Oh. My. Gods. (3 page)

As the doors glide shut, I flop back against the bench and cross my arms over my chest. I hope this country has evolved from the stone age. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I like my rights and I’d like to keep them. The ancient world was not very equal opportunity.

We slide into the next station and I’m almost dreading what this display will be about. Gladiators getting mauled to death? The horrific slave trade? Thousands being slaughtered at some huge, Troy-like siege? I glance out the window panel, prepared for the worst, and my eyes zero in on one word: “Marathon.” Before I even think about it, I’m off the train and running to the exhibit. It’s all about the marathon, as in the ancient one run by Pheidippides in 490 BC. The original cross-country race. There are pictures of Marathon, the site of the battle victory that Pheidippides ran to Athens to announce, and of the spot in Athens where he supposedly dropped dead after making the announcement. There are actual spearheads from that time like the ones that might have been used in the battle. There are ancient sandals like the ones he may have worn for his famous run.

Thank goodness for Nike. I could never run in sandals.

“Here she is,” I hear Damian say.

I turn just as Mom rushes up and throws her arms around me. “Never run off like that again,” she shouts.

Practically the whole station turns to stare at us.

“Sorry,” I say. But looking back over my shoulder at the marathon display, I’m not at all sorry. I’ve just come within inches of the ancient origins of distance running. What do I have to be sorry about?

“The city of Athens installed archaeological displays such as this in many of our metro stations for the 2004 Olympics,” Damian says. He’s lugging all four suitcases and the ninety-kilo briefcase behind him, but doesn’t even look unhappy.

“Oh wow,” Mom says softly and with a touch of awe in her voice, stepping up to the display for a closer look, analyzing every detail like she always does. “This says the modern Athens marathon follows the same path that Pheidippides ran in 490 BC. Phoebe, this is amazing.”

Like I want to share my visit to the shrine of distance running with them? Hardly. “Whatever,” I say as I turn away and head back to wait for the approaching train. “It’s not that great.”

When the next train pulls up we climb back on—Mom has taken her two suitcases from Damian and he is stuck pulling mine, which makes me smile. I’m torn between not wanting them to know how much seeing that exhibit means to me and wanting to see as much of the exhibit as I can before the train chugs away.

In the end, I twist in my seat and watch out the window as the shoes of Pheidippides race out of sight.

Someday I’ll come to this station again and take my time memorizing every little detail of the exhibit. Maybe when I’m breezing through Athens on my way to college back in civilization.

After the fourteen hours in a cramped plane seat and an hour on a packed metro train, I’m actually looking forward to the three-hour ferry ride to Serifos, an island near Serfopoula. Of course there are no direct ferry routes to Serfopoula.

Still, I can imagine myself gazing out over the turquoise Aegean— the salty sea breeze drowning out Mom and Damian’s repulsive lovey-dovey talk and blowing my stick-straight hair into beach-hewn waves. At least we aren’t moving somewhere with no major body of water. Heck, there probably isn’t anywhere on Serfopoula that isn’t within running distance of the beach. Beach runs are my favorite. Salty sea air rushing in and out of my lungs. Sand shifting under my feet, making my calves burn with extra effort. Collapsing in exhaustion and watching the waves crash the shore while restoring my energy. Pure bliss.

The actual ferry ride is nowhere near the peaceful boat trip I’m hoping for. Thank goodness my Dramamine kicks in because we aren’t on a slow boat to Serifos, we are on a hydrofoil—a super high-speed ferry that bounces me off the deck when it hits even the tiniest wave. It’s named Dolphin something-or-other, but it feels more like riding a really angry bull. One that can’t wait to shake every last human off its back.

Riding the bucking bull is bad enough, but one more second of watching goo-goo eyes and I’m going to lose the contents of my stomach over the side of the boat. Mom and Damian don’t seem to notice. They are busy standing close and batting their eyes at each other. Every so often he whispers something in her ear and she laughs like a little girl.

“I have to pee,” I announce, more crudely than normal. I fully intend on actually using the facility until I get in there and am about to unzip my jeans when the bull hits a ripple and sends me sidelong into the door. I can only imagine what will happen if I actually squat in hover position and we hit a real wave. Instead of tempting fate I decide I can hold it until we find land.

We get to Serifos and spend a few glorious steps on an unmoving surface while Damian leads us to the chauffeured—is a private boat driver a chauffeur?—private yacht—yes, yacht—that will take us the rest of the way to the stupid, ferry-less island.

Does that mean there’s no way off the island unless I have my own boat? Great, I’m going to be stuck on this stupid island until I get paroled. Or until I make friends with someone who has a boat.

Now there’s a plan.

When I step onto the boat I’m smiling at the thought of befriending someone with transport.

