Chapter 41 I Feel the School Move Under My Feet
FIFI’S WORDS STAY WITH ME for that night and the next few weeks as my roommate truly does become the best friend I’ve ever had.
We eat pretty much every meal together, hang out together—along with Arjun—almost all the time, search (obsessively and with no luck) for clues to the Pandora’s box objects, and have even started hanging out a little bit with each other’s siblings.
To be fair, I think Levi and Charlie are amazing, and while Fifi tolerates Paris, I’m pretty sure she believes that life with all the Athenas—and in particular his ridiculous, inexplicable crush on Rhea—is making him a little bit obnoxious.
I tend to try to play it off as no big deal, but the truth is, sometimes I think she might be right.
Like last night, for instance. The whole group of us had spent the entire day studying for our first big exam in logic class today, and Fifi, Arjun, Sullivan, and I decided to spend the time after dinner watching a movie.
Paris—my brother who loves video games and his PlayStation Portal more than anything on the planet—started acting like I was the biggest slacker in the world.
And when I suggested we break to get some snacks from the Aphrodite kitchen because it’s Mexican food night and everything is amazing, he got super mad and said I wasn’t concentrating.
After that, I told him to chill out, that tacos and empanadas are brain food.
He disagreed, telling me baked fish like they serve at Athena Hall is the best brain food, and when we disagreed, he got so mad that he and Rhea packed up their stuff and left—though I did notice they both emptied the candy bowls we filled before they got here into their backpacks before departure.
Apparently celery sticks and peanut butter and another three hours of studying material we all already knew was more important to Paris than hanging out with his sister and having just a little bit of fun.
In the end, I went back to my room to study too.
Not because I really thought I needed to—I know the information backward and forward—but because the Penelope who came to Anaximander’s several weeks ago would have done just that.
The girl who was sure she was an Athena, who hadn’t been sorted into Aphrodite Hall and become best friends with a girl who taught her that sometimes it’s okay to just have fun.
When I’m around Paris, I can find him searching for that girl, wondering where she went, and I hate that for him—hate that for us. We’re twins. Aren’t we supposed to know each other better than anybody else in the world?
My guilt only gets worse when I’m alone, because sometimes I can’t help wondering if maybe Fifi and Arjun are right. Maybe there is more to life than knowing every single answer in every single class before anyone else does.
I don’t know if that’s true for me yet, but I know I’m thinking about it, which is something I never used to do. And something Paris obviously still hasn’t thought to do.
I haven’t talked to him since he walked out, even though I tried texting him last night and this morning.
He hasn’t answered yet, but that’s fairly typical for him.
Instead of exploding, Paris tends to go super quiet when he’s mad.
I just hope he’ll talk to me after the exam today and we can figure it out.
Even if I don’t quite know what I want to say to him.
“You ready for the test?” Fifi asks Arjun as we walk past the amphitheater on the way to the arts building for our logic class.
A quick glance inside tells me PT is back to work on the cauldron for what has to be the fifth time now. He lifts a hand when he sees me and I wave back, because there’s just something likable about him and his determination to get the job done.
“Absolutely,” Arjun tells her with a truly impressive level of confidence. “Though I was thinking about my paper for myths class when I was in bed last night and I started wondering about why Zeus really locked up the Titans.”
“What do you mean?” Fifi looks confused. “There was a huge war and the Titans did very bad things, so Zeus imprisoned them in Tartarus so they couldn’t do any more damage to the world. He didn’t want them to hurt any more people.”
“But were there actually people to be hurt?” I counter, because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot too.
“Prometheus was a Titan, and Zeus chose not to imprison him because he fought on his side against Cronus and the others. After that, he even charged Prometheus with creating humanity. So what people was he actually protecting when he locked the Titans up? And why was giving humanity fire so bad that Prometheus ended up being punished for an eternity when he had been one of Zeus’s favorites before?
If you dig a little, the stories don’t make a lot of sense. ”
“I didn’t even think of it like that,” Arjun says after a few seconds of staring at me with his mouth open.
“I was just wondering if there was an alternative motive to locking them up. Like, did it help Zeus to get them out of the way? But when you say it like that, things look a lot murkier than I thought.”
“Of course Zeus benefited.” I roll my eyes. “He is king of the gods, which he totally wouldn’t be if he hadn’t fought the Titans.”
“And punished Prometheus?” Fifi adds.
“I don’t know about that. But you have to wonder why the punishment was so harsh for just giving us fire. And that’s without even talking about poor Pandora, who—”
I break off as lightning crackles across the sky, followed almost instantly by a burst of thunder so loud it shakes the trees around us.
Fifi lets out a startled little scream and then all three of us are moving a lot more quickly. Fall storms are really common in the Berkshires, and while they aren’t necessarily dangerous, they do tend to be torrential.
I pick up my pace, determined to get to class before the rain kicks in.
But I’ve barely taken two or three steps before the ground beneath me starts to tremble.
It feels exactly like it did on my first day—like this whole block of the school is about to move—so I hit the ground, shouting over my shoulder for Fifi and Arjun to do the same.
Sure enough, a loud grinding sound fills the air and then we’re spinning, spinning, spinning. Which is strange, because the school usually rearranges itself overnight. Except for my first day here, I’ve never seen it do this while people are awake.
But it’s definitely doing it now, so I yell, “Hang on!” to my friends as I hug the ground and wait for the world around me to stop shaking and spinning.
At least I’m not alone in an unfamiliar place this time. Surely Fifi and her uncanny sense of direction can get us out of this when the school finally stops turning. I just hope our class isn’t all the way across campus when it does.
It seems like it takes forever, but it’s probably only a couple of minutes before the ground beneath us grinds to a halt. I stand up right away, brushing myself off and looking around, trying to figure out where we are.
But there’s no amphitheater, no classroom buildings, no cafeteria, no halls, no landmarks at all to give me any idea what part of the campus we’ve landed in. Just trees and more trees.
“I’m not sure even you can find our way out of this, Fifi,” I tell her as I peer through the trees in front of me.
But she doesn’t answer. And neither does Arjun, which is weird, because there are few things that boy hates more than the way this school moves around. Every morning he complains about it, so he should definitely be having some kind of fit right now.
Nerves start pinging in my stomach, and I whirl around to see if they got hurt in all the shaking. But it’s so much worse than that. Because when I turn around, they aren’t on the ground like I feared.
In fact, they’re nowhere around me. Wherever the school has decided to move me to, it’s left me there completely on my own.