Did I say one? It was surely more than one time I was mortified because of something my sister suggested I do.

Where shall I begin?

Well, there was the time I got a hideous rat-tail mushroom haircut. I had beautiful long hair but my sister approached me one day in elementary school and presented me with the picture of a hideous coiffure.

- I think you should cut your hair like this.
- Why? It's real ugly.
- Well, the thing is I bet my friend that you would cut your hair like this. So if you don't I'll have to sell all your toys to pay the bet. Don't tell mom.

So I took the magazine photo and marched down to our hair cutter, Marina (conveniently located around the corner). Unfortunately, she gave me the desired butchering. When I went home to show my sister she said something like "wow, that's hideous..." And then confessed she merely wanted to see what it would look like because she was considering the hairstyle but could now see, clearly, she did not want it. Oh, and my mom got mad at me.

Wanna hear another?

In the summer of 1998, right before we moved to the States, I was 12 and my sister was 14. She was having some, uh, hairyness issues and came upon some bleaching creme to remedy the unsightliness of her, um, arm hair. Anyway, point is, I was abruptly woken up from my siesta one afternoon to find my sister hovering over my face with some white goo covering her extended finger. She had her signature look of evil smiling anticipation.

- What the...? What's on my eyebrow?
- I need to bleach my hair but I want to make sure it doesn't turn orange. So I decided to test it on your eyebrow. If I were you, I'd let it stay on there for the full ten minutes. If you take it off now you'll probably have an orange eyebrow. Also, I only put it on one eyebrow. You might as well have even eyebrows so let me do the other one.

And then I willingly let my sister bleach my other eyebrow. I spent the rest of the summer with coconut tan skin and white eyebrows. By the time we moved two months later, my brows had turned to kind of a salt and pepper. And that's how my first American friends met me. The Greek immigrant with the weird eyebrows.