The Pythia

By Sophie Hamel

/ Fiction /      

From the stone bleachers of Delphi’s ancient theater, the view of the Parnassus mountains had a before-civilization-turned-everything-ugly charm we all wanted a slice of. We took pictures, crowding the frame with our friends and defiant smiles.

The cultural field trip had so far taken us from one half-column to the next with the regularity of burning sunshine. Today, we were blessed with a mostly intact theater. Unfortunately, it was about to be a stage once again. We shifted in our seats as Mrs. Perlotti marched to the orchestra’s center.

“Quiet,” she said, the word harnessing power as it glided up to the seats Justine and I had claimed. “One of you will read a poem to the rest of the class, who will li-sten,” she over-articulated as if the concept couldn’t be grasped by our still-growing teenager brains. “Esther,” she said, landing on the new girl sitting in the first row, alone, far to the side, trying hard not to be noticed.

We’d heard of Esther before she joined out class mid-year. We had the talk. Be kind, make sure she feels at home, all rehashed banalities we half-listened to, but there was a warning in our home teacher’s insistence. It made us raise our stare when she entered the class, and we understood that for once, it wasn’t about us.

Mrs. Perlotti now held Esther’s hand as if helping her cross a river, but we all knew she was dragging her down in it. Esther centered on the stage, a thin silhouette barely carving space out of the backdrop. Mrs. Perlotti bowed to her. “Whenever you’re ready.”

The poem shook in Esther’s hands under our scrutiny. Mouth open around a text still bottled in, she eyed the side of the orchestra for her exit, as if she could taste the bitterness of our mockery, waiting for her to stutter, or to sound too involved.

She was so pale, and thin, her lips plumped big and too red in contrast to cheeks carved in. I stared at the dark hair on her arms in class, because I now knew they were all signs of something bigger than the starvation a body was fighting off. 

* * *

Lucile was fourteen like me that summer two years ago, her skin still light after the holidays while I traveled, tanned, and collected stories to tell her.

“Do you think I’m too thin?” she asked me this one time and never after.

This was silly. “Of course not.” She was the way she was. A short, petite teenager to my tall, pear-shaped body. I didn’t think she could be thinner if she tried. But there was a doubt in her voice and there never was. It felt good to be the one to wash it away, stand by her side against the others, as a show of allegiance after the time apart. Until she stood up and I saw the ten pounds she forced off her body during the month I was gone.

* * *

Esther did better than expected with the poem, her voice steady and body tethered to the place she had been forced to own. I wondered if she was proud or just relieved after the last verse, as she rushed back to the invisibility of her seat. 

Mrs. Perlotti made us clap, before taking back the stage. She filled us to the brim with historical facts and crazy predictions the Pythia made, shaping wars and entire nations’ futures. Only once the lecture was done, did we get to see the actual ruins, Mrs. Perlotti’s purple umbrella, our beacon in the crowding tide of tourists.

By the omphalos, the belly button of the world where the Pythia made her readings, I nearly stepped on a dead squirrel and pulled Justine to save her from the same fate. The small animal’s carcass was freshly eviscerated, intestines glistening on the picture-perfect landscape. 

“Eww,” Justine said, a hand to her mouth, “this is so gross.”

“Someone went too far in Oracle mode,” I said, trying for a laugh. My stomach heaved at the decay seasoning the heat, and a vision of ancient priests burying their hands in the squirrel’s innards to predict the future twisted my insides.

* * *

Through a darkening sky, we walked up the tight curves of the street that brought us back to the modern town, an aggregation of A-frame wooden chalets that must have doubled down as a ski station during the Winter season. Ski-lifts peppered the green slopes around in a clash of ancient and modern after the tour of the archaeological site. Calves strong from the climb up, we rushed towards a trattoria sign promising wine with every pizza slice and elbowed our way past a bored waiter to an overheated dining room dusted with crochet paintings and pairs of ancient skis tacked to the walls.

There was wine on all the tables that weren’t ours, and I could see more than one glance coming from our group, followed by stares from the teachers, watching trouble being planned. The Ancient Greeks were master drinkers. Their wine was so strong, they appointed a master of ceremony to dilute it, and change ratios as the evening went, making it weaker or stronger depending on the mood of the party. Maybe all teenagers were descended from the Ancient Greeks. Except nobody wanted a quieter party. The master of ceremony was always the loudest of the group and made sure nothing got diluted. Ever. 

