"Does Mrs. Longfellow live here?" this skinny little kid with bottle bottom glasses half-whispered.
"Yeah. Why you looking for her?"
Hey, I was just a tenth-grader in a big hurry. So sue me for sloppy speaking.
"I'm London," she whispered, and raked one hand through white-blond hair that stuck out from her head like dandelion fuzz.
"Hi, London. Nice to meet you. I'm her granddaughter, Athena."
Yes, the penchant for weird names runs in my family. Doni was named London because she was born there. I was named Athena because my flaky mother, Portia--who went to a sperm bank when her biological clock went off instead of putting up with the mess of the dating scene--thought that would influence me to be wise.
She forgot Athena was a goddess of war and, according to some of the stories, a real smart-alec with an attitude problem and a penchant for nasty jokes. Not a good role model. Mom never figured that part out before she dumped me on Gram and joined the Peace Corps when I was six. The last I heard from her, she was running an orphanage among the former cannibals in Papua New Guinea. Somewhere along the way, she figured it was easier to be a mother to twenty kids than to one.
I never said logic ran in my family.
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