Stupid, right?
“You’re going to be fine,” he adds in a thick voice. “I promise, nothing that’s possible for human medicine won’t. . . ”
“I know,” I interrupt him. His panic is breaking my heart. “I knew that’s what you would find, it’s okay.”
I feel weirdly calm. What is there to be afraid of now? Now I know. The ignorance was what was scaring me before. Maybe that’s why I’m not nervous anymore.
And now for the hard part. Spiros turns to pappou.
“That day, this past August, when Ari fainted at the barbeque. . . you remember?” Spiros asks grandpa, and he simply nods, threading his fingers together. “Well, I told you at the time that it was nothing, and indeed there was no reason for anyone to worry, except when I saw Ari later I. . . I asked her about it.”
I’d fainted during the town festival, on the fifteenth of August. That day is a big deal in Corfu—in all of Greece, actually. It’s a national holiday and all the shops are closed, so what else is there to do? Eat. (That’s almost always the answer in Greece.) Also, invite the entire village to your home to share your food. That’s Greek customs and Greek hospitality for you.
Anyway, I’d been having one of my good days that day; no sign of a headache in sight, nothing. And then, sometime in the early afternoon, it happened. Just like that, no warning or anything. I fainted.
Dad told me, after I came to in my room, the windows shut and blessed silence surrounding me, that I had been out of it for about half an hour. Which was quite a big deal, so they’d already called Spiros, who was at a beach down south with his wife.
He did tell me it was nothing, probably the heat or the exhaustion of intensive training, and just told me to rest. I fell asleep almost directly after he left.
About a week later, though, I bumped into him randomly. I was out on the town, running some errands for grandma. He saw me from a street away, I remember, and lifted a hand in greeting. I waited for him to come closer, and as he did his smile faded away.
I have classified that moment in my head as the end.
I know it started long before then; I’ve had these headaches since June, but that was the exact moment when I knew something was wrong.
“Hey there, Ariad—” Spiros had started saying, but the words died on his lips as he walked over. He looked me over in a glance, head to toe, and he turned pale.
He ran over to me and, with a harshness I had never seen him show before to anyone, he grabbed my arm, almost hurting me in his hurry, and drew me aside to the shade of a grocer’s tent.
“Have you lost weight?” he frowned.
I simply looked at him. I didn’t need to tell him, I knew all my fears and worries were written on my face.
He exhaled loudly and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Then he cursed. “Tell me.” Sweat was glistening at his forehead.
The day wasn’t boiling hot yet, although it would be in a few hours, but noticing that little detail, that he was sweating, just sent me over the edge.
I can still remember every moment, as if it was yesterday: I collapsed on the pavement, super-market bags spilling half-open next to my bare legs, and in a second he was crouching next to me, rubbing my back, and telling me it was probably nothing and to tell him, for chrissakes.
“I’ve fainted before,” I told him as soon as I could breathe. “I haven’t told anyone.”
“How often?” he asked, going all doctor on me.
“Monday,” I said. “Friday before that. Then a couple of weeks ago before that.”
He swallowed. “Anything else? Nausea? Vomiting? Headaches?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, once. And yes, all the time.”
“Headaches? All the—?” he repeated, looking dazed.
“All. The. Time.” I replied.
He placed a thin, long arm around my neck, and touched the top of my head lightly with his fingers.
“Dammit,” was all he said.
He helped me pick up the bags and we walked for a bit in silence, down towards the sea, although this wasn’t the direction either of us was going.
Then he told me.
ashley magazine
THE BIG Q
Wes Spencer edition
*excerpt*
Q: Weston, let’s talk about your newest film, which hits theatres in a few days, August fourth. It’s called Peter, and it’s a psychological thriller about a teenager with a Peter Pan complex, whose little sister disappears and he. . . has to deal with all of that.
A: Well, it’s mostly a coming-of-age story, a quest of sorts.
Q: A quest to find his sister or himself?
A: Both, actually.
Q: So, as to the young actress who plays your sister. . .
A: Candice Marks.
Q: How was it working with her? I mean, Candice is quite young?
A: She’s six. Well, five and a half actually during shooting. Oh, she was just great. Brilliant as an actress too, you wouldn’t believe how efficient she was, how concentrated on her work. I just. . . yeah, we became best friends.
Q: That’s so rare to hear. . . And there are already Oscar rumors circulating! You play the title role, right?
A: I do. Well, it’s too early to speak of awards yet, I’d rather not go there. . .
Q: All right, so we’re all very curious about your long-awaited next step in the industry! Will you tell us about this new project of yours? According to some, it will mark your transition to more mature film roles. That’s kind of a big step in your career.
A: If you put it like that it is.
Q: (laughs) So, tell us a little bit of what the plot is about.
A: Well, it’s supposed to be a modern retelling of a classic, I’m not sure I should say which one at this point. Mostly it’s a romantic story, not so much romantic comedy though. I think Tim [Tim Halls] would rather put it as a love story. But that’s up to the viewers to decide, really.
Q: Oh, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to see you on the big screen, no matter what. This is set up to be a big change for you, a great separation from your role as Tristan in the popular sitcom The Water Wars. How are you feeling about that?
A: Ah, you know my therapist keeps asking me the same question. . .
Q: (laughs) Seriously?
A: No, I don’t have a therapist. I mean, technically I do, but. . . Anyway, I’m rather glad to be leaving Tristan behind, you know. It was a great part and a real um. . . privilege to work all those years with all of these amazing people, we were a strong team and really close to each other, but I think it’s time to move on.