I’m full of stories about reading the Greek classics and crying on the treadmill at the gym and dreams I’ve had about dating Achilles except finding out he’s gay. But this story isn’t about those Greeks. It’s about the kind you might date when you go against your regular type (tender, geeky guys) and find yourself dating a guy only for how he looks in a bathing suit.

And so the Greek story.

Some summer, I think I was 17, I was babysitting these three kids (I took care of them for six years)—there was a little boy, just walking, a precocious five-year-old girl, and a pale little seven-year-old girl who had had a brain tumor removed just a couple years earlier. These kids were with me all the time, year-round, except for when I was in class.

I was a tax write-off, so the pay was especially good.

One day I was at the pool with them and this Greek guy walked up, said something flattering to me, then charmed the kids. He was a medical student at McGill in Canada and was in town for the summer. His parents were diplomats. He was actually a pompous fuck and not at all my type. I don’t dig Speedos either. But he had this body, just a marvelous chest—even though it was a put-off, how hard he must have worked at it, that he wasted his time at the gym like that. So he asked me out, and I said no. And he asked me out the next time I saw him at the pool, and I said no, but I was smiling at his chest hairs when I said it. And he asked me out the next time, and usually I go for shy guys who are too insecure to ask a girl out, but he’d brought along his five-year-old little sister, and he was cute as all heck with her, and that changed my mind. We went to the such-and-such embassy to pick up another couple and then to some fancy ball.

One thing I didn’t mention. His English was not great. My Greek was non-existent, although I learned how to say belly button that summer, so we communicated mostly in French.

The kids I babysat for loved him. And even though I didn’t, it was just as easy to date him as to not date him. He did have this marvelous chest and could sneak me into clubs and invite me to fancy diplomat parties.

Then he did something that got to me. You see, Rosie, the little girl with cancer, she’s always been my soft spot. Because she was unruly and ugly, and I don’t know, I’ve just always liked her a lot. Plus, I used to babysit her when she was four, right before she got the cancer diagnosis, and so I’d seen her through a lot, felt sisterly, I guess. And what the Greek guy did was he bought Rosie this giant Hello Kitty. She loved it so much, she wanted to take it through the CAT scanning tube with her—she still went for checks and blood tests and all of that, and I sometimes went along. She said this giant Hello Kitty would make it not so scary.

We were at the hospital, and I was watching the other two, and I heard that Hello Kitty couldn’t fit in the tube so I had this awful image of her going through the machine—she hated that thing, it made her panic to be in there alone—and I kept thinking about her going into the tube, with her mom and Hello Kitty slowly going out of sight.

For some reason, this gave the Greek guy some kind of appeal for me, that he’d thought about me and these kids during our time apart when I assumed he just worked out his pecs. That he’d brought that kind of comfort to my kind-of-kid-sister, something which naturally made me want to have sex with him.

So I left the hospital, called him, and, you know, we took things to another level.

But on to the blue Madrigal dress, because isn’t that where this whole story has been leading?

School started again, and the Greek guy was still in town, hadn’t gone off to college just yet. My first class of the day was Madrigals. This little singing thing, chamber music and stuff, and we had to dress alike every Monday and go class-to-class singing requests (like someone wanted to request chamber music, but at least it stopped class for a while). All the girls had to wear the same ghastly blue polyester dress, the only dress that the store had enough of in stock.

After school one day, I had this nasty blue dress on and I went to the Greek guy’s soccer practice. And he was completely sweaty and his shirt was off. He didn’t want to muss my dress so he just kissed the top of my head, but all of this sweat dripped over me anyway. So this prompted me to suggest a quick drive to the nearest bed, which happened to be at someone’s where he was housesitting. And before long we were having this crazed sex moment, me still wearing my blue Madrigals dress.

I got home, did all my regular things: homework, babysit, throw up dinner to keep my cute figure. And a week went by. I should have washed my dress, but I was a teenager and this was in the days before Monica Lewinsky, and I didn’t realize the huge semen stain on the seat of this dress until Monday. And, well, it was not going to come out.

I did the only sensible thing I could think of; I wore overalls to school and had a talk with my guidance counselor during first class. I told him I might have made a mistake with my schedule because I was planning on applying to some tough colleges and I didn’t think Madrigals was going to be very helpful. He agreed. We swapped Madrigals for Advanced Placement Physics, and the dress issue was resolved.

Here are some interesting follow-ups, if you’re a believer in Fate. I don’t know that I am, but it’s fun to draw the connections. First off, the little Madrigal class tours, for the first time ever, were cancelled. The Madrigals had dedicated a song to this kid, Mark Ellis, after he lost his virginity. The song they dedicated was “Come Again, Sweet Love.” They were banned from touring for the rest of the year, so I really didn’t miss out on anything.

Second thing, that AP Physics class helped me get into Carnegie Mellon’s biomedical engineering program, which kicked my butt and made me give up on a career in the sciences altogether. And that led to a change of majors to creative writing, which led me to believe I could rattle on about things like this for pay and publicity—and, ha, I can!

And finally, Rosie ended up naming that Hello Kitty something that sounds like “koobie,” Greek for belly button. It’s amazing how many situations have come up where Rosie and I have been able to drop that word into a conversation and sound very cool. I like to think now that she’s all grown up and living in her group home, that she’s still got that cat.

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Susan Henderon is the Managing Editor of Night Train and recently helped to judge the "20-Minute Stories" contest at McSweeney's. Writing credits include Zoetrope: All-Story Extra, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Bellevue Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Arkansas Review, and North Atlantic Review.

This piece was first published in INK POT #4 - 2004, a literary journal.

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