I waited until seventh period to visit the counselor’s office, so I wouldn’t
miss much school if she ejected me into the Atlantic again. At first, though, I was hopeful Eudora and I could just have a nice, calm conversation.
“Welcome, Percy Jackson!”
She seemed genuinely pleased to see me as she ushered me inside and waved me toward a new blue plastic chair. I wondered if she had a stack of them in the closet so she could grab a new one every time she flushed somebody through the floor.
She smiled at me over her jar of Jolly Ranchers. Her eyes floated behind her bottle-glass spectacles. Her scalloped hair glistened like she’d just had it permed with jellyfish goo. “So! How is everything going?”
“I got my first quest,” I said. “For Ganymede.”
She squealed. “That’s wonderful! What exactly is involved?”
I gave her the details, but her gaze was so distracting I mostly kept my eyes on the purple painting of Sicky Frog. It stared at me miserably with its thermometer in its mouth and didn’t judge.
I was working my way up to asking Eudora a favor—the location of the River Elisson—when she stopped me. “Just a moment. Hebe was involved. And now Iris. Did you apply for dual credit?”
“I— What?”
“Oh, dear. If multiple gods are involved, you could have applied for dual credit. Hebe and Iris might have written you recommendation letters as well.”
“You mean . . . I could’ve gotten all three rec letters from this one quest?”
Eudora nudged her Jolly Rancher jar so it made a protective barrier between us. “Well, yes, but—”
“How about I apply for the dual-credit thingy now? I could go back to Hebe. . . .” I mentally slapped myself. “Okay, maybe not Hebe, but I could go back to Iris—”
“Ah, but you have to apply for the dual credit in advance. I’m afraid it’s too late.”
I glared at Sicky Frog. I felt like punching it in the face, but since it was painted on a brick wall, I figured that might hurt me more than it did the frog.
“Can’t we make an exception?” I asked. “I mean, I did the work. I’m
doing the work.”
“Um . . .” Eudora rummaged through her brochures and pulled out the one for New Rome University. “No . . . you see? Right here. It says dual credit cannot be applied for after the fact.”
“Is that a general rule? I thought I was the only one who had to do these rec letters.”
“You are. See?”
She handed me the brochure. At the bottom of a tiny paragraph about dual credit (which I’m pretty sure hadn’t been there before), an asterisk led me to an even tinier disclaimer that read This applies to Percy Jackson.
“Okay, that’s messed up. I didn’t know!”
Eudora sighed. “Well, at least it sounds as if the quest is going well.
What’s next?”
Next, I thought, is punching your frog in the face.
But I didn’t say that. I forced myself to exhale. “Next,” I said, “I need some guidance.”
“Oh!” Eudora sat forward excitedly. “That’s what I do!”
I told her about Iris’s staff, which was presently taking up space in my bedroom closet. “I’m supposed to clean it, so I need to find the River Elisson.”
Eudora didn’t stop smiling. (I wasn’t sure she was physically capable of that.) But her lips stretched into a grimace as if somebody were tugging her shell-do. “The Elisson. Ah.” She shuffled her brochures and shoved them back in her drawer. “Snakes bathe there, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Monsters of all kinds. Not recommended.”
“Except I don’t have a choice. I need that letter of recommendation. Like you told me.”
She winced, probably caught between her job description and her personal feelings. “Yes, but . . . Elisson is touchy. He doesn’t like people taking advantage of his clean waters.”
“He? You mean the god of the river?”
I’d met a few river gods in my time. They tended to be cranky and unfriendly, and they thought of demigods as just another form of pollution, like old tires or cigarette butts.
“If he finds out I gave you directions,” Eudora muttered, almost to herself, “he’ll never let me into his yoga class again.”
“His yoga . . . ? Actually, never mind,” I said. “You’re telling me you know where I can find him?”
Eudora looked at her watch. “Almost the end of the school day. I suppose if you were to simply wind up at the Elisson’s headwaters by accident, that wouldn’t be my fault.”
The tiles started to bubble and leak around my chair. “No,” I said.
“Good luck, Percy!”
And she flushed me right through the floor.
