Paparazzi

by Linda Gerber

  I wished people would stop telling me to do that. “Leave what alone? I was just trying to help you—”

  “Don’t. You don’t know … Just don’t.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier.”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “Then what—?”

  He handed me the fixture. “Here. This is yours,” he said. And then he was gone.

  “I don’t get it,” I told Logan that night. “I found this exact light fixture online. It’s less than a hundred euros to replace. Plus, it wasn’t even his fault.”

  “Could be it’s not the cost that’s worrying him. His da doesn’t sound like the most reasonable man.”

  “I guess not.”

  “How did you say you broke it again?” Logan asked.

  I hadn’t said. And I wasn’t going to say. Logan would tease me forever if he knew what I’d been doing. Meddling, he called it. And he knew me well enough to know I couldn’t help myself. “We were just messing around on the deck and I lost my balance,” I told him. “I grabbed at it to keep from falling.” At least that was the partial truth.

  “Just be honest,” Logan said.

  My heart stopped for a second. “What?”

  “Just tell his da what happened.”

  Oh, right. That. “Yeah. I’ll tell him I broke it.”

  “It won’t be so bad,” Logan assured me. “Nothing ever is if you just tell the truth.”

  Travel tip: Never say anything that can be construed as challenging the honor or integrity of your host, or challenge his statements.

  I finally found Zoe the next morning after breakfast. She was clearing the table and I helped her.

  “Are you going to come to Paxos with us this morning?” I asked.

  “I … must work,” she said.

  “I could help get your jobs done,” I offered. “We don’t go until about eleven and if we hurry—”

  She planted the clearing tray on her hip. “I cannot.”

  “I could ask your mom for you. We could tell her—”

  “Cassidy,” she said in a sharp tone I’d never heard from her before, “I do not want to go.”

  I set the final spoon and fork on her tray. “Oh. Okay.”

  “Please excuse me,” Zoe said, and left me standing at the table wondering what had just happened.

  I can see the island of Paxos in the distance. Already it looks greener than a lot of the other islands we’ve visited so far. Lots of olive groves, Victoria says. We’ll be docking there in just a couple of hours for our final shoot before we reach Corfu tomorrow.

  The legend of Paxos is that it was made by Poseidon as a getaway for his girlfriend, Amphitrite. He supposedly struck his trident on the bottom of Corfu and dragged the piece of land that broke off a little farther south.

  We’ll get to—

  Someone knocked on my door. I shut the top on my computer and rushed to open it, hoping to see Zoe standing there. I found Magus waiting in the hallway instead.

  “Oh,” I said in my eloquent way. “Hi.”

  “Good morning, Miss Cassidy,” he said. “I’ve been sent to tell you that you are wanted in the salon.” His deep voice made the summons sound ominous.

  My stomach sank like a bad soufflé. The fixture. I hadn’t talked to Nikos’s dad about it yet, even though I had seriously planned to. As soon as I worked up the nerve.

  “Oh,” I said again. My mind was racing too fast to come up with anything deeper than that. I wondered if I should take the broken fixture with me. Or would that just make things worse? How was I going to explain what I was doing when the thing got busted? Mr. Kouropoulos must be plenty mad already if he had sent Magus to fetch me instead of Zoe or Victoria or Nikos or someone.

  “Is everything okay?” I probed.

  Magus actually looked apologetic. “Yes, miss,” he said. “Could you come with me now, please?”

  I felt like a prisoner walking to the gallows as I followed Magus through the corridors and up the stairs and around the deck to the salon. My chest grew tighter with every step.

  Magus stopped at the top of the stairs that led down to the salon and swept his arm forward. I swallowed hard. Whatever it was, I was going to have to face it myself.

  I took each step downward slowly, deliberately, steeling myself for whatever waited for me on the other side of the door.

