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  I liked his theory better than mine. At least that would mean that there was still a potential end to this trial. That I could still complete my mission, form my three couples, and return home to Mount Olympus with Orion at my side, his memory perfectly restored. But I didn’t quite believe it. Zeus had seemed so pleased at the idea of keeping Orion as his slave, at the prospect of torturing him while I did my work on Earth. Now, on a whim, he sends Orion here to torture me? It didn’t add up. Something was off. I needed to know why Orion was here. I needed answers.

  “We must contact Harmonia,” I said breathlessly. “Find out what she knows.”

  It was my sister Harmonia who had dispatched Hephaestus to me after I’d sent up a desperate plea to her in the town square, begging for help. Now that I was human, he was my only direct line to Mount Olympus. Aside from praying and offering up sacrifices—two notoriously dodgy forms of communication and bargaining—I had no other way to contact home.

  “That’s not really how it works,” Hephaestus told me.

  “What do you mean?”

  Orion disappeared, moving out of view inside the office. I leaned over Hephaestus, trying to catch a glimpse.

  “Excuse me. Your breasts are kind of in my face,” Hephaestus groused, gently shoving me away.

  I groaned and stood up straight. “What do you mean that’s not how it works?” I repeated.

  “I mean, I don’t contact her. She contacts me.”

  I heard Orion laugh again, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I sidestepped Hephaestus and walked into the office at the exact moment Orion was shaking hands with a guy I’d seen around school. He was tall and muscular with shaggy brown hair, and his pretty blond girlfriend was at his side. He wore one of those blue-and-white varsity jackets that every other person at this school seemed to own. It looked like Orion had just met his peer guide.

  “Peter Marrott,” the guy said. “And this is my girlfriend, Claudia Catalfo.”

  “Welcome to Lake Carmody,” Claudia said with a smile.

  “Thanks.” Orion nodded at Peter’s jacket. “You play ball?”

  “He’s the starting quarterback,” Claudia replied, looking up at Peter proudly. She sipped hot tea from a paper cup and entwined the fingers of her free hand with his. She was petite, the top of her head barely reaching Peter’s shoulder. Her auburn hair was tied into a French braid, and she wore skinny pink jeans, a white button-down, and a flowered headband. Her face was familiar, but I couldn’t place why. “He’s going to play in college next year, right, Peter?”

  “Maybe,” Peter said, a blotchy blush popping up on his cheeks. He tossed his light-brown bangs off his head, and they fell right back into place. “You play?”

  “I was starting running back at my old school,” Orion replied, rounding his sexy shoulders. “I had twenty-one touchdowns and almost a thousand yards last season.”

  My brain went fuzzy and I felt faint. He had an athletic history too? What else had he left behind in Boston? A part-time job? A slew of clubs? A girlfriend?

  “Really? That’s awesome. We’re a little weak at running back this year,” Peter replied excitedly. “Our starter graduated, and the backup guy is kind of a bust.”

  “Think they’ll let me try out?” Orion asked hopefully. The eager tone in his voice nearly broke my heart. I loved him so much. It killed me not to be able to reach out and touch him, hold him, tell him I was going to make everything okay.

  “Definitely! Come on. I’ll introduce you to Coach Morschauser right now.”

  They turned toward the door as one and paused, catching me standing there with what I was sure was pure desperation in my eyes.

  “Um . . . excuse us?” Peter said.

  I glanced behind me and realized I was blocking the door. “Oh. Sorry. Right. I’m . . . sorry.”

  I shoved the door open and stumbled out ahead of them, almost mowing over Hephaestus, who was still, loyally, waiting for me.

  “Thanks again, you guys. I’ll see you around,” Orion said dismissively.

  “You’re . . . problem,” I blurted. “I mean, no welcome. I mean—”

  “True, stop,” Hephaestus whispered, grasping my wrist.

  But it didn’t matter. They were already halfway down the hall. Claudia leaned toward Peter and loud-whispered, “That’s that girl. The one who stole my scarf on the first day, remember?”

