The View from Here

Chapter 1
Day 1: Piraeus (Athens), Greece
Departs 5:00 p.m. local time

"Tate! You ready? Taxi should be here any minute," Grandma called from the front of the small, cluttered store.
Her words snapped me out of my indecision. I was standing beside a jewelry display, holding a locket in each hand. One was an oval shape with the words Athens, Greece on the front, the starting port of our eleven-day cruise. It felt a little on the nose. But wasn't the purpose of a souvenir to remind you where you've been?
The other locket was a heart etched with beautiful, delicate vines. That-romantic, flowery, longing-wasn't really me. But there was something about it that made me pluck it from the display and hold it tightly in my right hand.
I hadn't come in here to buy anything for myself. Actually, I'd come to grab something for my mom, who hadn't wanted me to take this trip. It was my spring break, but it was a long cruise, and I'd still have to miss a few days of school. Plus I was supposed to finish my application for a summer internship at the hospital where she'd done one of her residencies. It was due in ten days, one day before the end of the cruise.
We'd fought about it before I left. I should've finished the application a month ago when she'd first forwarded it to me, when she'd told me about the benefits of an internship, how it would help me forge connections and see the inner workings of a hospital. But I'd let it sit. I'd had a lot of other things on my plate-school and leadership-and I thought I had time. Now it was hanging over my head, going on vacation with me without my mom to peer over my shoulder and make sure I did it right, like I knew she wanted to.
The cruise was a last-minute thing, a girls' trip for my grandma and a few of her girlfriends. But one of them had canceled at the eleventh hour, and Grandma asked me to fill in as her roommate. The more I thought about a week and a half cruising through the Mediterranean, the more it felt as if some knot inside my chest was loosening.
With Mom's busy doctor schedule, we didn't travel much. We went to Hawaii once when I was ten. And when I turned thirteen, my grandma had a sixtieth birthday party in Cancún-the reason I had a passport. My mom had worked almost the whole weekend, making calls and catching up on patient notes, so my grandma had taken me out to Mayan ruins and a local flea market, where we spent the day surrounded by handmade jewelry and sculptures and clothing. Maybe I didn't have much to compare it to, but it was, without a doubt, the best trip of my life.
So I'd begged to go on this cruise, pleaded, made promises I wasn't sure I could keep. I already hadn't kept the first one-finishing the internship application before I left. And so here I was, in the souvenir shop, looking for something that might smooth the tension between Mom and me.
That was a lot of heavy lifting for a trinket.
But instead of a key chain or bracelet or magnet for her, I was staring at two lockets for me, and my grandma was calling for me. I plopped the oval necklace with the city's name on the counter, rehung the heart one, and dug out some euros as the man at the register rang me up and packed the locket away in a small brown bag. He handed me my change and I tucked the purchase into my cross-body bag with a "thank you," then hurried after my grandma, wheeling my suitcase behind me. She was at the trunk of the taxi, passing off her luggage. I handed mine over as well.
"Ready?" she asked me with a smile.
I took a deep breath and turned toward the hotel where we'd spent the previous night. It was a tall boxy white structure with the lobby on display through a big window. The view from our room had been gorgeous, overlooking the deep-blue water of the Aegean Sea. But now we stood on a narrow street surrounded by buildings, one on top of the other. A motorcycle zipped around the waiting taxi.
The night before, we'd gone to a cute Greek restaurant. A large group of older men sat at the outdoor table next to ours, and by the end of the night, they were serenading my grandma with what they considered American music—"La Bamba" and "Tutti Frutti" and a few other hilariously ancient songs—as vines of bougainvillea dripped from the canopy overhead. It had felt like I was in the middle of a movie.
"I feel like we could explore this place for eleven days," I said as the driver shut the trunk.
"You'll feel that way about every place we go," Grandma said sagely. She traveled a lot more than I did. She was an artist, a painter, and said that travel filled her well of inspiration.
I opened the back door for us. My body still felt exhausted from the long flight over, my eyes still dry. Meanwhile, Grandma seemed awake, peppy even.
"You excited to see your friends?" I asked, buckling my seat belt across me. We were meeting the other two women on the ship. They lovingly referred to themselves as "the Coven."
The taxi moved forward, dodging a group of tourists overflowing onto the road from the sidewalk.
"Very excited," she said. "But I'm happy to be here with you most of all."
"You don't have to lie to my face, Grandma," I teased.
"I would never lie!" she said with a wink, which seemed to negate her statement. She nodded toward my bag. "What did you decide on?"
"Oh, a necklace." I pulled out the bundle. "I'll show you." I unfolded the top of the bag and dumped the locket onto my upturned palm.
"That's pretty," she said. "A heart!"My eyes shot down to my palm. "No-" I started to protest, but she was right. It was the heart with the swirly vines."No?" Grandma asked, confused.
In my rush, I must've put back the wrong one. I turned over the heart, looking at all the sides.
"It's a locket," I clarified, fumbling to recover.
"I love lockets. You can keep all your treasures inside."
"All my half-inch-by-half-inch treasures?"
"Well, only one of them."
"I better choose carefully." I slipped the chain over my head and tucked the locket beneath my shirt, then put my hand against it, feeling the shape press into my skin. Something about it felt right, significant somehow. As if it was telling me where I was going, not just where I'd been.
I nearly rolled my eyes at my own thoughts. No doubt the other locket would have felt exactly the same.
"There's our home for the next eleven days," Grandma said.
I turned and looked out the window, where a large ship loomed in the distance, past a big dock and several cargo ships piled high with colorful crates.
