by Anne Ursu
“Oh, Char?”
“Huh?” Charlotte started. She looked up from her dinner—turkey burgers, no bun, and spinach, no salt. Her mother was peering at her curiously.
“Why were your eyes closed?” Mrs. Mielswetzski asked.
“Oh. No reason.”
“All right. Well, listen, I spoke to Aunt Suzanne. We’re going to have to get a catsitter for Mew while we’re gone, because Zee’s going to be staying at a friend’s.”
Zee’s parents were going back to England during spring break, but he wanted to stay home for some soccer thing. Charlotte would never sacrifice a trip to England in order to run around on plastic grass for an hour getting sweaty, but it’s our differences that make the world go ’round.
“But—can’t Charlie take Mew?”
“His mom’s allergic.”
“So?” That was a stupid reason. Didn’t they have pills for that?
“Mew will be okay for a week. We’ll take good care of her when we get back, don’t worry.”
Charlotte wanted to suggest she could just stay home with Mew instead, but she didn’t think that would go over very well.
“Speaking of that,” Mr. Mielswetzski said, “we’ll have to drive her over tomorrow morning. It’s Zee’s week to have Mew.”
Charlotte grumbled to herself. It hardly seemed fair that Zee got to go out with her best friend and steal her cat. If she’d known, she would have offered a trade—Mew for Maddy. It was only right.
“You know—I saw the funniest old man when I drove Zee home from his soccer game last week,” Mr. Mielswetzski continued. “He was wearing an aqua suit!”
That got Charlotte’s attention. “What?”
“A man in an aqua-colored suit!” he repeated. “And not just any old suit either, but a three-piece suit, you know, with a vest? And a pocket watch chain and a bowler hat! He looked like something out of an old movie—except aqua.” He turned to Mrs. Mielswetzski and grinned. “I’ve got to get me one of those suits.”
“Now, really,” Mrs. Mielswetzski said.
“Wouldn’t I look smashing, Charlotte? What would that boy you like think of me in that?”
“Dad!” said Charlotte.
“The what?” said Mrs. Mielswetzski.
“There’s this handsome new boy on Zee’s soccer team,” Mr. Mielswetzski said, winking at his daughter. “I think Lottie fancies him.”
“Dad!” said Charlotte.
“Mike!” said Mrs. Mielswetzski.
He looked at Charlotte, his face puzzled. “Don’t you?” Turning to her mother, he stage-whispered, “I’m going to introduce them.”
“No!” said Charlotte.
“Mike,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski firmly, “I think you forget your daughter is grounded and not in any position to be set up with boys.”
“Yeah!” Charlotte said.
“And she’s too young to be dating, anyway.”
“Mom!”
For the rest of the dinner, Charlotte sat there frozen in horror while her parents argued over whether or not her father should embarrass her to death, and when dinner was over she crept up to her room, closed the door firmly behind her, and crawled into the bed.
Charlotte passed another restless night, filled with her usual strange dreams of the Underworld. But this time, as the Harpies flew overhead, two of their faces morphed into those of Maddy and Zee. Maddy’s narrowed its eyes haughtily and repeated, “You think you know him so well, but you don’t,” while Zee’s said, over and over again, “Go get ’em, tiger!” while a man in an aqua suit laughed and clapped.
When she walked into school Monday morning, she didn’t know quite what to expect. Part of her feared the whole place would have been hit with Zee’s happy bomb, and everyone was going to be bouncing around like lunatics. But as she walked through the hallways, she found to her relief that everyone at Hartnett seemed to be quite normal, thank you; as she made her way to homeroom, she didn’t see any unnatural exuberance in anyone, except Jasper Nix, who was always that way.
Right outside Mrs. Bryant’s room, Charlotte’s heart started to flutter. She so wanted to go in there and have Zee see her and smile slightly and nod in his British I’m-glad-to-see-you-but-I-don’t-want-to-call-across-the-room way.
