Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods(28)

“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.