Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She
could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local
teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to
dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had
raised him, who had poured into him the love they
couldn’t spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.
It was just a poignant fact of island life that
whole generations left to set up real lives in other places.
Lena let the tears dribble past her chin and down her
neck. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was crying for.
Even after the late hour at which the party ended,
Lena couldn’t sleep. She sat by her window watching the
moon. She waited for breezes to feather the edges of the
sea-moon. She imagined all the happy inhabitants of Oia
falling into deep, drunken sleep.
But as she craned a little out the window, she recognized
another pair of elbows in the far window of the second
floor. They were Bapi’s wrinkly elbows. He was sitting
at his window, staring at the moons, just like she was.
She smiled, both inside and out. She’d learned one
thing in Santorini. She wasn’t like either of her parents or
her sister, but she was just like her Bapi—proud, silent,
fearful. Lucky for Bapi, he had found the courage once in
his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew
how to give it.
Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find
that same courage.
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