Mom smiles at me.
I whisper back, “I’ve survived beach bunny cheerleaders, a slut-hunting ex-boyfriend, and five years of cross-country camp. I’m not afraid of some throwback to ancient myth with atrocious highlights and a Barbra Streisand nose.”
Catching Mom’s eye I smile big, even as Stella squeezes me way too tight around the ribs. One stomp on her pedicured toes and I’m free.
“All ready,” I say, snatching my backpack off the deck.
As I sling my pack onto my shoulder I see a spark out of the corner of my eye, just before the strap breaks, sending the bag flying right into Stella’s nose. Sure, it was an accident—you can’t exactly anticipate strap failure—but I couldn’t have aimed better if I tried.
Too bad, though. This is a brand-new backpack.
Hand cupped over her injured nose, Stella’s face turns bright red. She growls and lifts her other hand like she’s going to point at me—way rude, by the way.
“Stella,” Damian warns as he points a finger at my broken strap. The torn fabric glows for a second before magically repairing itself.
I grab my backpack off the ground and check the strap. It’s perfect, like it never broke in the first place.
Stella jerks her hand back to her side before turning in a huff and stalking off the boat. I glance back and forth between Damian’s steaming look and Stella’s retreating back.
Wait a second. . . . Did she do that to my strap? That must have been the flash of light. Serves her right getting bonked in the nose.
Next time she’ll think twice about zapping my stuff.
Dinner at the Petrolas house is unusual, to say the least.
Mom and I usually set up a pair of TV trays in the living room so we can watch the latest reality show while we eat. Not the best idea with some of the ubergross stunts they pull, but it was our nightly ritual.
Not only do we not even have TV on Serfopoula, but Damian and Stella actually eat at a dining table. In a dining room. Weird, huh?
“There is a small village on the far side of the campus,” Damian explains while a servant—yes, an actual servant—serves the food. “It mainly consists of housing for Academy staff and faculty, but there are a few commercial establishments. There is a bookstore, a small grocery that sells locally produced fruits, vegetables, and dairy items, and, a favorite among the students, an ice-cream parlor.”
That’s it? No CVS or Foot Locker? What if I need Band-Aids or new Nikes? “What about that other island?” I ask. “Where we caught the yacht.”
“Unfortunately,” Damian says, “only Level 13s are permitted to visit Serifos during the semester.”
I’m about to ask what a Level 13 is and why they’re so special, when Stella says, “I’m a Level 13.”
Of course she is.
“Yes,” Damian says. “Because she plans to attend university in England, Stella must study for an additional year beyond your American twelve.”
Across the table—a massive piece of dark wood furniture worn so smooth it must date back to the original Academy—Stella smirks.
“Yes,” she coos. “British academic standards are much higher.”
“Yeah, well,” I say. It is on the tip of my tongue to say she must need remedial school only her dad’s too nice to say so, but Mom kicks me under the table. Ouch! Clutching my throbbing shin, I cover by saying, “I’m going to USC, so I don’t need another year.”
“If you need anything at all,” Damian says, “please let me know and we will make arrangements. There is very little we cannot get here on Serfopoula.”
Yeah, except TV.
The servant, an older woman with wrinkled leather skin and a loose cotton dress decorated with embroidered blue flowers, sets a plate in front of me. There is some kind of salad, with recognizable cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, and stinky goat cheese that would be edible assuming I can pick around the onions. Next to the salad are two big slimy things that look like green sea slugs.
Damian must be able to guess what I’m thinking because he says, “Those are dolmades, traditional grape leaves stuffed with a rice mixture.”
Stella laughs at me and pops one in her mouth.
“Yia Yia Minta makes these,” I say, poking at one with my fork. “They’re just not usually so . . . wet looking.”
“Ah,” Damian says, smiling at the old servant woman. “That is part of Hesper’s secret recipe. She drizzles them with olive oil before serving.”
“Shhh.” The old woman, Hesper, bats at him. “You talk too much.”
“But, Hesper,” he replies, “they are family now.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. At first I think it’s because of Damian’s mushy comment—I don’t think one little City Hall marriage ceremony makes a whole new family—but then I catch Stella’s eye and she’s staring at my plate and looking, well, constipated.
Light from somewhere reflects off my plate, shining up at me.
I look down and—
“Aaaack!”
Jumping up, I knock over my chair, trip when my laces get caught on one of the legs, and wind up face-first on the floor.
“Phoebe,” Mom cries. “What’s wrong?”
She rushes to my side, but by then I’ve twisted around and leaped to my feet. I point at my plate—now looking like a completely normal dinner salad—and scream, “M-m-my food!” I glare at Stella, who is looking way too proud of herself. “It was alive!”
