"HAVE YOU EVER used a washing machine before?"

Marisol asks me this as the four of us head down the hallway. I do not think she means a literal machine that launders your clothes for you. I understand it as her asking if I've ever washed my clothes before.

"Of course," I say.

When Ezra opens the door to the laundry room, I am expecting a pool of clean water, some smooth stones. Maybe some perfumes and oils. Women in tunics leaning over to scrub their clothes clean, spreading the town gossip. Their thighs exposed. My wandering eyes.

Instead, it is a small whitewashed room with tiled floors and four gray machines, two sets of two stacked one on top of the other. A man and a little girl stand in front of one of them. Marisol opens the other bottom machine.

My cheeks are still warm from my moment with the elevator. I calmly hand Marisol our bloody and bleach stained clothes. The man beside us looks over and his eyes widen. He tries to shield his little girl from us, covering her eyes.

Marisol grins wickedly at them. "Periods."

She slams the machine shut. Ezra grabs a small packet from a table against the wall and struggles to open it. Marisol rolls her eyes and takes it from him, only to struggle with opening it herself. Then she passes it to me.

"I don't need help, but... could you open this?"

I try. It doesn't open. Grunting, I rip my dagger from its sheath and use it to cut the top off of the packet. Inside a liquid sloshes around, electric blue and smelling like an early morning, somehow.

"Antigone!" Marisol hisses. "You can't just whip a knife out in public like that." She grins at the little girl and the man, who are staring at us again. "You know how us Americans are."

"I'm not American," I remind her.

"Shut up! Yes, you are!" she tells me. Then, to the two: "Whenever we travel, she likes to pretend to be a local."

She takes the packet from me and pours it into a small compartment hooked to the machine. Ezra presses some buttons. Then the machine starts to purr.

Marisol shows the man the half-empty packet. "Want some?"

***

MARISOL AND I go to our hotel room. Ezra and Dahlia head off to theirs. I'm expecting very little. Even kings and aristocrats on Apollonisi do not decorate or furnish their homes lavishly. A simple chair and table, a bed, and a handful of tapestries will do. To have a home decorated more beautifully than a temple is a direct insult to the gods.

Our hotel room is so beautiful it's blasphemous.

Plush rugs cover the floor, and the same shade of white as downstairs clings to the walls. A large bed rests in the center, draped in a fluffy white blanket and cobalt blue pillows. Over it hangs a painting, a smear of nonsensical colors. Other smaller paintings of the same nature dot the room. There is a wooden desk with a chair on wheels, a plush sea-green couch with a matching footrest, two asymmetrical nightstands, and a long granite counter holding several strange machines. On the far side of the wall is a large glass window with white cotton curtains falling in folds.

Immediately after I walk in, there are two doors on either side of me. The first one is a sliding door that I push open to reveal—not much. A small room, with a metal bar hanging near the ceiling, and extra linens on the floor.

"Marisol," I say. "What's this?"

"A closet. It's where we store, um, our clothes and sometimes other things, too." A grin. "It's where I belong."

I look at her, not understanding. "You aren't clothes."

"Nevermind." She blushes deeply and pushes open the other door. "This is a bathroom, if you weren't aware. Looks niiice."

It's a whitewashed room with dazzling tiled floors. I do not recognize anything inside of it.

"What is all of this?"

She walks inside and takes a look around. "This is a sink, a toilet, a bathtub, and a shower."

The only thing that seems somewhat familiar to me is the bathtub, although it doesn't look like any bath I've ever seen before. Not even the rich have baths like that.

"What?"

She explains to me what each of the bathroom staples is used for and how you use it, though when I question her further, asking her how each thing works, she's at a loss for answers. Then she tells me she's going to take a shower and kicks me out.

While she showers, I lie on the bed—soft as ocean water on my skin—and listen to the running water. It nearly lulls me to sleep. When she comes out her hair is wet and she smells of lavender. She's holding my bag, opened.

"Um. Antigone. I didn't realize what all you had in here." She dumps the contents on the ground. "There's no way this is gonna make it through security. Neither will that knife you keep under your shorts."

I sit up. "What?"

"At the airport tomorrow, before we go on our plane, we have to go through security. They won't let you on the plane if you try to smuggle this shit in. They'd probably put us on a terrorist watchlist, or a no-fly list, and we'd have no way to get home. And we can't just leave all this in the room, either. We'll have to get rid of it somewhere else."

"You already took my sword from me. I am not going anywhere if I do not have the rest of my weapons."

The thought of it is incomprehensible. I have not spent a day in my life without a blade on me since I was a child.

"We can get you new ones in America," she promises. "Florida is weird. A gas station across the street from my school sells live alligators. I'm sure there's, like, a sword store somewhere around. And if there isn't, there's always the internet." She looks to me, tilting her head and sweetening her eyes. "Please just trust me, okay? Just go weapons-free on the plane over there, and we'll get you all the swords you want when we get to America. We can even get you a gun if you want—have you ever shot a gun before? Me neither. Fuck the NRA."

There are many questions I have—what is the internet, what is a gun, what is the NRA—but then I remember the bus. I still don't know how it works. "How do I Google?"

Laughter spills out of her throat, warm and golden as sunlight. "What?"

"I'm being serious! How do I Google? I asked the god on the bus how it was moving, and he told me to Google it. Is it some kind of sacrifice?"

"Hold up." She waves her hands at me. "What god?"

"The man in the front of the bus, sitting behind the wheel."

"Oh, my God, you thought the busdriver was a god?"

"Was he not?"

"No! He was a fucking busdriver! As human as I am. Let me let you in on a little secret, babe: there aren't any gods walking around in the rest of the world. That's just a thing with your island."

I look down. "I still want to learn how to Google."

"'Kay, so there's a couple things you've gotta understand first, young grasshopper."

She sits down on the bed beside me, her legs bunched up beneath her, and talks me through computers, phones, smartphones and iPhones, the internet, and, finally, Google.

"Okay," I nod. "Google how buses move."

Marisol presses the circular button at the bottom of her phone—which is actually this pearly white color, just trapped in a hot pink casing—and the screen lights up. She clicks on a tiny colorful bubble, and a string of text appears on the screen. She types multiple words in, and then presses a small button that looks like a magnifying glass. A bubble of text appears on the device.

"What does it say?"

She translates the text for me into Greek, finally giving me an answer that makes sense. Briefly sated, my curiosity has now strayed elsewhere.

"This is the English alphabet," I say. "Right?"

"It's out of order, but yeah."

"Teach me it. In order."

I am a sea sponge soaking up her words. I want to absorb everything about this world—her world.

She points to a random symbol, one that looks like our letter alpha, then points to another, one that looks like our beta. "This is A, B..."