My family is Greek Cypriot, which means we originally came from Cyprus, an island off the coast of Greece that’s shaped a little like a stretched guitar. This means we’re Greek but, you know, with our own specific twist. I won’t go into the details, because it’s a long story involving wars, invasions, Roman mosaics, Halloumi, lemon chicken soup, independence, more wars, and even more Halloumi. You can look it up if you’re that interested. But I’ll bet that wherever they are in the world, Greek families are big and close and loud, and if they’re anything like mine, they’re passionate about their traditions.

We have about four million of them, but a big one is filoxenia (also spelled philoxenia). That might sound like a cheesy pastry or a rare skin disease, but it actually means friend to foreigners. It comes from the Greek myth about Zeus, king of the gods, when he disguised himself as a poor man in rags and visited the homes of Greeks to see how they treated strangers.

“So-u,” Yiayia, my grandma, says. (Don’t ask me why, but she pronounces it like it has a u on the end. Greeks also drag words out so they’re really long, and the sounds and rhythms go up and down like a melody.) “You must always treat the strangers very very good, Alexandra, because maybe they turn out to be the god.”

Yiayia’s the only one who still calls me Alexandra. Like me, most Greeks are named after saints, but we usually give each other nicknames or our names get shortened. I got called Alexia, then Lexie, and half the time they even shorten that to Lex.

Anyhow, filoxenia is the reason we had the picnic near Brighton that Saturday: we wanted to welcome the new family and have an excuse—not that we ever need one—to eat ten tons of Greek food. The Antoniou family weren’t exactly strangers. We’re not talking about mysterious visitors from a distant land or anything. They were Greek Cypriots who’d moved from North to South London. The dad was Mom’s friend’s cousin, and the mom was someone’s sister-in-law, but they were new in our neighborhood, and that was enough.

So we had one of those big family-and-friends picnics where the adults talk extra loudly, the teenagers hang out together and act bored, and the little kids chase each other with dog poop on sticks. We have them a couple of times a year, and there’s always a serious amount of food. Mainly meat for the barbecue, but also salads, fruit, and lemon cake. And even though there are normally about forty or fifty Greek people there, we always bring enough food for fifty more.

As for all that Zeus stuff, well…let me put it like this: their daughter did not turn out to be a god in disguise. Uh-uh. Right from the start, I didn’t like her. I don’t know why. I usually like everyone, but there was something about her that made my skin crawl and my eyes squeeze into slits. It might have been because she kept trying to take my best friend and almost-twin away from me, but there was more to it than that. She got on my nerves, and that’s just the way it was.

Her name was Anastasia, and I liked her as much as I liked eating slugs and wearing itchy underpants. Still, when she threw our car keys into the sea, she taught me a big life lesson. It wasn’t that you don’t throw car keys in the sea. I knew that already. I don’t know why she didn’t, because you’d think it was pretty obvious.

No. What she taught me that day is that sometimes in life you have to lie.

You do. Honest.

And when I say this was a big life lesson, I’m not exaggerating either, but we’ll get to that part later, too.

Even though it was September, it was still warm and sunny. Eleni and I found a good spot near the dunes, spread out a scratchy blanket, and pulled off our socks. Then we breathed in the salty seaweed air and listened to the screechy gulls and the foamy hiss of the waves. That’s pretty much heaven to me: being outdoors on a sunny day with Eleni, our notebooks at our knees. On the downside, I’m not that into scratchy blankets, but you can’t have heaven outside of real heaven or real heaven wouldn’t be a thing (if you know what I mean).

First, we named the dogs running around on the beach (Gungadin, Slobberchops, and Felicity Whipple). Then we thought up ways of describing the sky and the sea and wrote them in our notebooks. It was a hazy, lazy pick-a-daisy kind of day, and the clouds looked like huge frothy thoughts puffing up and out of a giant’s brain, so I wrote that down in my notebook. Eleni said the rocks on the beach were magical brown and gray eggs laid by Great Mother Ocean, and the air felt warm but not hot, like a five-minute-old cup of hot chocolate, so she wrote that down in her notebook.