But when Charlotte walked into homeroom, Zee wasn’t at his desk at all. She scanned the room, only to find him crouching down in front of one of the bookshelves, looking deeply into Mrs. Bryant’s fish tank.
At the beginning of the year, Mrs. Bryant had had ten fish. Then she brought in an angelfish, and every few days there was one less fish in the tank, until the angelfish was the only one left. Once Charlotte saw it had another fish’s tail hanging out of its mouth.
As Charlotte carefully approached her cousin, she realized that he was not just examining the fish in the tank. He was talking to it.
She stared at him. “What are you doing?”
At the sound of her voice, Zee whirled around. “Oh, hey, Char!” he said brightly. “I’m talking to the fish!”
Charlotte looked into the tank and then back at Zee.
“His name’s Tyrone,” Zee added.
“What?…You named it?”
“Him. No, it’s just his name.”
“Okay.” Charlotte looked around. There was no way to bring up her letter to Mr. Metos here. “So, um”—she shifted a little—“how was your weekend?”
“Oh, it was great!” he enthused, beaming up at her. “Maddy and I went to a movie!”
Something inside Charlotte deflated. “Really?”
“There were explosions!”
“Right,” Charlotte said, eyeing him. “Zee, nothing fell on your head recently, did it?”
He scrunched up his face. “No, why?”
“No reason,” she muttered. “Hey, listen. I have to talk to you.” She motioned outside the door. “In private.”
“Okay!” Zee exclaimed, so loudly that three people in the classroom turned to look.
The cousins went into the hall, where Charlotte pulled Zee into a doorway. “Listen,” she said, leaning in, “I wrote Mr. Metos this weekend.”
Zee blinked.
“I’m so stupid,” she continued. “I should have thought of this earlier. I wrote him at his apartment here. They have to forward it, right?” The words came tumbling out of her mouth as if she had no control over them. Which perhaps she didn’t.
“Right,” Zee nodded.
“So I told him to write us. Maybe we’ll hear from him now! Maybe he’ll tell us what he’s been doing.” Charlotte looked at Zee, eyes wide with anticipation and hope.
But Zee looked as if she’d just told him she’d bought a new pair of socks. “Brilliant,” he said.
Charlotte stared disbelievingly. “Brilliant?”
“Yeah, brilliant.”
Charlotte stared at Zee, speechless, while he smiled happily back at her. Just as she was about to grab his shoulders and shake him, Mrs. Bryant walked by. “Bell’s about to ring, guys. Come on in.”
At lunch Charlotte looked for Jason Hart. She still hadn’t been able to try to find out what he’d meant the other night. If he knew about the gods, about her, well, then his presence in the school was no accident. And if not, she needed to find out why he was there.
But Jason wasn’t in his seat. Charlotte asked a few people if they’d seen him, and they all shrugged. Her heart sank. Perhaps she was slightly more disappointed at his absence than the situation warranted, but she did her best not to show it. Someone might tell her father.
When school was over, Charlotte once again found herself flouncing into the passenger seat of her mother’s car. Mrs. Mielswetzski took one look at her and asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
Charlotte nodded and looked out the window.
They drove along in silence for a few moments while Charlotte watched the world go by. Then her mother glanced at her and said, oh-so-casually, “I talked to your Aunt Suzanne this afternoon. She s
ays Zee has a girlfriend.”
Zee told his parents?
Charlotte exhaled. There was no getting out of this. “Yup,” she said, hitting the last P like a cymbal.
“She said her name was Maddy. Is this our Maddy?”
“Yup.”
“Wow, that’s really something.”
“Yup.”
“So, how do you feel about that?”
“It’s a little weird,” she said flatly, still gazing out the window.
“I bet. I mean, Zee and your best friend. That must be hard on you.”
“It’s not that, Mom,” she muttered with a glance at her mother.
“Then what is it?”
“Zee’s just…being really weird. It’s like he’s possessed or something.”
“Oh, Char. Look, I know this sort of thing can be really difficult. People start dating someone and then it doesn’t seem like they’re the same person anymore. And it can be really lonely.”