  Right! That was why I knew her. I’d used her scarf to tie my hair back on my first day of school, before I started to get a handle on how covetous people were of their things. They glanced back at me, even Orion, with that look in their eyes. That look that I had, unfortunately, grown accustomed to. Orion’s, at least, had a smidgen of sympathy in it, a touch of curiosity. But the fact remained:

  Every last one of them thought I was a freak. Including the love of my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Peter

  “Welcome to the team, man.”

  I walked up behind Orion and slapped him on the shoulder, so hard half the water in his cup sloshed over the rim. My best friend, Gavin Dunnellon, laughed, but Orion took it well. He turned to shake hands with us, then dumped the rest of his water over his sweaty head. Thank God this kid had transferred here. Without a solid running game, the offense was going to be totally focused on me, and I wasn’t sure I could carry the whole team this season. Impressing the scouts meant running a well-rounded game plan. Now I at least had a shot at going to college. If any good schools actually came out to see me.

  I was supposed to meet with my guidance counselor, Mr. Garvey, and the coach tomorrow to talk about it, a thought that kind of made me want to hurl.

  “Thanks, guys,” Orion said.

  “We were just gonna walk the track,” Gavin told him, his voice a low rumble. “Come on.”

  “Walk the track?” Orion asked, squinting one eye against the sun. The other members of the team were busy shoving their stuff into their duffel bags, rehashing the better plays of the session and shuffling back toward the locker room.

  “Gavin needs to loosen up after practice,” I explained, cocking a thumb at my massive linebacker friend. “It’s his thing.”

  “Don’t mock it, man.”

  Gavin cracked his knuckles, then his neck. His short brown hair stuck to his forehead like a second skin, and his freckles looked darker on his red cheeks. We used to call him freckle-fart-face in grade school. Until he got bigger than the rest of us. Now the guy was like a tank—thick neck, shoulders like boulders, fists like bowling balls. I even knew some adults who were intimidated by him. No one messed with him anymore.

  Orion shrugged. “Cool.”

  He launched his cup into the garbage can and we started walking. At the top of the hill next to the bleachers, the JV cheerleading squad practiced their chants. Farther down the slope, Claudia and the other members of the Boosters Club were working on spirit signs for this week’s pep rally and the game on Saturday while Greg Howell, one of the guys from yearbook, snapped pictures. I saw Claude bent over a long white roll of paper with a glitter gun, her lips pressed together as she concentrated.

  “That your girlfriend over there?” Orion asked, shading his eyes.

  I felt myself blush and was glad I was already red from exertion. “Yep.”

  “What’s she up to?”

  “That’s the boosters,” Gavin replied, rolling his shoulders forward and back, then stretching out his triceps. “Basically the hottest chicks in school who aren’t cheerleaders are boosters.”

  “Oh.” Orion looked them over as if he was shopping for arm candy. “Are any of them cool?”

  “Who cares? They’re hot,” Gavin joked.

  I laughed. “I can’t really say. If Claudia hears I been talking, I’ll get in trouble.”

  They both chuckled. “How long’ve you guys been together?” Orion asked.

  “Almost a year and a half.” I stooped to pick up a crushed cup someone had tossed on the blue running track. “She’s awesome. She’s not int
o this shallow crap like a lot of girls. Like, it’s not only about her hair and her clothes and stuff like that. She cares about stuff that matters.”

  “Plus, she’s obviously into football if she’s on the boosters,” Orion said. “That’s gotta be good.”

  “Yeah, she likes to support her man,” I replied with a grin, tossing the cup back and forth between my hands. “She’s actually into ballet, so she knows what it’s like to be on a regimen like I am. She just gets it.”

  “Plus, they’re sickening together, so that’s fun,” Gavin joked, holding one arm across his chest to stretch his shoulder out. “They’re, like, never not touching each other.”

  “Nice,” Orion said with a grin.

  “Shut up, dude!” I said, shoving Gavin as hard as I could.

  He barely moved. Just took a tiny sidestep.

  “I had a girlfriend back in Boston, but she dumped me as soon as I told her I was moving.” Orion stared out across the trees as the wind rustled through them.