Those green sea slug dolmades had come to life and were wriggling around in my salad with the olives and stinky goat cheese.
Any other day in the history of my life I would have checked myself into the nuthouse for seeing things, but after seeing Stella shimmer onto the boat—and zap my backpack—and my plate glowing, I know I’m not crazy.
So does Damian.
“Stella Omega Petrolas!” he yells.
Two throbbing veins pop out on his forehead and his face turns bright, bright red. Wow, he looks like he’s going to explode. Crossing my arms over my gray RUN LIKE A GIRL T-shirt, I smirk at Stella. Let’s see her shimmer her way out of this one.
Damian takes a deep breath and says a little calmer, “You know the rules about using your powers against another.”
“But, Daddy,” she whines, the fake tears starting. She’s even got the poor pitiful me pout.
I watch with great admiration. I’ve never been able to actually produce tears. Maybe if I pay attention I can pick up some pointers.
“No buts,” he says. He points at her with his right hand and a bright light shoots from his fingertip and suddenly all of Stella is glowing. “Your powers are grounded for one week.”
“A week!” she shrieks as the glow subsides. “That’s not fair. I only—”
“One week. Next time it will be a month.”
Stella tries to stare him down—like that has ever in the history of the world worked to change a parent’s mind. If it did then I’d be in Cali right now, and not on some stupid island trapped with a supernatural teenager clearly intent on making my life miserable. I can only hope that the rest of the kids at this school aren’t this bad.
“Please,” Damian says, oblivious to his daughter’s angry eyes, “continue the meal.”
I pull my chair upright, but hesitate before sitting back down.
I don’t plan on eating anything that was crawling across my plate two minutes ago.
Sensing a searing glare, I glance up at Stella. Her gray eyes burn with undisguised fury. In comparison, the dolmades are much more inviting.
Besides, I need to eat all I can before she gets her powers back.
“So what is this school like?” I ask, forking a piece of cucumber. “I mean, if everyone is from all different places, then how do they take all the same classes?”
“For many centuries,” Damian explains, “all classes at the Academy were taught in Greek. The gods felt that their descendants should learn their native language.”
Oh great. How am I ever going t
o pull that B average I need for USC if I can’t even understand the instructor? This is like one of those social experiments where they drop kids off in a foreign country and they have to either learn the language or be stuck there forever.
“When the British Empire rose to power in the early 1800s, the headmaster lobbied the gods to change the official school language to English.” He takes a drink of water. “This turned out to be an extremely wise decision since many of our students go on to study at Oxford, Cambridge, and Ivy League universities.”
Whew! Though, in the great grand scheme of things, the language barrier would be a minor problem.
“And if everyone but me has superpowers,” I say carefully, building up the courage to ask what’s really bothering me, “am I going to get zapped like a zillion times a day? Am I going to get . . .” I glance nervously at Stella, only mildly secure in the idea that her powers are grounded. “Smoted?”
Damian gives Stella a disapproving look, like he knows she threatened to smote me. “Certainly not,” he says, his voice clipped. “The students have been made aware of your arrival and know better than to use their powers against you. If anyone . . .” The word hangs there, but I think we all know he’s talking about Stella. “. . . disobeys my instructions you are to report them to me immediately.”
“Sure.” I push my plate away. But what if I can’t tell him because I’ve been turned into a sea slug?
“I assure you, Phoebe,” he says, smiling like I said something silly, “no student has been smoted from the Academy in generations.”
Yeah, like that makes me feel better. That just means they’re out of practice. They’ll probably do it wrong and I’ll end up on Mars or something.
“I know this is a little . . .” Mom sits down on my bed while I unpack my suitcases. “. . . hard to absorb.”
“Hard to absorb?” I cry, flinging my good Nikes onto the floor and wheeling around to gape at her. “Hard to absorb? Finding out that Ben & Jerry’s had discontinued White Russian was hard to absorb. This is . . .” I wave my hands in the air, trying to find the words to actually describe how I feel. “. . . freaking unbelievable.”
She starts taking T-shirts out of the suitcase and folds them into neat piles according to color family.
“I’m sorry,” she says, setting a red RUN HARD OR RUN HOME T-shirt on the red, orange, and yellow pile. “I should have told you sooner, but I thought you had enough on your mind already with all the major changes in our lives. I didn’t want to overburden you with this additional worry.”
So instead she waits until we’re almost here. When I can’t get away.
I snatch the T-shirts off the bed before she can restack them in order of shade and hue. Color coding is so not my thing.
“Whatever,” I say, not really meaning it—I mean, she did keep this a secret for over a month. A month! “I’m over it.”
