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: