The Summer War

the summer war A ROMANTIC COMEDY ALEX A. KING Copyright © 2023 by Alex A. King All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Cover by Beck and Dot Book Covers To all the snacks I ate while writing this book: I regret you. contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Epilogue Also by Alex A. King Greek Glossary one They—the world’s great meme philosophers—claim hate is a cancer, but they’re wrong. Hate is a natural preservative that keeps members of my family alive long after their peers have choked down one last souvlaki and rolled into their waiting graves. Exhibit A: My great-grandmother. Currently she’s standing (hunched, frail, liver-spotted) on ninety-five’s doorstep. Scrawny arms and legs outstretched, she’s performing a spectacular starfish so that Hades and Thanatos can’t team up to haul her skinny backside to the underworld. She refuses to buy a ticket to the big taverna in the sky until the matriarch of the Roussos family admits that the entire Roussos bloodline is a pack of dirty rotten thieves and croaks. Generally speaking, I’m not one of life’s haters. I like people. I love kids and babies. When it comes to cats and dogs ... gimme. Star Wars or Star Trek? Yes, please. One lone exception stands out. Thanos Roussos. My white-hot contempt for that reprehensible man will give me eternal life. At least that’s the plan. Ana, you’re probably thinking, do you realize you sound like a refugee from a Greek sitcom with all that drama? I do. But that is precisely why I came prepared with these posters and a bucket of color-coded stickers. So you would understand. See this? It’s a list. A sample of the perfectly reasonable reasons why I, Ana Merrick, detest Thanos Roussos and would gleefully shove him into a rocket ship and fire him into the sun. All I need is the opportunity. Billionaires, are you listening? Okay, so I used glitter pens to color-code everything. Makes for easy-peasy reading. You can take a teacher out of the classroom but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher. I have the student debt and at least two dozen Best Teacher Ever mugs to prove it. Before we get started, please note that I hated Thanos long before the Marvel movies were a thing. The movie villain evaporated half of the universe’s population and he’s still not worse than Thanos Roussos. Onward! The summer we were both five-years-old, Thanos melted the 120-pack of Crayola crayons that my parents bought me for our annual trip to Greece. Thanos said he wanted to make a mega-candle, but all he made was a mess. For the rest of the summer, I had to color with … Oh, wait! I couldn’t color at all. My grandmother gave me a pencil and told me to use my imagination. I was five. I could imagine a horse with five heads, but struggled with faking yellow. At seven, there was nothing more beloved to me than my favorite American Girl doll, Molly. Leaving her in Oregon was unthinkable, so she came to Nera with us for the summer. One week into July, Thanos kidnapped Molly and sent a series of misspelled ransom notes with two options: kiss his butt or he would shave Molly’s head with his papou’s razor. The American Girl Doll Hospital fixed Molly’s hair, but she was never the same after that. I’d swear all they did was swap her head for a new one. She wasn’t my Molly anymore, after her trip to the hospital. When we were eight, Thanos put squid in my bed. Not a single tentacled mini-kraken. Nothing so clean and civilized. More like thirty. Some were breaded and fried. One was marinated. The tomato sauce left a stain on Impostor Molly’s new hair. Once puberty struck, my nemesis amped up the awful, fueled by testosterone and Doritos. During our twelfth summer, Thanos told me he liked me better without boobs. Fun fact: At the time he was going through an awkward phase, so his were bigger than mine. Thirteen: He stole my sports bra and used it as the elastic doodad on a slingshot. At the difficult age of fourteen, he pretended to be my secret admirer. There was no admirer and it wasn’t a secret—not among his pals. That was also the summer I discovered Anna Vissi’s 1980s catalog and played her music non-stop, my boom box aimed in the direction of his bedroom window. Fifteen. Like Bruno, we don’t talk about what happened at fifteen. Okay. Fine. We need to talk about it. Thanos stole my underwear—all my underwear, clean and dirty—and used every last piece to make one big panty flag that he stuck to the top of his great-grandmother’s house. He even used my period underwear. Unforgivable. Things got weird at sixteen when Thanos declared that I’d died in a horrific nose-picking incident. If I spoke, he would pretend he was hearing voices and holler for an exorcist. During one brief moment I flickered into existence and he attacked me with holy water. While I was on a date. My date wound up inflicted with a brain-eating amoeba from the alleged holy water and spent a month in the ICU in Athens. His parents are still hoping he can speak and walk again someday, the Virgin Mary willing. At seventeen I miraculously came back to life, no longer dead from nose-picking, and my