I could have ended up in Greece or Brazil or who knows how far away. I was fortunate that I ended up in Yonkers, instead—which is the first time in history the words fortunate and Yonkers have been used in the same sentence.
Okay, sorry, Yonkers, that’s not fair, but hey . . . it wasn’t a place I wanted to get flushed to right after school, knowing I’d have to take an extra thirty-minute train ride to get back to Manhattan.
My blue plastic chair and I shot out of a drainage pipe, tumbled down a rocky slope, and splashed into a creek. I sat there for a second, dazed and bruised, cold water soaking into my pants. The first thing I noticed was the bottom of my overturned chair, where a metal plate was inscribed:
IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO EUDORA, ATLANTIC OCEAN REFUNDABLE DEPOSIT: ONE GOLDEN DRACHMA
Great. If I failed to get into college or get a job, I could just wander around New York looking for blue plastic chairs to cash in for drachmas.
I struggled to my feet. The creek meandered through the middle of a gritty small-town business district: low brick buildings, old factories and warehouses repurposed as condos or offices. I knew it was Yonkers because along the riverfront, iron lampposts were hung with weirdly festive banners that yelled YONKERS!
It was the kind of post-industrial area that would’ve looked better in the dead of winter, under a heavy gray sky and a covering of dirty urban snow. Rough. Grim. A Deal with it or go home kind of place.
The riverbed was lined with scrubby bushes and gray boulders—many of them now painted with Percy blood and skin samples from my tumble out of the drainage pipe. The water was what you might politely call non-potable
—muddy brown and streaked with foam like bubble bath, except I was pretty sure it wasn’t bubble bath.
I had landed right next to a marshy area labeled SAW MILL RIVER MUSKRAT HABITAT.
I saw zero muskrats. Being smart animals, they were probably
vacationing in Miami.
The name Saw Mill River sounded vaguely familiar. I remembered something in the news from when I was little. My mom had read me this article about how a bunch of urban rivers had been paved over back in the day and turned into underground drainage canals, and how people were now trying to open them up again and make them nature habitats. What did they call it . . . ? Daylighting a river.
From what I could see, the Saw Mill River didn’t enjoy its daylighting much. Three blocks north, the water trickled reluctantly from a tunnel large enough to drive a truck through. The current was sluggish, as if it wanted to crawl back into the darkness and hide.
I wondered if Eudora had made a mistake.
Oh, you wanted the Elisson, the cleanest waters in the world? I imagined her saying. Sorry, I thought you said the Saw Mill, the cleanest waters in Westchester County! I always get those confused!
Or maybe she’d intentionally flushed me off-course to protect the Elisson’s location. If so, the river god must run a really great yoga class.
I waded upstream, slipping and stumbling over mossy rocks. My head was swiveling for monsters, or Yonkers police, or ill-tempered muskrats, but
no one bothered me. About halfway to the tunnel, I caught my first whiff of putrid air from the entrance, like the breath of a sleeping giant who’d been living off moldy fish sandwiches. I doubled over and gagged.
The smell did not make me think of the cleanest waters in the world. While I was hunched over, praying to the god of not vomiting,
something floated by my foot. At first I thought it was a ripped grocery bag: just a shred of milky translucent plastic. Then I noticed the honeycomb pattern on the membrane. Like scales. Like the shed skin of a snake.
That was super helpful for my nausea.
Okay . . . Iris had told us that serpents bathed in the River Elisson. Maybe the water here was not so clean because I was wading through monster bathwater drain-off. Or that snakeskin could be from a normal snake, because nature.
I took a few more steps.
When I looked down again, I saw something else in the water. Snagged in a bed of moss was a curved black pointy thing about the size of my index finger. Some impulse—maybe a death wish—made me pick it up. The broken talon glistened in the sunlight. I’d seen ones like this before on the fingertips of my sixth-grade math teacher, aka the Fury Alecto.
I stared into the dark tunnel. Whatever might be in there taking a bubble bath, I did not want to meet it alone. Also, I didn’t have Iris’s staff.
Unfortunately, that meant I’d have to come back, with help, and subject Annabeth and Grover to the wonders of the Saw Mill River Fury habitat.
I cursed my guidance counselor, Sicky Frog, and the life of a demigod in general. Then I trudged off to find the nearest train station.