Insects buzzed busily. Wasps zoomed in for my apple juice. Where do they go all winter? I wondered. I’d just turned to ask Eleni when I saw Anastasia walking toward us holding a colorful stick with a hoop at the end.

She was taller than us and wore a bright green sparkly dress with dark green Doc Marten boots. She had thick curls tied up high on her head, large brown eyes with extra-long lashes, and a gap between her front teeth. Eleni thought she was cool and funky—those were her exact words when Anastasia stepped out of the car in that electric-leprechaun outfit. Personally, I thought she was annoying and unwelcome—a little like a wasp at a picnic.

Anastasia shoved our notebooks onto the rocks and sat on our blanket. I scowled at our treasured notebooks lying in a heap. Sorry, but you don’t push people’s precious things away like that. You just don’t.

“Picnics are literally lame,” she said rolling her eyes. She didn’t seem to care that we’d all come out that day to welcome her and her family OR that she was using “literally” in the wrong way. How can a picnic be literally lame? It doesn’t even have legs.

Eleni grinned. “Picnic food is always in a hurry,” she said. “You know why?”

A cheesy joke was coming. I could just tell.

“Because it’s fast food!” She started laughing her head off, but neither of us got it. I was frowning at her and so was Anastasia.

“You know! Fast food? It’s traveled really fast on the highway?” Eleni said. And then she cracked up again.

Anastasia burst out laughing, even though it was clearly only a two-out-of-ten joke. Maybe even one out of ten. “I’ve heard about you,” she said to Eleni. “You’re the miracle girl. No one told me you were so funny, though. Hahahahahaha.”

Eleni beamed. I bit the skin on the inside of my cheek and smiled weakly.

“Want a turn?” Anastasia held up her skipping hopper. I wasn’t sure who she was talking to, but she wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t answer her at first, but ohhh, I wanted a turn. Badly. But Eleni couldn’t run or jump much, so I wasn’t going to say yes and leave her sitting there. Anyhow, I didn’t want anything to do with someone who shoved our notebooks away and called our family picnics literally lame. Eleni wouldn’t either. I mean, seriously?

“No, thanks. Don’t like those things,” I lied.

“I do!” Eleni hollered. When I whipped my head around to frown at her, she added, “I’ll be fine,” and shot up with a giggle.

“We’re going to be best friends, I can just tell,” Anastasia said with a huge grin as they walked a few feet away to a flatter part of the beach. The salty clean air in my lungs turned into dark, swirling smog. Anastasia put the hoop around Eleni’s ankle, and she started spinning the stick and jumping over it, laughing. Steam hissed out of my head, but I picked up my sparkly notebook like it didn’t bother me.

Cooooooome, Eleni called in whale song.

Noooooooo, I replied, pouting.

Instead, I squinted at my notebook with my brain boiling. Why had I lied like that? I never usually lied. I didn’t like the way it made me feel, but also, adults always acted as if the truth was something pure and holy, and maybe they were right. The word truth even sounded holy. Truuutttth, Lexie. Trrrrruuuuuuutttthhhhhh. I could hear it calling me, like angels singing ahhhhh over the surface of the sea but in really deep voices.

The truth was, I desperately wanted a turn on that stupid hoppy thing, and now I was sitting alone with wasps buzzing by my ear feeling sad and grumpy.

This, I told myself, this is what happens when you lie, Lexie. Telling the truth would have made you happy. And now look at you. It was as if a mini angel with a voice like a principal was standing on my earlobe and shouting into my ear. But she had a point. At that moment, the truth about the truth smacked me in the face (in a pure, angelic way).

Lying wasn’t only bad because the truth was holy—it was bad because lying made you unhappy.

HUH!

Why hadn’t I realized that before?

That was it, I decided. From now on, I was going to tell the truth. Next time and every time.

Even if it meant saying yes to someone as grrr as Anastasia.