Damian leads Mom to a bench seat on one side of the rear deck and I head for the opposite bench. Hopefully this boat ride will be less earthquake-like than the last, and I don’t want my potential calm disturbed by disgusting baby talk or anything.

I think I’m out of hearing distance.

Not that Damian respects my isolation.

I rest my head against the back of the bench and start to close my eyes when he moves into the seat next to me. Prying one eye open to glare at him, I ask, “Yeah?”

Mom is sitting on the other side of him.

“Phoebe, there is something you need to know before we arrive at Serfopoula.” He folds his hands carefully in his lap. “Are you familiar with Plato’s Academy?”

The big philosophy school where a bunch of old Greek guys got together to talk about intense stuff like the origin of life and what kind of poison worked best? “Yeah.”

“Well,” Damian continues, “there is more to the Academy’s history than most textbooks contain. In the sixth century, the Roman emperor Justinian issued an edict demanding the Academy be closed and forbade formal philosophical education. The . . . ah-hem . . . benefactors of the school were not prepared to see it closed so they moved it here. To Serfopoula.”

I don’t know Damian real well, but I think it’s not typical for him to ah-hem in the middle of a sentence. He seems like a very formal guy who keeps his speech squeaky clean. Still, I think I should just ignore this observation and instead say, “Justinian must have been pissed when he found out they disobeyed his orders.”

“He never found out.” Damian swallows hard. “The . . . ah-hem . . . benefactors kept the knowledge from him.”

There is something strange in the way he says this. Something ominous.

It must have been hard to keep a Roman emperor and every tattletale who would rush to tell him from finding out. Maybe these benefactors murdered anyone who found out and buried them in the school basement. I get shivers at the thought and I have to ask, “How?”

“Well, Phoebe.” Damian looks over his shoulder at Mom, who nods in encouragement. “There is little the Greek gods cannot do when they choose to act.”

Chapter 2

MY FIRST THOUGHT IS, Damian is insane. Like crazy, nuts, messed-up-in-the-head insane. As if Greek gods really exist.

They are myth. Myth, as in the kind of stuff you read about in sophomore English with guys killing their dads and marrying their moms—ew, and I think my life is gross. As in, the kind of stuff you see Brad and Orlando duking it out over on the big screen—yum. Not the kind of stuff the man my mom married fully believes in.

I look at Mom, ready to express my sympathies and assure her I am ready to head back to America and that we can sort the divorce out once we get there. But she’s not freaking out.

She’s nodding.

Sympathetically.

At me.

As if I’m the one who just found out my new husband is delusional.

That’s when I first know I’m in trouble. Mom is professionally trained in the art of delusional psychopaths. She told me once she never goes along with their fantasies—it only makes things worse— and if she’s staying calm then that means she believes him. Which means she believes the Greek gods exist, too.

And while I might doubt her judgment when it comes to major life changes like marriage and moving out of the country, Mom is usually completely sane when it comes to discerning reality from fantasy.

As if she can sense my shock, she reaches out and places a hand on my knee. “I know this is difficult to digest—”

“Difficult?” I shout. “Difficult? Algebra is difficult. The Ironman is difficult. This is insane.”

“I thought so, too,” Mom says. “At first.”

“So you believe this?” What happened to rational Mom? “You believe him?”

She nods. “I’ve seen proof.”

“You’ve seen—” I shake my head. This is not happening. “What kind of proof?”

“It’s a little hard to explain,” she says, blushing. “He made roses . . . materialize.”

“Roses?” Ha! I’ve got him now. “He’s just a magician. He pulled them out of his sleeve.”

Mom blushes even more. “He wasn’t wearing sleeves at the time.”

Ewww! Therapy is definitely in my future.

All right, so the rational, that’s-not-really-possible approach isn’t working. I’ve got more tactics in my arsenal. I just need a minute to regroup. While I’m trying to come up with my next move I realize that, since I haven’t seen any roses around since we landed in Greece, Mom must have known before we took off from LAX.

Even if she’s being totally played, she should have said something.

She’s had plenty of opportunities, including fourteen hours in the confined space of an airplane cabin where I would have been a captive audience. And who knows how many times before the move—

“Wait a minute!” My voice rises to an accusatory scream. “How long have you known?”

At least she has the decency to look ashamed. “Since shortly after Damian and I met.” She glances at him and smiles. “As soon as we realized we were in love.”

What!? I cannot believe this. What has Mom married me into?

“There’s something else. . . .” Mom says.

Oh no. I can tell from the way she trailed off at the end that I am not going to like this.

She nudges Damian. “Go ahead. Tell her.”

He clears his throat before saying, “The students at the Academy are not your average schoolchildren.”

Like I couldn’t have guessed that. At least this isn’t more earth-shattering news.

“We have an acceptance rate of less than one percent. Our admission standards are far more stringent than even the most elite universities,” he says, “and are extremely specific.”

