“Your crown’s crooked.” She reaches over to straighten it. “Wait, you’re Ellie, right? Fifi’s roommate?”
“Penelope.”
“Oh.” She frowns. “I must have heard her wrong. Sorry.”
“You didn’t. Fifi’s decided Ellie is my new name, whether I agree or not.”
Charlie bursts out laughing. “Yeah, that sounds like the little tyrant. When she was a baby she couldn’t say my full name so she started calling me Charlie. Twelve years later, it’s the only thing anybody calls me.”
“What’s your real name?” I ask. “I can call you by it if you want?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” She stretches her legs out in front of her, drapes an arm over the back of her chair. “I’m used to Charlie now.”
I nod, because I’ve known the powerhouse that is Fifi for only a few hours and I’m half ready to give up on the name I’ve had my whole life. I can’t imagine what it’s like for one of her siblings.
Although Charlie’s about as different from Fifi as she can get. Oh, they look alike—same glowing brown eyes, samerich brown skin, same slightly crooked nose and long, elegant build. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Unlike Fifi, Charlie wears her hair in short, tight blond curls. Also unlike Fifi, who is all dressed up, Charlie is currently wearing loose olive-green cargo pants and a cropped black tank top. She’s also got a ring through the side of her right nostril, a bar through her left eyebrow, and more ear piercings than I can count.
It’s not a look I would go for—my mother might have an actual stroke if I come home with a facial piercing—but it looks good on her. A little intimidating, definitely, but also really cool.
Her friend gets back before I can think of anything else to say, and she hands me a water bottle before dropping a giant plate of food on the table in front of me.
“There’s no way I can eat all that!” I tell her as I eye the mountains of grilled vegetables and pita bread.
“You don’t have to,” she answers, pulling three forks out of her pocket and handing one to each of us. “Turns out I’m starving too.”
I don’t normally share plates with strangers or, well, anybody. But it seems rude to do anything but dig in when she and Charlie have gone out of their way to be nice to Fifi’s pathetic little roommate.
I mean, really, what was I thinking? Just dropping down on the dance floor like that because I thought the floor moved? I’m lucky Charlie found me and not a bunch of kids who would have had a blast making fun of me.
Still, it seemed so real, which makes no sense. I’m not saying a moving floor is impossible, not when the entire school spins around whenever it wants to. But I am saying that no one else saw it. So what’s got the better odds—that I was overheated and hallucinating or that the mosaic tiles actually moved?
I definitely know which one of those I’d be willing to bet on, and it isn’t the second one.
“Eat,” Charlie tells me, “before Leah here changes her mind and keeps it all for herself.”
She hands me a pita stuffed to the brim with chicken and vegetables and the most delicious-looking sauce I’ve ever seen.
So I do as she instructed, and the second I take the first bite, I realize they’re right. I am famished. Then again, I did spend most of the day hiking from one place to another. No wonder I’m hungry.
Two sandwiches later and I’m finally feeling normal again. No more dizziness and no more moving tiles. I glance at the dance floor just to be sure—and to prove to myself that there’s nothing weird going on with it. Sure enough, this time the tiles stay exactly where they belong.
Charlie and Leah are bantering back and forth about absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. But I don’t want to interrupt, so I wait for them both to take a bite of their own food before I say, “Thanks for helping me. It was really nice of you.”
Leah shoots me a weird look, her turquoise eyes glintingwith the reflection of the fairy lights all around us. “You’re an Aphrodite now, Ellie. Taking care of each other is what we do.”
I don’t know what to say to that, not when I’ve spent nearly every minute since becoming an Aphrodite trying to get out of being one. So I just nod and take a long sip of my water to avoid having to say anything.
We pass the next couple of minutes in silence, with Charlie and Leah watching everyone on the dance floor and me trying to find Levi. But sometime in the last fifteen minutes, the line for flower crowns has disappeared, and he’s nowhere to be seen.
Terrific. That’s what I get for relaxing and just having fun for a few minutes—I totally miss the opportunity I’ve been waiting for since I got on this roof. That’s why Athena girls are always supposed to be vigilant.
When you’re not, opportunities get missed, mistakes get made, and you end up sitting in the middle of a dance floor seeing things that never happened.
Just the thought has me stumbling to my feet. “I’ve got to go,” I tell them, shouting to be heard over the music.
But before I can do more than take a couple steps back from the table, Levi—hands full of unlit sparklers—flings himself into the seat I just vacated and says, “Hide me!”