The first time I drank from a bottle at a party, there were so many alcohols mixed in it, they called it a cemetery. Lucile drank after me, but this was us then, pre-summer, inseparable, always doing what the other was trying. Harmless, stupid, a pair stronger for it.

Pizzas were served on massive metal plate holders at the center of our tables, and we all filled our plates coming back for seconds and thirds. The guys were making a competition stuffing themselves. I was past full too, but the cheese was dripping off the crust and I couldn’t resist finishing an extra slice.

Justine’s freckles were bright red against the heat of her cheeks. I knew she would have patted her full belly with a laugh if I joked about eating too much, but I saw Esther’s plate in front of me, a slice smashed in the middle, and I said nothing, popping the button of my jeans open. Don’t say the wrong words. Words are sticky, they turn on you. Esther didn’t eat a bite. A few times, she took her fork up to her mouth, only to put it down while she grabbed her napkin or checked her pocket.

“Want a last slice?” I asked Esther as if there was a point. Was I even helping? Maybe I was doing it for me. I had to try to get her to eat something, even if it didn’t work. It never did.

“I’m stuffed,” she said massaging a stomach so flat and empty, she must have been stroking ribs. Her wide smile opened a breach in me. Lucile was across the table at the school cafeteria, serving me the same words sweetened with fake smiles. I could see these days as a Before era, when I still asked when she didn’t touch her food, made a point in doing so. I nodded at Esther, swallowed her lie, like the gift she meant it as, and looked away, but the food was everywhere. Lucile’s words curled into my head: “You taught me what not to eat.” Guilt gnawed at my insides. I remembered not drinking a coke and listing how much sugar was in it and her eyes bulging; not finishing my fries and seeing her put down the one in her hand; saying I’m full before I finished my plate and noticing she didn’t touch hers. This was another kind of before – before she removed sweets, bread, meat, slashing foods by categories, before she stopped pretending even trying to eat. I looked at Esther’s plate, the smashed pizza that paraded as a “see I ate something” when it was all there, but I didn’t want to think about this. I couldn’t get involved this time. I turned to Justine. Face flushed from the heat and the food, she wrapped her flamboyant, heavy mane around her fist, as she fanned her neck with the other hand. “Are the boys doing something tonight?”

She composed an outraged face, that was lightness and mischievousness in one teenager’s wink. Something was happening, and she knew all about it, and wasn’t that something worth grinning about.

* * *

We dragged ourselves back to the hotel, a short five-minute walk away from the restaurant, discussing the benefit of fresh air on our full stomachs. The hotel was the typical one-star pit-stop you would find in any small town that catered to a lot of groups and one-nighters. A single attendant handed out keys at the end of a long, dark lobby, surrounded by a few yellowing pictures of the three columns that I thought were part of the temple of the Pythia, but nothing was as it seemed. These three columns were not the site of the Oracle, and they only stood because some archaeologists decided to piece them back together. Out of a circle of collapsed pillars, they chose these three to become an emblem of the site, something pretty for tourists to look at. It must have taken a lot of mortars for them to stand so straight holding nothing but themselves in the emptiness around.

The girls’ rooms were on the second floor, while the guys took over the one above.

I was paired with Justine and Esther. Even the teachers knew to put Justine and me together without asking, but Esther wasn’t anybody’s choice, and the teachers knew it too. “Take care of her, will you?” Mrs. Perlotti whispered as she gave me the room key in her typical way of making a command sound like a request.

Our room was sparse with three rough single beds in a row, no headboards and covers the color of spilled wine. I jumped on my bed and the springs of the frame creaked under my weight.

“Mine has a better bounce,” Justine said, letting herself fall on the mattress next to mine.

Esther funneled a path among our discarded luggage to the only bed left by the window. It creaked loudly when she sat on it.

“Oh my God. Hers too!” Justine said.

Esther stood up as if she had been burnt by the mattress.