Should I be overjoyed? I throw Mom a look that says I’m not thanking her for the favor. She knows I would rather be back in L.A. than accepted into some snotty school any day.

“Really,” he says, “we have only one criterion.”

Uber-popularity?Unfathomable wealth? Genius-level IQ? Great, I’m going to be a dunce at a school of Einsteins.

“All the students at the Academy . . .” He tugs at his navy blue tie—my first clue that he’s a little nervous about telling me this— but it doesn’t really look tousled. “. . . Are, ah-hem, descendants of the gods.”

My world starts to go black around the edges as I stare at Damian’s negligibly loosened tie and hear Mom say, “Oh no, I think she’s fainting.”

The next thing I know, Damian is kneeling over me and Mom is frantically waving her purse over my face. I think she’s trying to fan me back to my senses, but all I can think is it would really hurt if she drops it on my nose. Her purse is like Mary Poppins’s bag—it holds way more than should be possible.

I hear Damian say, “She is regaining consciousness. Zenos, send out the gangplank and bring the gurney.”

Xena?

Mom’s purse comes darn close to clipping me on the cheek.

Wait. A gurney?

The last thing I need is to make my arrival strapped to a gurney pushed by a fictional warrior princess. That is not the way to make a good impression—if this stupid school is anything like PacificPark, gossip makes the rounds faster than the flu.

Not that I have any hope of making a good impression. It must be pretty hard to impress someone who sits across the dinner table from Zeus.

Wait, what am I saying? I must be in shock. This is ridiculous. Damian must be having some elaborate twisted joke on me. And on Mom.

But she says she’s seen proof.

The black edges come back just as Mom finally swipes me across the nose. And ouch, does it hurt. That shakes me out of it and I bolt up, ignoring the tingling dizziness in my brain.

“I’m fine, really.” I bat away a few of the bright yellow bugs swarming around my head before I realize these are only in my mind. Knowing Mom and Damian and the gurney-pushing warrior princess would have a field day with this, I close my eyes and take three deep breaths before saying, “I don’t need a gurney, you can call Xena off.”

“Who?” Mom asks, clearly not up on her TV culture.

“Not Xena,” Damian explains. “Zenos. Our yacht captain.”

Somehow, it is only a minor relief to find out that he knows some fictional characters are actually not real.

“Sorry,” I say. “My bad.” For the time being, I think it’s better to just play along. I can talk some sense into Mom later—when we’re alone. “I’ve got it now.” I open my eyes, relatively certain I can maintain consciousness for the moment. “Xena, not real. Zeus, real. Check.”

Mom and Damian exchange one of those I-don’t-think-the-poorchild-is-buying-it looks. They’re not far off. Who can blame me, what with the idea that the Greek gods really exist still ricocheting through my brain? I deserve at least a little wiggle room when it comes to confusing reality with fiction. Maybe if I approach it with a little scientific logic, Mom will see how crazy all of this is.

“So, what does this mean?” I ask, rubbing my temple to make it look like I’m really considering believing all this. “Are the students all immortal?”

“No, no, of course not. Immortality is reserved for the gods,” he says with a little laugh. As if that’s the most absurd idea floating around. “We descendants are more like the heroes of ancient legend. Like Achilles and Prometheus, we have some, ah-hem, supernatural—”

“Whoa,” I interrupt. “We?”

“Damian is a descendant, as well,” Mom says.

I close my eyes and take a deep, deep breath. This just keeps getting better. “All right.” I wave my hands at myself as if to say, Bring it on. “You’re like heroes. . . ?”

“Yes,” he continues. “Like those you may have read about, we have varying degrees of supernatural powers. In most descendants the powers manifest pre-adolescence, though there are cases in which they remain dormant until after puberty.”

“It’s really quite amazing,” Mom says, bubbling with enthusiasm. “There are apparently built-in controls to protect the rest of the world, with the gods monitoring all use of—”

I tune out. I mean, Mom seems honestly convinced and, until recently, I’ve always trusted her judgment, but this isn’t exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to accept. Like I can suddenly decide that everything I’ve ever learned about the Greek gods is not just some fluff story English teachers make you learn. No, it’ll take more than Damian’s say-so to move the Greek gods from the fairy-tale land of Santa Claus, werewolves, and Cinderella into everyday reality. But even if I’m not a believer in “alternative realities,” as Nola calls them, I’m willing to keep an open mind. Sure, I’ll believe they’re real. Just as soon as I see one. . . .

“Well, well,” the girl who just appeared next to Damian says. “I see the barbarians have arrived.” When I say appeared, I don’t mean she walked up and there she was by his side. No, she appeared. As in out of nowhere. As in she wasn’t there and then she was. She, like, shimmered into place.

That’s the kind of proof that’s hard to ignore.