  “That sucks.” I said it lightly, but inside my heart did this awful spin-around-and-die maneuver. Me and Claudia were both seniors. In exactly nine months we’d be graduating, and in eleven months she’d be going to college and who knew where the hell I’d be. Sometimes I lay up nights just thinking about her off at Princeton—her number one choice—or Harvard or some other smart place like that next year, flirting with a brainiac in a corduroy jacket or some shit, forgetting I ever existed. I tried to tell myself it would never happen, that we would never break up, but who was I kidding? At least here I was good enough for her. I wasn’t in the honors classes with her, but I was the star of the football team, the most popular guy in the senior class, and everyone at our church loved me because of the time I spent volunteering. I had other things to make up for the fact that I was never going Ivy League. But once she was out of this lame-ass town and meeting guys who were as smart as her? Guys with dreams and ambitions and the possibility of actually achieving them? Forget about it.

  “What’s up, man? You just went quiet,” Gavin said.

  “Nothing, it just . . . it sucks.” I looked back over my shoulder at the boosters and couldn’t see Claudia anymore. “There’s, like, a ticking time bomb on this whole thing.”

  “What whole thing?” Orion asked.

  I threw my arms wide. “This. Football. High School. Friends. Girlfriends . . .”

  “Dude. Claudia’s never gonna break up with you,” Gavin said, giving me one of his don’t-mess-with-me stares. “She lives for the Marrott love.”

  Orion snorted a laugh.

  “What? She totally does,” Gavin said. He cracked his knuckles again. Orion stopped laughing.

  “Please. Everyone knows long distance doesn’t work.”

  I started to jog. Just because. My blood was pumping suddenly, and I needed to do something to work it out. The two of them started to jog too. Within a minute we were rounding the turn and I spotted Claudia again, holding up one end of a sign while her best friend, Lauren Codry, held the other. It read GO MARROTT! #11 in huge blue letters. I smiled, but my heart felt sick.

  “You don’t know, man. Maybe you guys’ll end up at the same school,” Orion said, pacing me.

  I laughed him off. “Yeah, right. Claude’s crazy smart. She’s applying to Princeton early admission. My best hope is some triple-A school gives me a football scholarship, and who knows where the hell that’ll be.”

  “Whatever, man. You think too much,” Gavin said, shoving me. “We’ve got the whole year. Just chill.”

  I paused near the opening in the fence, with the boosters and cheerleaders right up the hill from us. The cup, which I was still holding, had been squeezed into a sweaty, twisted stick of cardboard. I threw it in the nearest trash bin.

  “I’m chill,” I said, raising my palms and forcing a smile. “Do I not look chill?”

  “G! A! V! I! N! What’s? That? Spell?”

  We froze. The JV cheerleaders had just started up this loud chant. I looked at Gavin. He pushed his wet hair back from his face and shrugged.

  “G! A! V! I! N! What’s? That? Spell?” they repeated.

  Six girls in front were holding up big placards spelling out his name in red, the sixth one holding a heart. Then this girl, a sophomore named Tara Schwartz, popped up from behind the line of them. Two girls held her up by her feet as she raised her arms in the air. Gavin had been tutoring her in Spanish since last spring, and I knew they’d hooked up a couple of times.

  “Gavin!” she shouted solo.

  Gavin was the color of a lobster and looked confused. Greg Howell stepped up alongside us to take a few pictures of both the cheerleaders and Gavin’s stunned face.

  “Gavin Dunnellon! Will you go to homecoming with me?”

  “Awwwwwww!” someone on the Boosters moaned.

  It was official—homecoming season was here. Every year my school had this tradition where we asked each other to homecoming with these big, stupid displays. As soon as one person started it, there’d be, like, twenty crazy stunts a day, like dudes coming to class in gorilla outfits, girls having pizzas delivered to the caf for a guy and his friends. Last year someone even hired a skywriter.

  Everyone looked at Gavin. The girls holding Tara up started to shake.

  “Um, sure?” Gavin said.

  The hill erupted with cheers. Tara popped up into the air and her friends caught her. Then Gavin climbed the whole hill in, like, five long strides to talk to her, and he was smiling for real, so I knew he hadn’t just said yes to keep from embarrassing her in front of everyone.

  “Dude. What was that?” Orion asked.

  “Welcome to Lake Carmody High,” I said with a grin. “Where nothing you do is too cheesy.”

