We approached the booth.
“Lady Hebe?” I asked.
I figured that was the safest way to address her. I was guessing her last name wasn’t Jeebies.
The goddess raised a finger to silence me, her eyes still fixed on the geriatric singers. “Don’t they seem happy? So young again!”
The boomers did seem happy. I wasn’t sure about young, but maybe young meant something different back in the day.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “We were just wondering—”
“Please, sit.” The goddess waved her hand, and three chairs appeared on the outside of the booth.
Then Hebe issued one of the most terrifying threats I had ever heard from a god: “I’ll order us some pizza, and we can talk while the old folks sing protest songs.”
It was the pizza that got me.
I don’t mean with food poisoning. I mean with nostalgia.
The cheese slice looked like a triangle of melted vinyl, garnished with three sad flecks of basil and served on a paper plate limp with grease. I had no intention of eating it—not after Sparky’s mold comment—but the smell took me right back to third grade.
Wednesdays were pizza days. I remembered the burnt-cheese smell in our basement cafeteria, the cracked green plastic chairs, the feverish conversations I used to have with my friends about trading cards, the history teacher who was our lunch monitor, Mr. Christ. （No kidding, that was his actual name. We were too scared to ask what his first name was.）
Now, looking at （and smelling） Hebe Jeebies’s glistening plastic pizza, I felt eight years old again.
“Wow,” I said.
Hebe smiled, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Feeling young again?”
Okay, maybe she didn’t know exactly what I was thinking. Being in third grade for me had not been wonderful. Neither had the pizza. But it was still a rush, being pulled back in time by nothing but a smell.
Grover dug in, devouring his pizza slice, his paper plate, and my napkin. I had learned to keep my hands away from him when he was in grazing mode or he might have started gnawing on my fingers.
Annabeth remained focused on the karaoke boomers. They were now belting out a slow, sad song about where all the flowers had gone. I wanted to shout, I don’t know. Why don’t you go outside and look for them?
“What a fabulous generation,” Hebe said, admiring the geriatric singers. “Even now, they refuse to accept growing old.” She turned to me. “And you, Percy Jackson, I assume you’ve come to ask a favor. Perhaps you’re starting to regret turning down immortality?”
Here we go, I thought.
Every time the gods brought up my rejection of Zeus’s offer, they treated it as a sign of stupidity—or worse, as an insult to godkind. I hadn’t figured out a great way to explain it to them. Like, maybe if you all promised to claim your demigod children sooner, so your kids weren’t living their whole lives not knowing who they were or where they came from, that would be a win for everyone?
I must have looked like I was about to bust out the sarcasm, because Annabeth intervened.
“He made the selfless choice,” she said. “Because of that, your kids got their own cabin at Camp Half-Blood. You finally got the respect you deserve.”
Hebe narrowed her eyes. “Perhaps. Still, Percy Jackson, turning down eternal youth? You can’t really want to grow old. Don’t you understand how terrible that will be?”
There didn’t seem to be a right answer to that.
Honestly, I’d spent most of my life wishing I could be older, so I could get to college, get out of the target years when monsters were trying to kill me every other day.
I didn’t want to contradict the goddess, though, so I tried a careful answer. “I mean, I guess getting older is part of life—”
“This pizza is great!” Grover interrupted, probably in an attempt to save me from god-level zappage. “And the music . . .” He frowned at the boomers. “Wait a minute. . . . Are they actually getting younger?”
He was right. The changes were subtle, but their hair didn’t seem so gray now. Their postures were straighter. Their voices sounded more assured, though still terrible.
“They come here to remember the old days.” Hebe gestured around her. “Nostalgia is the doorway back to youth. I’m just showing them how to open it.”
A shiver ran across my shoulders. The last thing the world needed was boomers aging backward, like, We enjoyed monopolizing the planet so much the first time, we’re going to do it again!