IN THE ARMS OF THE HYBRID

"Callie! Get up, and don't make me come up there!"

The voice filtered through the pillow which covered my head, interrupting the dream in which I was making out with the delectable Damon Salvatore from Vampire Diaries. Arg! It's always the good dreams that get interrupted and never the ones where you're being chased by giant bunny rabbits who want to eat your brains.

I pried my eyes open and stared at the ceiling of my lilac bedroom. When I was younger the walls had been decorated with ballerina posters and dolls and, even though the ballerinas and dolls had faded along with my childhood, the lilac walls remained.

"Callista Natalie Georgiou, I'm not speaking again! You're going to be late for school!"

Who needs an alarm clock when you have a mother?

I dragged myself out of bed and grabbed the first items of clothing which I laid my hands on – a baby blue vest and a pair of jeans – tugging them on unceremoniously. With that done, I ambled into the bathroom. My hair was a mess of dark brunette curls somehow resembling a bird's nest in its dishevelled style. I grabbed my hairbrush and yanked it through my hair in order to tame the wild beast before applying a thin layer of eyeliner and mascara. The make-up was purely an effort to prevent my best friend from nagging me about not making an effort for our first day as seniors.

As if being a senior was such a big change from being a junior.

With that done, I made my way downstairs to the kitchen. Our house was old. Built in the 1930s, it still had all of its original trimmings. Hardwood panels and floral wallpapers decorated almost every wall in the house, creating an effect which left you feeling trapped in a time warp. It was only in the past two years that my mother had forced my father to relent and they finally tiled the bathroom and kitchen, ripping out the last shreds of linoleum which had remained in the house since the dark ages. Parquet ran throughout the rest of the home and gleamed like glass under the tender loving care of my parents. The kitchen, in direct contrast, was completely modern. Decked out with top-class cookware and appliances it was blatant to all who visited where the centre of the home was.

“Callista! You’d better be up!” my mother roared.

My family is Greek and proud of it. In stereotypical Greek fashion we are loud, carefree and we own a restaurant which –surprise, surprise – serves Greek food. Sometimes it feels as if we just launched ourselves out of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, with a few exceptions of course.

My father, a large man with the heart of a teddy bear, sat at the breakfast table reading the morning's paper, sipping a cup of coffee as my mother, a tiny creature, made pancakes. In retrospect, they’re completely the opposite of each other which is probably a blessing. My mother’s firecracker personality needed some watering down, and my father’s calm and collected ways were just the type of fire extinguisher needed.

"Good morning Mama, good morning Baba." I said as cheerfully as I could muster this early in the morning, kissing both of them on the cheek in our usual morning greeting.

"Good morning my kori." my father replied using the Greek word for daughter, although still not lowering his paper.

I sat down as my mother placed a plate of perfectly stacked pancakes in front of me, drowning them in gloriously golden syrup. Yummy! I poured myself a cup of coffee in an attempt to wake myself up before digging into my breakfast. I don’t think I could live without my daily dose of caffeine.

As I reached for a fork, my eyes caught the unopened envelope situated next to my plate with my name on it in bold, sloppy print and decorated with stamps.

"Niklos wrote?" I grinned, tearing at the envelope to free the letter and marvelling at the fact that the idiot still posted letters instead of emailing, texting, or even just calling.

Niklos, my elder brother by three years and my only salvation from within my family, had been sent to university in Greece. He had told my parents that he wanted to "experience and witness life through the lens of his heritage" but it my opinion he just wanted to experience life independently and out from under the ever watchful gaze of my mother. While my parents obviously didn't fall hook, line and sinker into his grand scheme, they were ecstatic at the possibility that my brother may fall madly in love with a Greek girl and bring her home to marry and start a large, loud, crazy Greek family of his own.

His letter, as always, contained telling of the humorous ventures in which he constantly found himself. I chuckled to myself as he wrote in detail about his failed attempt to get a girl’s number in a market. She led him on a scavenger hunt throughout the market, only to discover that she was a tourist who couldn’t speak English or Greek.

"Are you going to school like that?" my mother piped up from across the kitchen, an odd expression plastered on her face.

Peering over the paper, my father looked me over. "There's nothing wrong with what she's wearing, Delia."

My mother mumbled under her breath about making a good first impression as a senior but took the comments no further, successfully guilting me into treading back to my room after breakfast and changing into a summer dress which my mother had bought a few weeks back. Personally, I believe that she had bought it specifically for that very occasion.

"Won't Kayla love this," I whispered to myself as I looked in the mirror. My hair curled slightly as it brushed my waist, contrasting clearly with the turquoise and white floral print. More floral! Could my parents get any weirder? The upside of this monstrosity was that it actually accentuated my figure in all the right places and made my ice-blue eyes sparkle. I was of the average size and the average weight with an average hair colour so I was proud of my unusual eyes, made even more unusual by my heritage.

I mean, who ever saw a Greek girl with blue eyes?

Brushing my teeth furiously and grabbing my backpack, I raced down to catch up with my father in order to grab a lift to school. Dad worked at the University of California as a lecturer of ancient Greece and mythology, a rather useless topic in my opinion, but my father loved it almost as much as he loved his 1980s model Cadillac. Grabbing a lift with him to school instead of taking the bus meant that I would be early enough to catch up a bit with Kayla before we had to rush off to home room.

Kayla, my best friend from elementary school, was the sister I never had. Her blonde hair and bombshell body had made her popular in our sophomore year, however she lost most of her followers as soon as she opened her mouth and voiced her opinions of how sexist and brainless cheerleading is. This all occurred when the cheerleading squad tried to rope her into joining them. Needless to say, they weren’t impressed by her views on their sport and spent a few months trying to drag her name through the dust so that she would transfer schools.

It didn’t work.

As Carmel High School neared I looked at the sombre building and prayed a quick prayer of thanksgiving that this would be the last year I would tread the halls of my prison. The school's dark grey exterior was not softened by the stairs in front of it or the odd bush which had been planted in an attempt to make the school Eco-friendly. Students (and fellow inmates) littered the steps in little groups, chatting about what they had done over the summer break. Yup, back to the grind.

My father pulled up to the left of the stairs and turned to look at me. "Well, Callista, this is the last first day of school you'll ever have." he said sombrely. "Do you have everything you need? Did you bring money for the cafeteria?"

"Yes, Baba."

It was really hard not to laugh at his sombre tone – as if he was dropping me off with a transcript to go off to war. In a way, he was. High school was just a different kind of war.

With him put at ease, I kissed my father's cheek and vacated the car, watching him drive off into the golden sunrise as if we were part of a cheesy film.

Looking up at the steps I saw the usual scene unfold before my eyes. There were the cheerleaders gossiping on the lowest tier, the jocks checking the cheerleaders out and comparing muscles, the stoners staring off into the distance, the emos sulking in a corner, the band geeks talking about band camp and the nerds attempting to look cool as they edged their way closer to the school entrance in breathless anticipation of another academic year.