  “Hey, guys! Come check out what we’re doing!” Claudia shouted down to us.

  Orion and I jogged up the slope next to the bleachers, and I kissed Claudia hello. She reached up and hugged me, full-body, not caring that I was covered in sweat. Then she gestured down at the signage.

  “We’re making one for each starter,” she said. “We figure we’ll hang them over your lockers tomorrow and then bring them out here the day of the game.”

  There were a couple dozen girls and, randomly, one guy on the boosters. They looked up at me, waiting for my reaction.

  “Cool,” I said with a nod. “They look awesome. And hey, you’re gonna have to make one more. We got a new starting running back,” I added, slapping Orion’s chest with the back of my hand.

  “Congratulations! That’s so great!” Claudia said, her eyes lighting up. “But all the boosters are taken. We’re gonna need someone to double up.”

  Every starter on the team is assigned their own booster. Basically the girl (or guy) decorates your locker for you, makes you a big basket of food the day before the game, and does other random cool stuff throughout the season.

  “Does anyone want to be Orion’s booster?” Claudia called out.

  “I’ll do it!”

  The girl from that morning—the one who had stolen Claudia’s scarf out of her bag at lunch on the first day of school—stood up from a seat on the bleachers. I hadn’t even seen her sitting there until now.

  “You’re not even on the boosters,” Claudia said, her face falling.

  The girl clomped down the stairs and then walked up the hill and over to us. Her long dark hair streamed out behind her in the wind, and she had the most unbelievable blue eyes I’d ever seen. She was gorgeous, not that I’d ever admit that out loud. When it came to boosters, Orion could do worse. Maybe he’d even just landed himself the new girlfriend he was obviously looking for. At least he had two more years of high school to be with her. Lucky bastard.

  “So? Sign me up,” the girl said, looking directly at Orion. “I’m in.”

  Claudia sighed and turned to Orion. “Are you okay with . . . what’s your name again?” she asked the girl.

  “True,” she and Orion said at the same time.

  Claudia and
I locked eyes, both surprised he already knew her name.

  “True Olympia,” True said with deep meaning, as if that was supposed to be significant to Orion somehow.

  “With True?” Claudia finished.

  “Sure.” Orion shrugged.

  “Okay. Go see Wallace over there,” Claudia gestured toward the one dude in the group, who scrambled to his feet with his iPad. He was wearing a black T-shirt and checkerboard shorts with a chain connected to the wallet in his pocket and had dark floppy bangs like mine. He lifted one scrawny arm and waved. There was ink up and down his forearm, but it looked like a doodle, not a tattoo. “He keeps the booster lists and attendance and everything.”

  “Got it.” True made her way over to Wallace, tripping over a paint can and half crumbling a sign. It seemed like she couldn’t take her eyes off Orion, and she was plowing everything over to do it.

  “You ready to go grab dinner?” I asked Claudia. “Me and a couple of the guys are going to Pizza City.”

  She checked her watch. “Crap. How’d it get so late?” Dropping to the grass, she shoved her phone and a notebook into her bag, then stood. “Lauren, can you hang out for a while and make sure everything gets put away?”

  “No problem, Skipper,” Lauren said, saluting.

  Claudia rolled her eyes, but laughed.

  “I’ll see you at the Studio.”

  “Hey, guys, before you go, can I get a shot of the senior class couple?” Greg asked, wielding his camera.

  Claudia and I grinned, both of us loving being called the class couple. Like I said, nothing was too cheesy. “Sure,” I told him.

  We turned toward each other and hugged, smiling for the camera. Greg reeled off about half a dozen shots, then gave us a thumbs-up.

  “Thanks.” He checked something on the screen and then moved off to photograph the cheerleaders.

  “No problem!” I shouted. “Hey, Orion! You coming for pizza?”

  His eyebrows rose. “Yeah? Cool.”

  “Gavin! Let’s go!” I shouted, raising an arm to wave him down.

  He said good-bye to Tara and jogged over to join us. I slipped my arm around Claudia as we made our way down the hill, Orion and Gavin in front of us. There was still an annoying pinch in my chest from my conversation with the guys, but I tried to ignore it.