The Marathon Conspiracy by Corby Gary

Author:Corby, Gary [Corby, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781616953881
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2014-04-28T18:30:00+00:00

IT TOOK SOME time to calm her down. We sat on the jetty, our legs hanging over the side, almost touching the water. I had my arm around her while she sniffed away the last of the tears.

Diotima said, “I suppose you want to hear about it?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

She said, “What a girl’s supposed to do, when her bleeding starts, is go to the temple and dedicate her toys to the Goddess, because she isn’t a girl anymore, you see, she’s become a woman. So she gives all her toys to Artemis, and then goes home to wait for her marriage, with all the things of her girlhood gone. They take every single toy from you, Nico. I hated that. I loved my toys too much.”

“Do all the girls feel the same?”

“Some of the girls can’t wait to be women and have a husband. Not me.”

“Terrific,” I said, demoralized.

Diotima realized what she’d said. “Oh, Nico! That was what I thought when I was a child. I may have changed my mind slightly since.”

“All right,” I said, slightly mollified. “So what did you do?”

“What do you think? I cheated, of course! I didn’t see any need to lose the toys I loved just to be a grown-up.”

“But they’d know at once if you didn’t hand over the toys.”

“Which is why I handed over toys to the Goddess. It’s just that the toys I dedicated weren’t … er … they weren’t mine.”

“You gave away some other girl’s toys?” I was shocked.

“Actually, I bought them from her.” Diotima shrugged. “Sometimes it helps to be the spoiled child of a wealthy mother. I hid my toys, which I loved more than my parents, then took an expensive vase I knew Mother would never miss. I traded it for the toys of another girl. The other girl agreed! Father never looked, Mother didn’t care, and I had something to fool the priestesses.”

“What about the other girl? Didn’t she get into trouble?”

“The other girl was Gaïs.”

“Dear Gods!”

Diotima nodded. “She was a poor orphan. She didn’t have much. I gave her a lot of money, Nico.”

“So when Gaïs called you a cheat—”

“She’d be in a position to know,” Diotima admitted. “Obviously, she’s disgusted with me.” She blushed deeply. “I never thought Gaïs would still be here. I thought I was safe to come back. Gaïs should have been married long ago and gone from the sanctuary. When you pointed her out, running in the woods, and then when she turned up at the sanctuary and Doris said she’d become a priestess … well … I thought I’d die. The funny thing is, it was because I cheated the Goddess that I became her priestess.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, listen. The dedication is a very solemn moment for the girl. She stands before the Goddess and says a prayer. A priestess goes with her to make sure she says it right. With me it was Doris. The girl lays her toys at the foot of the Goddess, and drapes her hair ribbons over the Goddess’s hand, and then she walks away, a woman.

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