My mom and Annabeth were both giggling.
I wanted to say Just kill me now,but with my luck, those words would stick on the letter and the admissions office at New Rome would make me fall on my sword the moment I arrived.
I dictated Paul’s sentence, minus the vegetables. For the next half an hour, Paul, Annabeth, and my mom offered all sorts of unhelpful suggestions for Ganymede’s letter, while I picked out the least embarrassing lines and read them onto the paper. I even managed to get a line in there about how helpful my counselor, Eudora, had been.
By the end, Annabeth was on the floor crying from laughing so hard. Paul looked like he was starting to feel bad for me. My mom came over and kissed me on the head.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “But we do love all those things about you. Let’s see how the letter came out.”
She read it aloud, and I had to admit, it wasn’t bad.
“How do you get his signature to appear, though?” Annabeth wondered.
Before she could suggest something like Hugs and kisses,I said, “ ‘Thank you for your time. Yours sincerely, Ganymede.’ ”
The words burned themselves onto the paper, with Ganymede’s signature appearing in red.
“You think it’s done?” I asked. Then I realized my question was not transcribing itself.
“Thank gods.”
“You have to get two more recommendation letters?” my mom asked. “Sounds like fun!”
“Yeah, and if those are do-it-yourself letters, too,” I said, “I think I’ll do them by myself.”
“But you’re never alone, Seaweed Brain.” Annabeth squeezed my ankle. “We’ll always be here to help you.”
She didn’t even have the decency to put sarcastic air quotes around help.
“To Percy!” Paul raised his glass. “Our own family hero!”
My mom and Annabeth both cheered and drank sparkling water to my health.
I appreciated the sentiment, but I didn’t join in. Toasts made me think of Ganymede, and it was a little too soon for that.
That night, I told Annabeth the full story.
After dinner, she’d headed back to her dorm, but once I’d had enough of doing homework, I lay down in my bed, fired up my makeshift Iris-message machine, and tossed a coin into the rainbow. I was a little afraid Iris’s staff, Mercedes, might fly through my window and beat me upside the head for using another form of messaging, but thankfully that didn’t happen.
“Hey,” said Annabeth.
She shimmered in the rainbow light, her head propped on one hand, an open textbook on the bed in front of her: some math stuff that was beyond me.
Her smile was the perfect antidote for my long crazy day. Sure, she had smiled at dinner （And laughed at me. A lot.）， but this was a warmer, more intimate smile. I liked to think it was just for me.
“I wanted to tell you about Olympus,” I started.
She was delighted to hear about Barbara’s request for a selfie and an autograph. “Of course! Happy to!”
I was a little surprised by how unsurprised she sounded. Maybe she got these requests all the time and just didn’t talk about them.
“Thanks for the loan of the Yankees cap, by the way,” I said. “You never told me it makes you uncomfortable when you wear it.”
She gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “All power has a price. Even being invisible. My mom taught me that a long time ago.”
She sounded wistful, maybe a little sad, but not resentful. She had apparently accepted the way the world worked according to Athena, even if she didn’t always agree, even if it sometimes didn’t make any more sense than Annabeth’s math homework did to me.
“Speaking of your mom . . .” I told her what had happened at the brunch, when Athena locked eyes with me under the table.
Annabeth’s expression was difficult to read. Iris-messages were always a little hazy, but she looked like she was trying to sew my words together in her mind, to make a coherent story out of them.
“Wow,” she said at last.
“Yeah.”
“She helped you.”
“I . . . guess? She didn’t kill me, anyway.”
“You know what this means?” She stretched her hand toward me. Her fingers dispersed into water and light as they hit the Iris-message, but I reached toward her anyway. When the image re-formed, it looked as if our hands had merged, fused together at our life lines. Annabeth was smiling again.
“My mom gets it,” Annabeth said. “It’s weird that she didn’t before, seeing as she’s usually so far ahead of everyone else, but I guess this isn’t a battlefield.”