“All right, Mom,” Charlotte muttered. There was no point in saying anything. She would never understand.
Charlotte stayed in her room most of that night, except for dinner, during which nobody mentioned a thing about handsome boys. Her father kept asking things like, “Why the long face?” but her mother always distracted him. Because it was the week before spring break, Charlotte had mountains of homework to keep her busy, including a paper due in English and tests coming up that week in science and math.
It was while she was practicing balancing chemical equations (as if she’d ever need to do that in her life) that she heard the scratching on her window.
Now, the last time there had been a noise on that particular window, it had been the tapping of the large black bird who lured them to the Underworld. But you could be sure Charlotte wasn’t going to fall for that twice. Any bird scratching on her window was going to be sent straight back where he came from.
She slowly moved her head toward the window. The curtain was closed and she could see nothing. With a deep breath, she took a sharpened pencil from her desk (it was the best weapon she could think of) and crept slowly over to the window. The scratching grew louder and more frantic. Charlotte stopped right in front of the closed curtain, poised the pencil, and quickly pulled the curtain open—
—and promptly dropped the pencil in surprise. For it was not an evil bird scratching at her window, or even a not-evil bird. On the sill outside her bedroom window, scratching and meowing, was Mew.
Alarmed, Charlotte opened the window and lifted her cat in. “Baby,” she whispered, “what is it?”
She examined Mew carefully. Her father had taken her over to Zee’s in the morning before school. And it seemed like Mew had come right back. But the Millers’ house was a couple of miles away—and that seemed like an awfully long way to go. Of course, Mew had also found her way to the Underworld, so really Charlotte shouldn’t have been surprised.
“What are you doing here?” Charlotte whispered.
“Meow!” said Mew.
“Are you okay?”
“Meow!” said Mew.
Charlotte frowned. The cat seemed to be fine, but also extremely agitated.
“Did Zee do something weird?” she asked. “Is that why you’re upset?”
“Meow!” said Mew.
“Poor baby. You can stay with me,” Charlotte said, stroking her cat. She could think of no other explanation than that Lulu Zee had driven her out of the house. And frankly, she couldn’t blame Mew one bit.
Eventually, Mr. Mielswetzski called over to the Millers to find out what had happened. Mew had gone missing right before dinner, it seemed. They offered to bring her back, much to Charlotte’s dismay, but after conferring with Zee, Mrs. Miller said Charlotte could keep her, since she would be going away for so long. Charlotte went up to tell Mew the good news, only to find the cat had skulked under the bed to sulk.
Make room for me, Charlotte thought grimly.
The rest of the week, Charlotte did her best to stay out of Zee’s way. He’d told her he didn’t care about Mr. Metos anymore, so she really didn’t have a thing to say to him. Anyway, even if she’d wanted to, he was pretty much always attached to Maddy. And when Maddy wasn’t attached to him, she was always surrounded by the other girls in school, who now thought she was the coolest thing ever for going out with Zee.
Meanwhile, Tuesday passed, then Wednesday, then Thursday, with no sign of Jason Hart. Charlotte had no desire to ask Zee anything about Jason. Finally, at the end of the day on Thursday, Charlotte went into the school office and asked after him.
“We don’t know, Charlotte. We haven’t heard from him,” Ms. Moran said.
“What?”
“Well…” The receptionist looked right and left to make sure no one was listening. Charlotte felt she was being let in on a secret, which made sense. She had, after all, developed a close relationship with Ms. Moran, since she was in the office every day after school calling her parents. That sort of thing really brings two people together. “Don’t tell anyone, but he ran away. His grandfather called and told us.”
Her heart pounding, Charlotte gasped, “Really?”
“But”—she leaned in closer—“the thing is, we can’t reach the grandfather anymore either. The phone number they gave doesn’t work, and there’s no house at the address they gave.”
Something on Charlotte’s neck tingled. “Are you serious?”
“Weird, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Charlotte.
