Page 58 of The Summer Show

Yiayia abandoned her meal. When she returned from the kitchen, she was carrying a plate with thickly sliced onion. She placed it at my elbow. “Here. Put it on your face like this.” She plucked a slice off the plate and pressed it to my forehead. “Does it feel better?”

“I feel like a salad.”

“A sign that it is working.”

There were quick but heavy footsteps on the street. Irini One appeared, panting and damp. She eyed me then threw a bunch of Greek words at Ana and everyone else. I picked at my fish while they shouted at each other. Were they shouting, though? Hard to say with Greeks. Inside voices were for other people, and outside voices could shake windows in their frames. For all I knew, they were partaking in a friendly chat about the weather and this relentless sun.

Then I heard my name.

Also, everyone was looking at me.

The gate between the Stamou and Roussos houses opened and Mrs. Rousso pushed through carrying a big bowl.

“Oh boy,” Ana muttered. To me: “Just go with it, okay? They think you’ve got the evil eye and that’s why your face looks like hamburger.”

“I fell.”

“Yes, but they think you fell because of the evil eye.”

“Is that a thing?”

“It is here,” her mother told me. “Greeks love their superstitions. Superstitions make them feel like they’re in control of their lives.”

While the older women readied the bowl of water, Ana filled me in on the evil eye and how it did its evil eye-ing. If I was inflicted, one of two scenarios was most likely. In the first instance, someone was envious of me and the evil eye’s favorite emotion was envy. As the lucky envy-ee, the evil eye was naturally attracted to me and eager to screw up my life. Another way the evil eye could have latched on to me: compliments. If the evil eye overheard someone saying nice things about me without spitting on me afterwards—the evil eye is allergic to saliva and the mere suggestion of saliva—the evil eye might have decided to stick around to meddle.

According to everyone in the yard, I was a prime candidate for a serious evil eye-ing. Who in Greece didn’t envy me at the moment? No one, according to them. Everyone wanted to be a contestant on Greece’s Top Hoplite. Which meant I was one of the country’s biggest evil eye magnets.

“Is a miracle you are still alive,” Yiayia said.

“That is why your face looks like a monkey’s kolos,” Irini One told me.

Hey now, I didn’t think it looked that bad.

But when I inspected my face in my phone’s front-facing mirror, I realized she was right. Give me a buzzcut and David Attenborough would mistake me for a baboon’s butt.

“And the oily water will fix that?” I asked, dubious about the whole thing, but willing to believe.

“If you believe in woo-woo stuff,” Lina said.

“Do you believe in woo-woo stuff?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m Greek.”

“What about you?” I asked my best friend.

“I believe that bad things will happen if you don’t let them get rid of the evil eye. By bad things I mean they’ll gossip about you non-stop.”

“Okay.” I steeled myself. “Give me the oily water and I’ll do whatever it is I’m supposed to do.” I looked around at the eager faces while Thanos’s great-grandmother muttered a prayer over the bowl. “What am I supposed to do?”

The possibilities were limited, but some were less than palatable. Drinking the oil and water was bound to have laxative effects. And surely they didn’t want me to splash it over the ladygarden. Fingers crossed.

“First you have to wait and see if the oil separates …” Ana peered into the bowl “… and it separated. You’ve a hundred percent been whammied.”

“The only way out is to rub it on your lips,” Lina said.

Yiayia mimed dipping my finger in the water and rubbing it over my lips.

That wasn’t so bad. I could do that.

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