  At the bottom of the steps, I stopped dead. I could see through the glass that CJ was in there. And Victoria. Nikos sat slumped into a chair and his dad towered over him, the scowl on his face like one of those tragedy masks. Actually, CJ’s face didn’t look much better. And when Victoria turned to face me, the disappointment on her face hit me smack in the chest so hard I could barely take a breath. She motioned for me to come in, and like a robot, I made myself obey.

  Inside the door, it was silent. Everyone turned to look at me. Everyone but Nikos, that is.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked finally, my voice small.

  “This”—Mr. Kouropoulos slapped a newspaper onto CJ’s desk—“is what’s wrong.”

  A newspaper? Now I was really confused. If we weren’t gathered to talk about the broken fixture, then what—

  I stared at the paper and my heart sank. I’ll be the first to admit it looked bad. I couldn’t read the headline because it was written in Greek, but the photos accompanying the story showed Nikos and me when we had fallen onto the deck. Only it didn’t look like we had just fallen. From the angle of the camera, it looked like Nikos and I were making out. In one photo, he was on top of me and it looked like my arms were wrapped around his neck. Down below the text, a photo showed Nikos fastening my necklace for me in that shop on Mykonos. There we were again on Delos, with him giving me a piggyback ride. And on Zakynthos, arms around each other, as we were just about to get toppled by that wave. But the picture that made my heart sink was of me and Nikos, sprawled on the deck again, our faces almost touching. If you didn’t know what was really happening, it looked as if Nikos was about to kiss me.

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” I said. I hated the way my voice trembled, but I was turning cold inside. It was like Spain all over again—the tabloids, the twisted situations. They could make anything look like something it wasn’t, but everyone would believe the lies anyway because the pictures were “proof.”

  “Well, of course it isn’t,” Mr. Kouropoulos snapped. “But that doesn’t much matter once this hits the newsstands, now does it?”

  “It’s not her fault, Papa,” Nikos said. “Stop yelling at her.”

  It was the first time I had heard Nikos talk back to his dad. And probably the first time his dad had heard it, too, judging by the way his face turned all purple as he turned on Nikos. “And what were you thinking, eh? You knew the paps were out there. This was not the type of image we talked about for you.”

  “Papa,” Nikos said, gesturing with his eyes at the rest of us.

  “Well, I personally don’t understand what all the fuss is about,” CJ said. “You knew this girl was tabloid fodder before you signed on for this gig.”

  “Excuse me?” Victoria said.

  CJ shrugged. “Well, it’s not exactly the kind of image we’ll push when we get closer to airtime, but—”

  “I should say not,” Victoria fumed.

  I was still standing in the middle of the floor, trying to make sense of what was happening. Victoria gestured for me to sit next to her, and I sank onto the cushions gratefully.

  Which is when my cell phone rang. With my mom and dad’s ringtone. Perfect. If they came unglued over the Facebook photos, they were going to have dual aneurysms over this.

  I handed the phone to Victoria. “Please,” I told her. “I can’t talk to them right now.”

  Victoria didn’t look all that thrilled to talk to them, either, but she took a deep breath and slid the phone open. “Hello, Julia. Davidson. Yes. It appears that we have a slight problem.”

  Nikos and I both sat uncomfortably th
roughout the whole discussion. If no one wanted our input, I thought, why did we have to be there? It was just awkward.

  Mr. Kouropoulos said he was done and that we were going straight to Corfu and it was over. CJ said she had a show to complete and two more days of shooting and if we didn’t finish, we’d be in violation of our contract with the network. Mr. Kouropoulos reminded her that he was the one paying for everything, to which she responded that we still had a contract and she intended to enforce it. Victoria relayed everything to my mom and dad over the phone.

  Once Mr. Kouropoulos finally calmed down, they decided we could complete the show, but he still wasn’t happy about it. I escaped from the room when they started discussing whose responsibility it was to tighten security for the remainder of the cruise.

  I stomped back toward my cabin, thinking about how backward everything had gotten. If the paparazzi wanted to play up a romance on board the Pandora, they were looking at the wrong girl. I didn’t even like Nikos. Not in that way anyway. How come there were no pictures of him with Zoe? They were the ones who belonged together.