* * *

That night, in the darkness sliced by the bathroom’s crude light we left on, I tossed around, stomach heavy, mouth dry. My hands were sticky, as I removed them from under the pillow. They were covered in dark blood. Something was moving, undulating in my palms, pulsating. 

“Tell me what you see. I’ll do as you say,” said a voice coming from Esther’s side of the room. It sounded like Lucile’s but with a hinge of despair that ached in my teeth. I sat on my bed, hands shaking, the weight of what shouldn’t be dropped, couldn’t be tossed, or ignored, heavy, yet incredibly fragile, and sought the voice in the semi-obscurity. Sitting at the foot of Esther’s bed, looming big in her gaunt frame, Lucile pointed at my hands. She was still fourteen, her stomach opened wide with blood-soaked pants hanging loose at her thighs and waist and everywhere where there should be flesh. “Do you think I’m too thin?” she asked, pointing at her entrails pulsating in my hands. I steadied them to pretend I wasn’t afraid, but my body was a leaf in the wind. I looked at the slick, dark intestines, at her eyes, expecting an answer I couldn’t give, wasn’t qualified to give. What if I made it worse? What if… “Tell me,” she said, “I can take it.”

I woke up covered in sweat, heart hammering in my ears. Lucile was gone. My hands were empty, impossibly clean. I looked past Justine, for the thin frame under the blanket in the bed by the window and waited to see Esther’s body rise and fall under her shallow breaths.

* * *

The minute our phones’ alarms chimed on, I got dressed and ran downstairs before Justine or Esther could ask me to wait for them. I filled a plate at the buffet, but the eggs were too salty, the bacon greasy, making a pool of fat that grossed me out. I couldn’t eat the milk-logged cereals that looked like liquid glue, and I grabbed a blueberry muffin instead. Too sweet. It stuck in my throat, expanding and I panicked when I choked on it.

“Dude,” Justine said, helping me coughing it out, “chill.” She must have rushed to be only a few minutes behind me. She slopped next to me. She was too close. Why was she always so close? “I’m so tired,” Justine declared, when the dark circles were under my eyes.

The taste of sugar and artificial blueberry plastered my mouth. I drank a full glass of water, but I was noxious, sweating, too tight in my skin. “Those of you who are done with breakfast can go shopping,” Mrs. Perlotti announced, her voice fighting against the clattering of knives and small talk.

I put my untouched tray on the serving cart.

Justine gave me a look, hurt by this blatant show of individuality, but I couldn’t deal with this. I promised to meet her on the bus, a confirmation, I hoped, there was an us, always, even if not now.

* * *

I went past a tourist shop selling Greek jewelry that got the attention of a trio of girls in our class. They tried on earrings to bring back alongside their selfies. Esther was on her own at the counter looking at pendants on a rotating stand. Did she even eat this morning or rush out to avoid the food spread on every surface, on every plate, in grotesque amounts?

I went in, not to talk to her, but to be close. The three girls snapped photos to help each other decide on their purchases, and I hid behind their nonchalance as I tried on rings. Esther toyed with a blue glass beaded pendant representing the evil eye, supposed to ward off malicious glares. One of her shirt sleeves slid down. I stared at the slit across her wrist. Her skin was so pale, almost translucent, I could see the blue of Lucile’s blood pulsing through the pink bulge of a scar still mending. I didn’t know how deep you needed to cut to do what Esther did, but there were other ways to cut into a woman’s body. I wanted to put a bracelet on Esther’s wrist to hide the hurt, or show I saw it and wasn’t afraid, but these were lies we told ourselves.

“Nice choice,” the shopkeeper told Esther. “Beautiful on beautiful girl.” Esther smiled. “Protect you from people say bad things about you,” the shopkeeper continued in sales’ pitch mode, eying the rest of us. If Ancient Greeks didn’t know what it was to be a teenager girl in high school, this lady certainly did.

Esther spotted me, and she smiled, a soft subdued line that reached her eyes as if she could see I didn’t belong here, as if she had been waiting for me all along. “Should I get one?” she asked. I wavered under her blue stare that gleamed with too much expectation. I glanced at my hands, unbearably clean, and nodded, because it was better than not, even if it wasn’t enough.