I fled, jogging upstairs and barely breathing till I had the bedroom door closed behind me. It was going to take an act of will to get me to open it again.
But I did. I changed into my swimsuit, slipped a cheery orange sundress over the top (purchased at employee discount but not, I thought, obviously so), and considered Gretchen. She was, I thought, like me in her diffidence, her slightly awkward, hesitant way of carrying herself, even if she did look more like Melissa’s brand of bombshell. It was an odd combination and I wondered how it evolved, how someone with such obvious good looks grew up so mousy.
I still didn’t know who she was or why she was there, nor did I have any idea about whether she was involved with Marcus, or if Melissa had brought her there to become so. It seemed an odd thing to do with me here. I mean, we were just friends, me and Marcus, but Melissa couldn’t know that romance was absolutely off the table for us, not unless Marcus confided way more to Simon than he let on. I felt mildly affronted, then reminded myself that I had no right to be.
And what if Gretchen did get involved with Marcus? What was that to me? He wasn’t why I was here.
I considered myself in the mirror over the sink, staring myself down for a long minute, then snatched up my purse and went downstairs, where the others were waiting.
We piled into the huge Mercedes with our beach bags, chattering happily and smelling of suntan lotion and, in the case of everyone but me, rum. The car was warm, the sky blue, and Melissa’s enthusiasm for the excursion infectious.
“Oh my God, this is so great!” she said. “This place! The weather! All of us together again. And with Kristen and Brad on their way!”
“I can’t wait to meet her,” said Gretchen, starry-eyed. “I love her show.”
“We are going to have the best time ever!” said Melissa, barely listening.
Gretchen gave a shrill whoop and shouted “Yeah!” so unselfconsciously that I was quite impressed, though it also struck me as strange since she didn’t actually know the all of us who were getting back together. Then Melissa was turning up the radio and we were rocking out to the Black Eyed Peas, which, anywhere else, at any other time, would have been absurd but here was perfect, so even Marcus sang along. I felt ten years younger and forgot my annoyance with Gretchen. Melissa was right. This was going to be great after all.
That feeling flagged a little after an hour and a half but perked up again as we pulled into the Minos. We were still singing, bobbing in our seats like kids.
“We are so white!” Gretchen exclaimed to Marcus. “Aren’t we just so white?”
Marcus’s eyes widened slightly and he smiled that puzzled, disbelieving smile I knew so well.
“Pretty white,” he agreed, indulgently.
“Right?” said Gretchen. She shrieked with laughter at her own outrageousness.
“You are so random,” said Simon consideringly. He was smiling, but it wasn’t quite a compliment.
“I know, right?” said Gretchen, delighted. “Seriously random.”
Melissa had booked lounge chairs on the beach behind the hotel in the exact spot where we had sat five years ago, and we took our places without thinking. The sand was warm underfoot, rather than the searing heat we had so bitched about last time, a heat that had actually burned your feet if you didn’t get to the water fast enough. The beach was quieter too. In my memory it had been crowded with Germans and Russians, the latter mainly bullish men and sculpted, hard-eyed women who might have been TV news anchors or models. The relative quiet calmed me, and for a moment I just sat in my beach chair, staring happily at the water, the years falling away like curls of old skin. When I turned to see that Marcus had, on some old instinct, taken the chair next to mine, we smiled at each other unselfconsciously, amazed at how easy it all was.
I looked at Gretchen, slathering oil onto her trim belly, apparently unaware of her status as interloper. I had not seen so much as a glance or gesture between her and Marcus suggesting they were a couple, but I couldn’t think of a way to find out for sure. She caught my eyes on her and said, apparently unsarcastically, “Makes a change from Great Deal, I bet.”
“It does,” I said.
“Do you still have that pink top that you got on employee discount?” she asked. “The one with the seashell pattern around the neck?”
I blinked. I knew exactly which top she meant, but I’d spilled wine on it at Christmas and had had to throw it out.
“How did you know about that top?” I asked.
“You were wearing it in a picture, right, Mel?”
“Oh my God!” said Melissa, wriggling out of her top to reveal a stunning black bikini that made her look like a Bond girl. “Do you remember when we went to that cheesy disco and had to get a cab back, and we told the driver the hotel was Midas instead of Minos, and he drove us, like, halfway across the island?”
“When you told him it was Midas,” said Simon, smirking.
“And then he wouldn’t bring us back when we realized the mistake!” Marcus chimed in.
“You say Midas!” Melissa mimicked, hunching her shoulders and flapping with her hands. “Now you not want Midas. What is wrong with you?”
“And then he wanted double the money!” Simon added. Gretchen, I noticed, was laughing with the rest of us as if she’d been there, the Great Deal pink top forgotten.
“I took down his name and cab number,” said Melissa, delighted, “and when I spoke to the concierge at our hotel—finally, after driving around for hours—the guy just shrugged and threw it away! I was like, excuse me? And he was like, meh. You know, whatever. I was furious. And I still hadn’t realized we’d been saying the name of the wrong hotel, and the concierge was like, ‘If you want to get back to this hotel’”—she said, making her voice slow and serious—“‘you might try saying the right name.’ I felt so stupid that I told him they should rename the hotel Midas because that was someone everyone had heard of.”
She laughed at herself.
“I’m sure he was like, yeah, lady, we’ll get right on that,” she added. “What an idiot. I still get it wrong. It’s Minos, right?”
“As in minotaur,” said Marcus. “Mythical king of Knossos down the road. Heart of the Minoan civilization.”
“Thank you, professor,” said Melissa, sticking her tongue out at him, then grinning. “God, look at this place. Is this awesome or what?”
We considered the beach stretching around a rocky headland toward the town of Rethymno in one direction and the long golden stretch back to Heraklion in the other, the view of the blue Aegean so vast and unbroken that you could see the curvature of the earth itself.
“Pretty awesome,” said Simon.
“Totally awesome,” said Gretchen. She shaded her eyes to look at Marcus, who, feeling everyone’s gaze on him, chuckled, shrugged, and played along.
“Awesome,” he said. “Jan?”
“Awesome,” I agreed.
There was a reverential silence while we considered the general awesomeness, and then something occurred to me.
“Why was the minotaur named after the king?” I asked.
“What?” said Simon.
“Minos. Minotaur,” I said. “What’s the connection?”
“Minos. Taurus,” said Melissa. “Well, Taurus means bull, right? Like the star sign.”
“Right,” I said. “So why Minos?”
“The monster was actually the offspring of King Minos’s wife,” said Marcus. “That’s why it wasn’t killed at birth. It lived in the complex of passages under the palace.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” said Melissa. “You are so smart. Isn’t he smart, Gretchen?”
“Super smart,” said Gretchen. “I mean, I know you made the dean’s list every year, but still.”