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complex subject for me at the moment. Demetri slid his chair toward mine and asked what I studied at school. “History,” I told him. He asked about my family, my life, what I thought of Greece. I discovered he attended the Ikaron School, Greece’s Air Force Academy. He had a younger brother. And ever since his parents divorced, his mother worried about him more.
    Plates of pastitsio, moussaka, salad, bread, and feta went around the table while we talked, just the two of us, for what seemed like hours. He was intelligent and polite with a quiet, intense way about him. He translated the lyrics of songs the band was playing, most of them about love—losing it or finding it—then held out his hand to me. An invitation to dance.
    I looked at the dancers with their arms clamped on one another’s shoulders, at the complicated steps they performed, at the tables jammed with people watching and clapping. I felt myself sweating under my gray turtleneck. I’d been blending in fine at the table, a lot like the curtains hanging behind me. The girl who’d run like beach wind around the track in Olympia seemed like another person.
    “I’ll teach you,” Demetri said. His hand still stretched out.
    The great dancer Isadora Duncan, who was, coincidentally, deeply influenced by Greek myths, spoke of dance as a manifestation of the soul. I’d been dedicated to invisibility for such a long time that I did not dance, not in public or private. I did not want my soul out there expressing itself. Who knew what it would say?
    Demetri leaned down, his mouth close to my ear. “Life is short.”
    If you don’t dance with him, you’ll regret it. The line had been used on me so often, now I was using it on myself. Besides, if I was going to live the kind of life I wanted, I would have to be less like the draperies.
    I took Demetri’s hand and he pulled me onto the dance floor. At some point, bouncing along in the Greek dance line, the thought of my ex-boyfriend popped into my head, accompanied by the dull pang that had followed his rejection. It had not completely gone away. I pictured myself boxing up the photographs of him that lined my desk and dresser back home. I told myself I would be okay.
    We kept dancing, song after song, and when the other dancers climbed up on the tables, I was right in the middle of them. Finally, laughing and exhausted, Demetri and I slipped outside into the cool night air. He wrote his address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. I opened my eyes when he kissed me. The Acropolis was lit up just over his shoulder.
    After the Fun Girls and I got back to the hotel, I was too excited to go to bed. I persuaded one of them to go up to the rooftop, where we waited for the sun to come up. We watched as light spilled over the city of Athens.
    The next night Demetri met me in the lobby of my hotel. We walked for blocks, and when we got back, I was surprised when he gave me a necklace, a simple chain with a blue stone. He’d gone out and bought it earlier that day. To remember him by. We promised to write and said good-bye. The last thing he said to me was, “Ann, learn some Greek.”
    Once I was back home in South Carolina, Demetri and I exchanged letters. I bought Greek language tapes and listened to them in my Toyota Corolla, practicing phrases like Pou einai i toualeta? (Where’s the toilet?) The word I loved the most was kefi. It means joyous abandonment.
    My plans for the future took on weight and detail. I pictured myself with a doctorate, teaching Greek history, writing during sabbaticals, and continuing my studies in Greece, maybe even working there. My parents and friends encouraged me. I applied to the master’s program in history at the University of South Carolina, the one affordable place I knew that had a program with an emphasis on the ancient world, including Greece.
    Two months after my return from Greece, not long before my senior year, I met Scott. I spotted him in a pizza place near campus. A