We exited the taxi and collected our luggage, then joined a surprisingly fast-moving line of people waiting to check in bags. Next we were ushered into a tent-style enclosure filled with chairs and staff holding numbers on poles. We found our assigned number and sat on one of the white folding chairs.
"Oh!" Grandma said. "I almost forgot to give this to you." She dug through her tote bag and pulled out a bright-orange T-shirt. "We won't match every day. But it's a must for day one."
I held up the shirt. On the back was a picture of four elderly witches who looked like a spooky version of the Golden Girls standing on the bow of a big ship. On the body of the ship, it said: The Coven Takes to the Seas.
"You don't have to wear it," Grandma said.
"Oh, I'm wearing it," I assured her. "I get to be an honorary Coven member. I might wear it all eleven days. Where's yours?"
She pulled another one out of her bag and then over her head, covering her flowy boho shirt. My grandma had style-vintage clothes, silver hair, funky jewelry, thick-framed glasses-and seeing her in the bright-orange shirt made me laugh. It definitely wasn't her style.
On the breast pocket her name stood out in black letters: Glow. Well, that wasn't her name. Her name was Gloria, but her friends all called her Glow. I glanced down at the pocket of the T-shirt I still held and saw the name Babs.
"Short for Barbara," Grandma said, noticing my gaze. "If I knew you were coming, I would've put Tater Tot."
My name was Tatum, but most people called me Tate. Of course, my grandmother had to come up with her own nickname.
I took off my cross-body bag and slipped the shirt on over the one I was already wearing. It was a couple sizes too big, and orange definitely wasn't my color. My best friend Juniper and I had done a virtual color analysis one night last year when she was sleeping over-turned out I was a soft summer-so I knew my pale skin looked even paler and my blue eyes and light-brown hair looked dull right now. But I didn't care. I was here with my sixty-seven-year-old grandma and two of her best friends; this wasn't some fashion show. In fact, as I looked around, I saw that there wasn't a single person my age in the entire room. I should have expected it since this was a fifty-five-plus cruise, but it seemed the emphasis was on the plus.
"Is she even allowed?" Mom had asked my grandma when she'd come over to help me plead the case. My mom had accused us of ganging up on her; I privately wondered why she was so adamant about keeping me from going on this trip. Probably because she thought that the only way to do things was the way she had-hard work, no distractions. If I wanted to be a doctor like her, I had to keep my eye on the prize. No missing school or gallivanting around the globe.
"Of course she's allowed," my grandma had said. "It's not a requirement to be over fifty-five, just a suggestion."
"Mom, her first cruise shouldn't be with people four times her age," Mom had said. I felt like she was just using that as an excuse. Because she hadn't even known it was fifty-five plus at first and she'd still said no. But I kept that thought to myself too.
"More like three," I pointed out."Fifty-five is the minimum," she shot back.
"I just want her to have a first cruise," Grandma said. By the time Mom was my age, she'd already been on a couple. But then life had gotten in the way—college, residency, work . . . me.
Mom narrowed her eyes at her. "Fine, I'll think about it."
My phone buzzed in my back pocket with a text, pulling me from the memory. It was a message from my mom-as if she knew I was thinking about her.
Did check-in go well? Your passport didn't give you issues? The room is big enough? You might want to finish up your internship application while you're at port, the internet can be bad out at sea. I knew that last sentence was the only reason she had texted me.
"Everything okay?" Grandma asked. "Your smile disappeared."
"All good. I guess I can't smile and read at the same time." Obviously not true, but I was irritated with myself for leaving the application until now. It was weighing me down—I just needed to send something in. Filling out the application was just a formality anyway. Dr. Singh, the one running the internship, knew my mom well.
No issues. Not in the room yet, I sent back to Mom, purposefully ignoring the only thing she wanted me to answer. I should've bought her a souvenir. I would; I had tons more stops to find a gift that said, Don't worry, Mom, I'm super committed to The Plan.
"Number three, time to board!" a woman called from the front of our group.
"Here we go," Grandma said with a grin as she stood up.The next thirty minutes were a whirlwind of activity-more lines, bags through X-ray machines, metal detector wand beeping as it scanned over my locket, getting our bracelets that doubled as room keys, and finally collapsing on the beds in our room.
"What do you think of the room?" Grandma asked from her twin bed, which was only about a foot away from mine.
"It's cute," I said. "I like it!"
The room was painfully small. When you first entered there was a closet-sized bathroom, across from an actual closet with shelves and drawers and a place to hang clothes, all covered by a black curtain. Past that was a long desk on one wall, opposite a couch. And finally there were two tiny twin-sized beds. I was on the one closer to the sliding glass door, which led out to a small balcony with a table and chairs and a hammock. Beyond that was Athens. The city stretched out before me, rising on a slight incline. The coastline was full of big boxy white hotels and other buildings lining a maze of streets.So what if our cabin was a little cozy? With a view like this, it was worth it.
A buzzing noise pulled my gaze back into the room."Dori and Ginger just checked in," Grandma said, reading the text she'd just received. "They want to meet at the buffet."
"Okay, I'll meet you there. I need to finish up something on my computer while I still have connection."
Grandma nodded. "Buffet is on floor fourteen."
"I won't be long," I said.When she left, I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and took it to the balcony, setting it on the little outdoor table and signing into the hospital website where my half-finished application was saved. I scanned through the sections I'd already completed. Facts about my life: where I lived, what I studied in school. Things like that. But then I got to the unanswered questions and remembered for the tenth time why I'd stopped here: Why was I choosing this hospital? What did I bring to the table that was different than what other people had to offer? Why did I want this?
The muscles across my chest tightened as I read.