  Speaking of Zoe, I saw her at the railing and rushed over to talk to her. When she saw me coming, she turned away.

  “Zoe, let me explain.”

  “I think you were my friend,” she said.

  “I was. I am. Those pictures are not what they look—”

  “It is not the pictures. You spy on my mother!”

  Oh. She knew about that. “Look, I didn’t hear anything. I was just trying to—”

  She shook her head. “Go away.”

  “But I just wanted—”

  “Please.”

  The shoot on Paxos was just pathetic. As long as the cameras were rolling, Nikos was all enthusiasm and smiles, talking about Poseidon and the Fifteen-Hundred-Year-Old Olive Tree! in a grove on Paxos, but between takes, he hardly even looked at me. Forget about talking.

  I wanted to remind him that the paparazzi thing wasn’t my fault—only that wasn’t exactly true. If I hadn’t been trying to spy on Theia Alexa, I wouldn’t have fallen on top of him, and if I hadn’t fallen on top of him, the paparazzo wouldn’t have been able to get any sensational shots to misrepresent. I left him alone and felt alternately sorry for myself and really mad at everyone else.

  Once we got back to the yacht, Zoe avoided me the entire rest of the evening. I finally gave up and told Victoria I didn’t feel well, and went back to my room early. The only thing that kept me going was waiting for my nightly video chat with Logan. But even though I waited an hour past lights-out, he never signed in.

  I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I sat out on my balcony, watching the moonlight spill across the water. Its reflection floated on the surface like liquid diamonds, shimmering, shifting. It looked a lot like the reflection I saw when I sat out there just a few nights ago. Just as bright. Just as beautiful.

  But it wasn’t the same. We were in a different place.

  Like Heraclitus said, the water is constantly moving. That means the reflection I see at this moment will be different from the one I will see in just a few seconds. It’s always changing.

  Just like me.

  I deleted the post instead of publishing it and shut my computer and crawled into bed, feeling dramatic and hopeless and a little bit lost. I was like the moonbeam, with no control how the water would move me. Logan didn’t want to talk to me. Zoe didn’t want to talk to me. Nikos didn’t want to talk to me. My hopes of returning to When in Rome were probably smashed. And there was nothing I could do about any of it.

  Or was there?

  I switched on the bedside lamp and pulled out Magus’s book and skimmed through the pages until I found the quote I was looking for. It was from Socrates. “Let him that would move the world first move himself.”

  I had read that before, but I didn’t know what it meant. Now it seemed simple. If I wanted a change in fortune, I had to start with a change in myself.

  I turned the light off again and lay back against the pillows.

  And thought.

  I found Nikos in the game room the next morning. He was sitting in front of the screen with his video game turned on, but he wasn’t playing. He was just staring at the screen.

  I sat next to him. “Are you okay?”

  He shrugged.

  “Do you know where Zoe is?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I need to find her and tell her I’m sorry.”

  No response.

  “Because I value her friendship.”

  We sat quietly for a while longer and then I turned to face him.

  “She really likes you, you know. I wish you would talk to her, too.”

  He slid a quick look at me and then went back to staring at the screen.

  “My dad …”

  “I’m not talking about your dad. You’re the one who likes her.”

  His ears turned red.

  “Okay. I’m going to go now,” I said.

  And I left him to stew.

  The way I figured it, some things were beyond my ability to change. I had no control over the paparazzi or Nikos or what my mom and dad thought. But I could try to mend my friendship with Zoe. That was too important to me to let it go.

  Be as you wish to seem.

  —Socrates

  I found Zoe perched on a stool in the corner of the galley, peeling potatoes. I approached her carefully, afraid she’d run away again if I made any sudden movements. “Hi, Zoe.”

  She looked up from her potatoes long enough to acknowledge me and then turned back to her job.

  “Please tell me you aren’t still mad at me,” I said.