“Stella,” Damian says, a serious hint of warning in his tone. “What have I told you about materializing?”

“Please, Daddy,” she coos. “I just had to see them for myself. They’re like a new exhibit of rare animals at the zoo.”

Her voice is sickly sweet, like those sirens in The Odyssey who used their beautiful singing to attract men to their deaths. There isn’t a trace of sincerity in her. Not from the brown roots of her overhighlighted hair to her bright red painted toes. And I don’t think it’s a simple case of overenthusiastic tweezing that makes her look like a bi’atch with a capital B-I-A-T-C-H.

“We will speak about this later,” Damian says. And he does not sound happy. “I apologize for my daughter’s . . . rude behavior. Barbarian is a term applied to non-Greeks.” He shoots her a sharp look. “It is not meant in a derogatory manner. Not only is it misapplied, since Phoebe is half-Greek and Valerie is now Greek twice by marriages, but, as Plato once said, the term is absurd. Dividing the world into Greek and non-Greek tells us little about the first group and nothing about the second.”

Stella looks completely unfazed, like she pisses him off every day. Why do I think she excels at getting herself out of trouble with her dad? I have a gut feeling that she’s going to enjoy making my life miserable—and probably won’t get in any trouble at all.

“I never thought of it that way,” Mom says, taking Damian’s hand, “but that’s also true in modern psychoanalytic theory. If one defines their world in terms of ‘object’ and ‘other’ then one only knows what the object is and what the other is not.”

Stella rolls her eyes. Damian nods. I have learned—after many years of theoretical nonsense talk—to ignore the psychobabble. Trying to follow along only ends in headache.

“Besides,” Damian says, giving Stella one last disapproving look before smiling at me, “you are not the only non-Greek to attend the Academy. We are primarily a boarding school and many, if not most, of our students are from abroad. Our ancestors were not, shall we say, confined to a particular geographical area.”

Right. I remember all those stories about Zeus and Apollo and the other gods jumping around from one seduction to the next. There are probably little mini-gods all over the world.

Stella smiles tightly, as if saying, Whatever.

“You must be Phoebe,” she says, stepping forward and offering me a hand. “I’m Stella . . . your new sister.”

Now, I’ve always wanted a sister, but not one like this. In my mind I picture a little girl with ringlets and dimples who follows me everywhere and copies my every move to the point of driving me crazy. Stella is not a follower. That much I can see in the icy gray shallows of her eyes. She crushes those foolish enough not to fall into place behind her. I am not that foolish.

“Yeah,” I say, taking her hand and letting her pull me up. I’m shocked when she doesn’t let go halfway and send me falling back on my butt. “Nice to meet you.” The words choke out around the gagging sensation in my throat.

Then she shocks the living crap out of me by pulling me into a hug. Over her shoulder I see Mom take Damian’s hand and look at me with pride, like they can already see us having sleepovers and sharing secrets and painting each other’s toenails. She thinks we’re halfway sisters already.

Only she doesn’t hear what Stella whispers in my ear.

“I hope you’re ready for a living nightmare, kako, because this school will chew you up, spit you out, and smite the tiny pieces of whatever’s left all the way to Hades.”

Mom smiles at me.

I whisper back, “I’ve survived beach bunny cheerleaders, a slut-hunting ex-boyfriend, and five years of cross-country camp. I’m not afraid of some throwback to ancient myth with atrocious highlights and a Barbra Streisand nose.”

Catching Mom’s eye I smile big, even as Stella squeezes me way too tight around the ribs. One stomp on her pedicured toes and I’m free.

“All ready,” I say, snatching my backpack off the deck.

As I sling my pack onto my shoulder I see a spark out of the corner of my eye, just before the strap breaks, sending the bag flying right into Stella’s nose. Sure, it was an accident—you can’t exactly anticipate strap failure—but I couldn’t have aimed better if I tried.

Too bad, though. This is a brand-new backpack.

Hand cupped over her injured nose, Stella’s face turns bright red. She growls and lifts her other hand like she’s going to point at me—way rude, by the way.

“Stella,” Damian warns as he points a finger at my broken strap. The torn fabric glows for a second before magically repairing itself.

I grab my backpack off the ground and check the strap. It’s perfect, like it never broke in the first place.

Stella jerks her hand back to her side before turning in a huff and stalking off the boat. I glance back and forth between Damian’s steaming look and Stella’s retreating back.

Wait a second. . . . Did she do that to my strap? That must have been the flash of light. Serves her right getting bonked in the nose.

Next time she’ll think twice about zapping my stuff.

Dinner at the Petrolas house is unusual, to say the least.

Mom and I usually set up a pair of TV trays in the living room so we can watch the latest reality show while we eat. Not the best idea with some of the ubergross stunts they pull, but it was our nightly ritual.