“Gary is so terrifying he can scare nature spirits away from their own life sources,” I mused. “You know any monster or god with a name that sounds like Gary?”
“Geryon?”
I shuddered, remembering the three-bodied rancher I’d met during my one and only trip to Texas. “Been there. Killed him. Anyone else?”
“Gar—gary—gany—Ganymede?”
“That would be a plot twist. Let’s assume he didn’t steal his own chalice, though. Anyone else?”
Grover shook his head. “Maybe it rhymes with Gary. Larry? Harry?”
Considering that I couldn’t even get my own teammates’ names right, I decided not to play that guessing game.
Down in the pool, the next race had begun. My teammate Lindsey, or maybe it was Linda, was on her first lap for the five-hundred-meter freestyle.
“Maybe we should hit the park early in the morning,” I said. “The fewer people around, the better it will be if we end up in a fight.”
Grover nodded. “I wonder if Gary is some kind of nature spirit—a big angry one, scaring off all the little ones. If so, maybe I can get him to listen to me.”
I remembered how well things had gone with the big angry river god Elisson, but I didn’t mention that. There would be plenty of time for Grover’s hopes to be dashed later.
“How’s tomorrow?” I asked. “We could meet Annabeth at Washington Square Park.”
Grover winced. “I think I’d better get out to camp and spend a long weekend with Juniper. How about Monday?”
I wasn’t good at keeping a schedule. I was pretty sure I had a math quiz first thing Monday, but hey . . . surely I would be done with our monster encounter before school, right? And if the Minerva-feast thing on Olympus wasn’t until the following Sunday, that technically left us plenty of time to find the chalice and return it to Ganymede. . . .
“Okay,” I agreed. “Super-early o’clock on Monday. I’ll let Annabeth know. She’s coming to dinner tonight.”
“Cool,” Grover said, though he looked uneasy. “Do you think . . . ?” He didn’t seem able to finish his thought.
The satyr seemed so worried, I assumed about Juniper, that I wanted to give him a hug, wrap him in a warm fluffy blanket, and drive him to Camp Half-Blood myself. Since I didn’t have time to make the drive, and I also didn’t have a warm fluffy blanket, I racked my brain for helpful advice.
I remembered something Annabeth had told me months before, when I was trying to figure out what I could do to make up for disappearing our entire junior year.
“Look, man,” I told Grover. “Juniper will forgive you. She probably doesn’t want presents at all. She just wants you to be there for her. Listen to how she’s feeling. Be with her.”
From the pool, my coach yelled, “Jackson. You’re up again!”
It was time for me to get ready for the high dive.
“I should go,” I told Grover.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s just . . . I’ve been so stressed about me and Juniper, but honestly, we were fine until I started obsessing about her bloom-day present. What if that’s not what’s really bothering me? What if I’m worried about you and Annabeth leaving me next summer?”
Leaving him.
That hit me like a cold wave of Elisson water. I looked down at the contact sheets from Blanche’s photo shoots—all those images of Grover playing dead in a black-and-white landscape of despair.
“Ah, Grover . . .” I did give him a hug then. I felt a little awkward, since I was only wearing a swimsuit and I was still wet from my last event, but he didn’t seem to care. “We’re never leaving you, buddy. We’ll be back to visit. You’ll come see us in California. You’re like our life source, dude. We can only be away from you for so long before we start to wither, you know?”
Grover managed a faint smile. “Yeah . . . yeah, okay.”
My coach yelled for me again.
“Go,” Grover told me.
“You sure you’re good?”
“I’m good. I’ll see you Monday morning at Washington Square Park. You wanna say six thirty?”
I didn’t want to say 6:30 A.M., and I definitely didn’t want to be awake then. The thought of how early I’d have to get up to make it downtown by that time made me want to stick my head in the water and scream. But satyrs are morning people.
“Sounds great,” I told him.
Then I jogged off toward the diving board. I hadn’t practiced my dive at all, but I figured I’d spent so much of my life plummeting downward, I’d be a shoo-in for first place.