Free The Scapegoat by Sophia Nikolaidou Page A

isn’t going to university.
He who has ears, let him hear
, says Grandma, who doesn’t let a fly shit without comment. Fine, fair enough. It’s your money. Next year, when I’m an adult, we can talk again.
    I don’t even bother bringing up the Air Jordans, since I already know the answer:
In Africa kids run around barefoot, and you have three pairs of shoes. We don’t have money to waste on nonsense
.
    In our house Mom gets to decide what’s nonsense and what’s not. It’s pretty much a dictatorship. They used to try and trick me into thinking we made decisions democratically. There were three of us, so we voted. I don’t need to tell you the score. At some point I figured it out.
You guys always agree, I’ll never get my way
, I complained. It was my first lesson in majority rule.
    —The glory and the weakness of the democratic system, Evelina once commented in class, pointing at me, is that his vote counts as much as mine.
    I can just picture her studying law. She’ll rise to the top, no doubt about it. I mean, she’s killer.
    Last year she showed up at the debate tournament with a stack of notes and her father’s Mont Blanc. She was bossing everyone around, giving orders. But when they asked her a question about the stock market crash of 1929, she froze. It wasn’t in our history book. She doesn’t care about anything that won’t be on the Panhellenic Exams.
    In the twenty minutes our group was given to prep, I went over the whole history from the crash to Lehman Brothers. Itwas one of the few times in her life when Evelina shut up and took notes. She was epic, though, I have to admit. She went up to the podium and pretty much smoked all the private school kids. She had her usual expression on, the one that suits her best: a German shepherd with a job to do. She didn’t let anyone else finish a sentence.
    —I’m sorry if I’m getting a bit competitive, she apologized, smiling at the judges.
    They smiled right back. Dumb as bricks. She had them in the palm of her hand right from the start.
    Evelina isn’t going on the class trip, either. It’s too close to Easter, she can’t afford to lose even a day of studying. I’m sure she talked her dad into putting the money aside for her, so she’ll be able to take a trip this summer instead, to celebrate.
    No Prague for me, I might as well accept it. I won’t see the old clock tower with the statue of Death, won’t retrace Kafka’s steps, won’t go to that club I found on the Internet. I won’t get to see what airplane food is like: goulash, boiled vegetables, chocolate cake. I’ll just rot here in Thessaloniki. Kamara to Diagonios to Aristotle Square—the entire city center by foot in fifteen minutes. My whole life spent in a tiny speck on the map. Nine hundred steps along the sidewalk of Tsimiski Avenue. I counted.
    Dad hates this city, but Grandma adores it. She’s an old-time Thessalonian, she grew up on Plato Street, her balcony looked onto the Church of the Virgin Acheiropoiitos. On Good Friday she would go down and buy her votive candle as soon as the bells started ringing. For Grandma all that really counts as Thessaloniki is the part of the city inside the Byzantine walls. Everything outside the walls was just muddy fields in her day:
Don’t be fooled, dear, by all the apartment buildings they’ve built out there, back then when it rained the whole place was one big mud pit
. Anything eastof the White Tower is a foreign country as far as she’s concerned, Toumba’s a suburb, and Panorama up on the hill is countryside. Western Thessaloniki is a parallel universe she reads about in the paper, in the articles Dad edits.
    Grandma always does her hair in that poofy old-lady style. She paints her nails and smokes thin cigarettes. She has more memories than you would believe. The other people in her apartment building call her
the principal
, even though she was only ever a teacher. Whenever anyone goes out shopping they stop by her place