Charlotte walked out the front door in a daze. Jason was gone. Poof! Disappeared. It was too weird. He did know about the gods, he must. Either he was working for them or they’d come after him. Either way, something had happened to him and his grandfather, too, and she wanted to know what.
Despite everything, Charlotte called Zee when she got home, but no one answered. She left a message and waited all evening for him to call back, but he never did. So on Friday morning Charlotte arrived at school early, determined to track down her cousin. Charlotte kept telling herself that Zee did still care, of course he did, how could he not? It was just that he was so happy to be with Maddy that he couldn’t really focus on anything else. Love does strange things to people. But once he heard about Jason, he would come out of whatever idiotic fog he was in and they could figure this out together.
But it wasn’t Zee who Charlotte saw first that morning. When she got to school, she found Maddy waiting by her locker. Charlotte frowned; Maddy had barely said a word to her since Monday. She approached warily, then gasped as she saw that tears were streaming down Maddy’s face.
“Maddy!” Charlotte exclaimed, hurrying over. “What? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Maddy shook her head and began crying in earnest.
“Come on,” Charlotte urged, putting her hand gently on her friend’s arm, “tell me. What is it?”
“It’s Zee,” Maddy sobbed.
Charlotte gasped. “What’s wrong with Zee?”
“He broke up with me!”
“He what?”
“For Ashley!”
“Ashley?” Charlotte blinked. “Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter which one!” Maddy fell into Charlotte’s arms. “Oh, Char,” she whimpered, “I was so awful to you. I’m sorry. I just felt so weird that I was going out with your cousin, and I was afraid you’d be mad, and—”
“It’s okay,” Charlotte said soothingly. Ashley?
“I can’t believe he did this to me,” she bawled.
“Neither can I,” Charlotte muttered.
After Charlotte had gotten Maddy together enough to get through the day, she tore off to homeroom to find Zee. It didn’t take long. He was in the doorway of the janitor’s closet with the blond Ashley, whispering in her ear, his hand resting on her arm.
Charlotte had no compunction about breaking that little scene up. “Excuse me,” she said, tapping pointedly on Zee’s shoulders. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Zee turned around as
Ashley looked warily from Charlotte to her new boyfriend. “Uh, see you later, Zee!”
“You sure will, Ashley!” he called. “What’s up?” he said, turning to Charlotte.
“What’s up? What’s up?” She shook her head. “What’s going on with you?”
He blinked benignly at her. “What do you mean?”
“You broke up with Maddy!”
“Oh, right. I’m too young to be tied down, Char.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Anyway, we wanted different things. But I’m hoping we can still be friends.”
“But—” Charlotte stood there, her mouth hanging open, unable to even form words.
Just then Chris Shapiro strode by and called, “Hey, Zee!” Then he added quickly, “Hey, Sweatski!” Charlotte shot Chris a haughty look.
“Ha!” Zee exclaimed. “Sweatski! Ha!”
Charlotte’s head whipped back toward her cousin. “What’s gotten into you?” she hissed, her eyes slits.
“What do you mean?” Zee asked, bewildered.
“What do I mean? You broke Maddy’s heart. And there are things happening, Zee. Jason’s missing!”
“Oh.” Zee waved a hand dismissively. “He’ll turn up.”
“He’ll turn up?” Charlotte repeated incredulously. “Zee, he’s got something to do with our Greek friends, I know it! Either they took him or he’s evil or—”
“Oh, Char,” Zee said, shaking his head. “Can’t you just get over that stuff?”
“What?”
“I mean, we’re young. Who cares about all that stuff?”
“You do. Or at least you did.”
“Well, I’ve changed.” He shrugged.
She stiffened. “That’s right, you have.” She shook her head disgustedly. “Look, Zee, we’re leaving for the cruise tomorrow, and—”
Something passed over Zee’s face. “You are?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” he said, eyeing her with great interest. “Are you sure you want to go?”
“What? Why?”
“Are you scared?”
“Am I what? Why would I be scared?!”