  She attacked the potato with her peeler. “No, I am not angry at you.”

  I was relieved to hear her say that, but it didn’t take a genius to tell she was upset about something. I took an empty plastic food drum and turned it over like a stool. Then I scooted it close to her and sat down. “Can I help?”

  She shrugged, so I grabbed another potato and a peeler that was lying on the stainless-steel counter.

  “I was wrong to spy on your mom. Whatever I thought … it was none of my business. I disrespected your privacy and I’m sorry.”

  Her peeler passed over the potato in a steady rhythm. She didn’t look up, but she finally said, “Thank you.”

  I felt so much better. Lighter. Even though I knew it was only the first step.

  “I was just talking to Nikos,” I said.

  She peeled even harder.

  “He really likes you,” I ventured.

  “I know.”

  Okay. That was good, right? I scraped the peeler along my potato a couple of times, confused. If she already knew how much he liked her, why didn’t she sound happy?

  “I think Nikos is afraid to say anything to you. …”

  She held her potato and peeler still in her lap and finally looked up at me for real. “I know this. I hear Nikos and his father talking last night.”

  “Oh. Uh …” I didn’t know where to go from that. Nikos must have told his dad how he really felt. That should have been a good thing.

  “Nikos and I …” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “My mother …”

  “Are you afraid you can’t like Nikos because he’s the boss’s son? Because that’s so old—”

  “He is not the boss,” she said. “Nikos’s father … he is a client.”

  Now I was confused. Zoe’s English was pretty good, but maybe she had the wrong word. Or did boss and client translate the same?

  “My mother tell me, without this charter, we could lose …” She swallowed and blinked really fast a few times. Were those tears clinging to her eyelashes?

  My stomach turned cold. “Lose what?” I asked.

  She leaned closer, her eyes darting back and forth. “The Pandora,” she whispered.

  It took a minute for that to sink in. Lose the Pandora? “Oh,” I murmured. “The Pandora is not his yacht.”

  She shook her head. �
��He only charter her for this trip.” She was right: that made Mr. Kouropoulos a client.

  I remembered the photo of Zoe’s family standing on the pier when she was a baby. It all made sense now. “The Pandora is yours.”

  Zoe nodded and stared at her hands miserably. “I was not supposed to say.”

  “What do you mean, you could lose her?”

  “It is not good time for anyone,” she said quietly. “My father’s investment business is bad. He loses too much money. So my parents decide for the summer season they will charter the Pandora. But still the money is tight. We have to release some of the crew. My mother loves to cook, so …”

  “Wow.” I shook my head, trying to adjust what I thought I knew. “But why did Mr. Kouropoulos pretend the Pandora was his?”

  “Because he needs the publicity,” Nikos said.

  I whipped around on my stool to see him standing in the doorway.

  “He hasn’t gotten a new role in almost two years,” Nikos continued. “In his business, that’s like being dead. So he hoped he could use this special to keep the Kouropoulos name in the tabloids.”

  Now my hands went cold. “He wanted you in the tabloids?”

  “It’s cheap publicity,” Nikos said.

  I noticed he didn’t say free.

  And then it made sense to me. Why there were hordes of photographers in the big cities where everyone could see them, but none on Delos. None at the beach. “Has he been … paying them to follow us?”

  Nikos nodded. “He says it’s cheaper than hiring a publicist.”

  “But he seemed so angry yesterday when he talked about the pictures in the paper.”

  “That’s because the photographers were only supposed to take flattering pictures. That was part of the deal. But then this paparazzo tried to start a scandal. He threatened to tell about the arrangement if we didn’t come up with more money, but my dad just spent the last bit of money he had.”

  I looked from Nikos to Zoe. “And you both knew all this?”

  “She didn’t know anything!” Nikos said quickly.

  “Except about the charter,” Zoe said.

  I shook my head. Everyone had been acting. Nikos, his dad, Theia Alexa, Zoe, the paparazzi. “Am I the only one without a part in this drama?”