“Dad?” I guessed.
She tried for a smile. The saltwater lake was still spreading across the office floor, soaking my textbooks, seeping through my shoes.
“He thinks you might be right,” Eudora said. “He’ll explain this to you in person.”
She said in person the way most teachers say in detention.
I tried to act cool, like I had won an argument, but my dad and I hadn’t talked in . . . a while. He usually only brought me to his underwater palace when a war was about to start. I was hoping maybe he’d give me a week or so to settle in at school before he summoned me.
“Great. So . . . I can go back to class?”
“Oh, no, dear. He means now.”
Around my feet, the water swirled into a whirlpool. The tiles began to crack and dissolve.
“But don’t worry,” Eudora promised. “We’ll meet again!”
The floor dropped out from under my chair, and I plunged into a churning maelstrom with a thunderous FLUSH!
You know you’ve been a demigod too long when you’re flushed out of your school straight into the Atlantic Ocean and you’re not even surprised.
I didn’t try to fight the current. I could breathe underwater, so that wasn’t an issue. I just sat in my blue plastic chair and rocketed through Poseidon’s Private Plumbing System?, powered by a five-billion-gallon tsunami. Faster than you could say, Well, that sucked, I erupted from the seafloor like I’d been coughed up by a mollusk.
As the sand cloud around me settled, I tried to get my bearings. My nautical senses told me I was about forty miles southeast of the Long Island coast, two hundred feet down; no big deal for a son of Poseidon, but, kids, don’t try this at home. A hundred yards in front of me, the continental shelf dropped into darkness. And right on the precipice stood a glittering palace: Poseidon’s summer villa.
As usual, my dad was remodeling. I guess when you’re immortal, you get tired of having the same crib for centuries. Poseidon always seemed to be gutting, renovating, or expanding. It helped that when it came to undersea building projects, he had pretty much infinite power and free labor.
A pair of blue whales was towing a marble column the size of an apartment building. Hammerhead sharks slathered grout between rows of coral brickwork with their fins and cephalofoils. Hundreds of merfolk darted here and there, all wearing bright yellow hard hats that matched their lamp-like eyes.
A couple of them waved at me as I swam through the worksite. A dolphin in a reflective safety vest gave me a high five.
I found my dad standing by a half-constructed infinity pool that looked over the abyss of the Hudson Canyon. I wasn’t sure what the point of an infinity pool was when you were already underwater, but I knew better than to ask. My dad was pretty chill most of the time, but you didn’t want to question his stylistic choices.
His clothes, for instance.
Some of the Greek gods I’d met liked to morph their appearance on a daily basis. They could do that, being, you know, gods. But Poseidon seemed to have settled on a look that worked for him, even if it didn’t work for anyone else.
Today, he wore rumpled cargo shorts that matched his Crocs and socks. His camp shirt looked like it had been targeted in a paintball war between Team Purple and Team Hello Kitty. His fishing cap was fringed with spinnerbait lures. In his hand, a Celestial bronze trident thrummed with power, making the water boil around its wicked points.
With his athletic frame, dark trimmed beard, and curly salt-and-pepper hair, you’d think he was maybe forty-five—until he turned to smile at you. Then you noticed the weathered lines of his face, like a well-worn mountainside, and the deep melancholy green of his eyes, and you could appreciate that this guy was older than most nations—powerful, ancient, and weighed down by a lot more than water pressure.
“Percy,” he said.
“Hey.”
We have deep conversations like that.
His smile tightened. “How’s the new school?”
I bit back the urge to point out that I’d only made it through two classes before getting flushed into the sea. “So far it’s okay.”
I must not have sounded convincing, because my dad furrowed his bushy eyebrows. I imagined storm clouds forming along the Atlantic coast, boats rocking in angry swells. “If it’s not up to snuff, I’d be happy to send a tidal wave—”
“No, it’s cool,” I said hastily. “So, about these college rec letters . . .”
Poseidon sighed. “Yes. Eudora volunteered to counsel you. She’s the Nereid of gifts from the sea, you understand. Loves helping people. But perhaps she should have waited a bit before breaking the news. . . .”