There is a tall dresser in the corner of my room, and I try to pull open one of the middle drawers while balancing the enormous stack of T-shirts in my left hand. The drawer does not cooperate and it takes a monumental tug to pull it open, sending the T-shirts tumbling.
After I pick the T-shirts up off the floor I proceed with putting them away.
The dresser is the closest thing my room has to a closet. Other than that I actually kind of like the room. Like the rest of the house, the furniture is seriously old—the sturdy, made-to-last kind—and the floor is age-worn tile in the same dark brown as the furniture. The walls are bright white plaster and they feel cold when I touch them. I can’t wait for our boxes to get here so I can add some of my own color.
“Phoebe,” Mom says like she’s disappointed that I’m not spilling my feelings all over the tile floor. “You can’t bottle up your emotions inside. Talk to me. Are you worried about fitting in?”
“Look,” I say—fine, I shout—as I slam the drawer shut, “drop the shrink act. I’m fine. I don’t need psychotherapy or a Rorschach test or an open dialogue. Just point me to the computer so I can e-mail home.”
She looks like she really wants to say something shrinklike, but thinks better of it. Good thing, too. I grew up on her therapist approach. It so doesn’t work on me anymore.
The computer—something from the dark ages of technology if the dingy gray plastic is any sign—is in Damian’s office. You’d think a guy with Greek gods on his PTA could afford to upgrade.
He is in his office when we get there, filling out some paperwork at his desk. Looking up, he smiles and asks, “Are you here to use the computer, Phoebe?”
I nod, thinking that’s enough of a response. Until Mom pokes me in the ribs.
“Yeah. I want to e-mail my friends back home.”
“Oh.” His face falls and he looks to Mom for support.
Great. Another secret? Another reality-shattering headline?
“Honey,” she begins. Her voice is quiet and way too hesitant, but it’s the hand on my shoulder that tips me off to the really bad news. “We don’t want to say you can’t stay in touch with your friends, but—”
“What? I can’t even e-mail my two best friends?” I shake her hand off my shoulder. “I thought being stuck on this stupid prison-of-anisland was going to be bad, but I can’t believe this! Why don’t you just put me in solitary and slide bread and water under my door twice a day?”
“It’s not that,” she insists.
“Phoebe,” Damian says, using what I know must be his patient principal voice, “you are entirely free to e-mail whomever you choose. But we must ask you not to reveal the truth about Serfopoula and the Academy. We trust you to act responsibly.”
Is that all?
“Fine,” I say, sounding like it’s a major concession when I’m actually thinking, As if they’d believe me.
I mean, Nola and Cesca are my best friends and all, but there are limits to every trust. Their faith in me would be seriously depleted if I drop an e-mail saying, Safe in Serfopoula. It’s hot, the evil stepsister has already struck, and, oh yeah, my new school is run by Greek gods. Not in this lifetime.
“If you click on the envelope icon at the top of the screen it will lead you through the setup process for your Academy e-mail. I suggest using that program since messages sent from outside e-mail addresses are delayed through our screening software.” Damian looks pleased when I nod. “Well, then we will leave you to your e-mail in private.”
Good. I was afraid they’d stay and watch over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t slip up. Mom doesn’t look as pacified as Damian, but she lets him take her hand and lead her out the door anyway. As soon as they’re gone I slip into the chair in front of the computer and log on to create my new Academy e-mail.
After entering my entire life history, the program finally prompts me to select my alias. I stare at it for a while before I realize it means I get to choose my own screen name. Nice.
Normally I use PhoebeRuns. That’s what I had at PacificPark and on IM.
Here, though, that seems too much like home. And this is definitely not home. This is more like a detour. Like I got lost on my way to USC.
That’s it! I quickly type LostPhoebe for my alias. Finally, I am in the actual e-mail program and click on compose.
To:
[email protected],
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: On the Island of Dr. Demento Hi Girls, Mom and I got here. Finally.You would not believe what we had to go through just to get to this stupid island. Planes, trains, hydrofoil ferries.You name it, we were on it. And the stepdad was there to meet us at the airport. I seriously considered losing myself in Athens. Really, what could they do if I just disappeared?
Then as soon as we got to the island the evil stepsister showed up. Boy is she a trip. She could give Mitzi Busch a run for her attitude. How am I going to make it through an entire year without you guys?
I start school first thing tomorrow, without even a getused-to-the-time-change day off. Apparentl
y this school is uber-exclusive. I bet it’s full of snobs and rich brats who think their parents’ money gives them the right to act all superior. Don’t you wish you were me?
E-mail me soon!
Love,
Phoebe
I click send and log off. Bed is calling me. After all, it is ten hours later in Serfopoula and that means I haven’t slept in, like, thirty-six hours. And I have to go to the Academy with Damian at seven-thirty to fill out paperwork and finalize my class schedule.