THE AIRPORT IS A STRANGE, SPRAWLING WHITE labyrinth of a building, unknowable in its entirety. The driver drops us off at the central entrance. We thank her graciously for her services and promise her our first-born.

Inside, there is blue everywhere and odd glass tiles on the floor. We enter into a large waiting area where everything is moving—people briefly taking a seat before popping up again to greet a returning loved one or rush off deeper into the building. An amalgam of languages dance across my ears, all of them strange to me. Voices come from nowhere. Lights come from the ceiling. Short, jarring beeps sound off every couple of seconds.

We head to a tall gray screened machine that Marisol begins tapping on, her long nails making this strangely satisfying pap-pap-pap against the screen.

Ezra leans up against it, his eyes still crusted over with sleep. "I really don't wanna go back home."

"Why not?" Dahlia asks.

There is too much going on in the world around us for me to pay much attention to their conversation.

In the air there is something I can't quite describe, those nuances I fear—only here there isn't any fear in them, only comfort. Here everybody is unknown and everybody is an outsider. Here are people who have lived in this city their whole lives and still have to check the map to get from one point in its airport to another. Here are people coming to vacation, to visit their families. Here are people charting off to countries I've never heard of before, making a quick pit-stop on the way. I can tell that some of them are foreigners just by the way they dress and talk and sometimes even move. I wonder if they feel the same about me.

All of us, mixed together like this, none knowing where another is from or where their final destination is, if they even have one.

I watch the faces of passersby and try to find something in them, anything. But there is nothing familiar to me about this place.

"Because it sucks," Ezra replies. "Life there sucks. Everything there sucks. I could stay in Greece forever."

"Then why don't you?" Dahlia counters. "You're, like, twenty-something, right? You can make your own decisions. It's your life, not anybody else's."

"You should be a motivational speaker. You could have your own TedTalk. Meet Ted himself and face him in a boss battle."

"What would I gain by defeating him?"

"Infinite power."

"But at what cost?"

"Who is Ted?" I ask. "Is he a god?"

Marisol then hands us each a small white ticket. "Don't lose it," she orders.

There is no more discussion of this mysterious god Ted.

Ezra and I follow Marisol and Dahlia as they lead us to our next Herculean test: TSA. The main thing that TSA tests is my patience. We wait in a line for what feels like hours, all the while creeping forward at a snail's pace, though we never seem to get any closer to the front than we were when we joined the line.

Finally, we reach the front. We all show the All-Seeing Judge our tickets and passports and Marisol instructs me to remove my shoes. Following her lead, I set my bag down on a strange moving table, then grab a small plastic container in which I place my shoes. After I've successfully completed this, another All-Seeing Judge ushers me inside a machine, a sleek, tall thing that looks like a doorway without a door. When I step out on the other side I collect my belongings, shouldering my bag and shoving my shoes back onto my feet.

Reunited on the other side of TSA, the four of us strategize our next move.

"The gate," Marisol says, looking at her ticket. "It's this way."

We dive into the interior of the building, twisting through endless corridors, doubling back on ourselves several times. Once, we go down a set of moving stairs, clinging tight to the handrail. A couple times we pass over a walkway made of the same mechanism. We pass row after row of blue seating; small restaurants and stores; and long, gaping windows looking out onto what Marisol tells me is called the runway, where planes jet off from.

It is through these windows that I first catch sight of a plane, this large, rounded machine with a spiky tail and wings.

After it seems as if we have walked the airport up and down we finally come to our gate and claim four seats facing the window. All around us are people—napping sprawled out on the floor, engrossed in books or their phones, leaning into each other as they laugh—and I'm struck with the realization that I'm never going to see any of them again. All of the people—besides Marisol, Dahlia, and Ezra—that I've met since I left Apollonisi I'm never going to see again.

Back home, you know everyone. You see them at feasts and festivals. You run into each other while shopping in the agora. Everyone has... a lasting connection with one another. But here—there are too many people, there is too much noise. You get so caught up in it, and in yourself, that the strangers you pass on the street—that's all they'll ever be to you, a stranger.

"So here's what's up," Marisol tells us. "First we've got an hour and a half flight to Istanbul. Then eleven hours to Boston, and another three hours to West Palm Beach."

Most of the words she says I'm not familiar with. I try to drink them in like I drink in everything else she says. So easy those words lay on her tongue, and yet they mean nothing to me. Will it always be this way? Will I always feel one step behind?

"Where?" I ask.

Marisol explains: "Istanbul is a city in Turkey—do you remember the Ancient Greek city Byzantium? It's Istanbul today."

"You say that as if she was alive back then," Dahlia says.

Ezra starts to sing, and by the second line, Marisol and Dahlia have joined in. Their voices, though joking in tone, are practiced, decent—no, not decent; they're better than decent, good enough to make it, good enough to sing hymns.

The song goes: "Istanbul was Constantinople / Now it's Istanbul not Constantinople / Been a long time gone, oh Constantinople / Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night!"

Once they've finished singing Marisol adds: "Boston and West Palm Beach are American cities." There are no songs to accompany either of them. "The closest airport to where the three of us live is in West Palm Beach, so that's our last stop."

"Why do we have to fly to all of these places to get there?"

"Because most flights aren't direct," Dahlia says. "Not enough people are flying from Athens to some random little Florida town to make a whole flight about it, so you take a bunch of indirect flights to get where you've gotta go."

"Oh."

"Where's Antigone gonna stay once we get back home?" Marisol asks.

"She can stay with me for a little teensie-weensie bit," Dahlia offers. "My moms are off transporting medical supplies to some refugee camp and they can't leave for another couple of days. So I have the whole place to myself."

"Why won't I be able to stay with you once your moms come home?"

"Because as chill as they are, they wouldn't vibe with me smuggling a Greek demigoddess into America. Or to Greek demigoddesses existing. Or to—really, anything that we've been up to lately."

"Why not just pretend that I'm a normal American teenager?"

"One day," Marisol says. "But for now, you don't know nearly enough about this world to pass as one."

"So teach me."

"Okay." She nods. "Or should I say okurr? Which is some slang that you're gonna need to know. It's just another way to say okay, but with a lil bit of extra spice. Like every other slang word, people claim the Kardashians made it up, even though it actually came out of drag culture. Which, drag culture is the community of drag kings and queens, which are people, usually—but not always—gay men and lesbians, who dress up as the opposite sex for entertainment or artistic purposes. A good portion of our slang comes from them, or somewhere else in the LGBT community. But most of it comes from AAVE—African-American vernacular English, which is . . ."

She sounds so incredibly passionate about these strange things, the Kardashians and AAVE and drag, her voice getting louder and more rapid and higher-pitched, her eyes livening up, her hands flying all over the place. I want to experience all of it with her the way that she does. I could live in Marisol's world forever.