The Girl Games (Goddess Girls)

by Joan Holub

  The front doors opened behind them and another tour group entered the front hall. They were laughing. Obviously the girls in that group were enjoying their tour, she thought.

  Aphrodite and Athena were leading it. Aphrodite was the goddessgirl of love and beauty and Athena was the brainiest girl at MOA. Together with Artemis and Persephone, the four goddessgirls were all best friends, and the most popular girls at the Academy.

  Glancing up, Aphrodite caught Artemis’s eye and winked. Her long golden hair glistened in a ray of sunlight that shone in through a high window. In honor of the Games, she’d threaded her hair with blue and gold ribbons—MOA’s colors. The same double-G gold charm necklace that each of the four goddessgirl friends wore dangled at her throat.

  Whatever funny thing Aphrodite had told her group to make them laugh, it couldn’t have come from the official MOA tour guide scroll, Artemis decided. That thing was as dry as month-old ambrosia toast!

  While Penthe continued to flirt with Actaeon, Apollo came over to Artemis. “Are you almost done?” he asked. “We should be at the range. I checked out some of the other archers, and you’re going to have some stiff competition.”

  “Go ahead,” said Persephone, overhearing. “I can finish the tour.”

  “You sure?” Artemis asked. She’d scoped out the other archers too. The two Egyptian goddessgirls had looked pretty good. But these Amazons, and one of the Norse goddessgirls, were going to be toughest to beat. Still, as much as she wanted to be off practicing, and as much as she needed to check up on game preparations, she also felt like she should see the tour through to the end.

  “Yes! Go,” said Persephone, making shooing motions with her pale hands.

  “Okay. Thanks.” Big-time relieved, Artemis let go of her guide scroll. It rolled itself shut in midair with a loud snap. “Go, scroll. Zoom! Up to my room!” she called out before it could hit the floor.

  “Whoa!” a mortal girl in her group exclaimed. Her eyes followed the scroll as it zoomed up the stairs, heading for the girls’ dorm on the fourth floor. “That was amazing!”

  Artemis grinned and bowed as several of the girls in her tour group applauded. She should’ve thought about using magic to liven things up before. To mortals, nothing was as fascinating as the magical feats immortals could perform!

  Mortals that weren’t Penthesilea, that is. She was still talking to Actaeon. Neither of them had even noticed when the guide scroll whooshed away. Well, worrying about that Amazon was a waste of time, Artemis decided.

  There were other, more important things to worry about. Principal Zeus was counting on her. And so were the girls! To make sure that the Girl Games wouldn’t end up as a one-time thing, she needed to make Zeus proud. And that meant everything had to go perfectly.

  With her mind stuffed full of details she needed to take care of, Artemis took off, promising to meet Apollo for target practice later that afternoon.

  2

  Persephone

  Thursday morning.

  A HALF HOUR LATER THE TOUR WAS OVER and Persephone was on her way to the sports fields. There were lots of other students there already, practicing for the Games. Including Hades. But he was waiting to coach her. In the long jump. Seeing her coming, he waved, flashing her that sweet smile that always lightened her heart. She waved back.

  “Hey, Persephone,” a girl who’d been in her group called out to her. “Good tour!”

  “Thanks,” she called back. She’d really enjoyed being a tour guide. After Artemis had left, she’d entertained the girls with stories about the teachers at MOA.

  She told them about Mr. Cyclops, who taught Hero-ology and liked to go barefoot. Sometimes kids stole his gigantic sandals and hid them in odd places.

  And when they’d walked past Principal Zeus’s office and glimpsed his assistant, Ms. Hydra, Persephone had explained about her nine heads. How her green head was grumpy, her purple head was impatient, and so on.

  “Tour go okay?” Hades asked as she came up to him.

  Persephone nodded, watching him groom the sand in one of the pits with a wooden rake. “Mm-hm. Artemis had to leave early, so I took over at the end.” She paused. “This week has been crazy. We’ve spent time planning the Games, but we also have to find time to practice for them. We’ve all got a lot of responsibility right now. Especially Artemis. I can tell she’s worried.”

  Hades leaned against the rake. “So is Apollo,” he commented. “He says Artemis may be an expert archer, but other schools have sent their best archers to these Games too. He wants her to win!”

  Since when had the boys started caring so much? Persephone wondered. Not long ago they hadn’t even wanted the girls to have their own Games!

  Getting down on his knees, Hades eyed the surface of the sand critically. Apollo might be anxious for Artemis to win the archery championship, but Hades seemed just as eager for Persephone to win the long jump. He cared about her chances way more than she did. She just wanted to have fun!

  Hades’ long dark hair fell over his face as he smoothed the sand. “This pink sand is so weird,” he said, letting some of it sift through his fingers.

  “So girly, you mean?” Persephone teased. “This is a girls’ Olympics, you know. We can color the sand however we want!” Besides being pink, the sand was also magical. But its magic wouldn’t give immortal jumpers any advantage over mortal jumpers. So they’d decided it was okay to use it despite the “no magic” rule Artemis had made for the Games.

  Hades was grinning. “You’re right,” he agreed. “Pink is good.” When she’d first met him, he’d rarely smiled. He’d been so moody all the time. He still was once in a while, and that appealed to one side of her—a darker side. But her bright side liked seeing him smile like this.

  “Ready to get to work?”

  She nodded. He wanted her to win, and she didn’t want to let him down. Still, it was a lot of pressure.

  “Okay, then,” Hades said. “Let’s get cracking!” He went to stand near the take-off board in front of the pit. “You know the drill,” he said.

  Nodding, Persephone backed up a number of yards to give herself room for a running start. “Get into a rhythm as you approach the board,” he reminded her. “Make your last three steps the fastest.”

  All around her in identical sand pits, other girls were practicing jumps too. Persephone shut them out of her mind, as Hades had coached her to do. He didn’t want her comparing herself to them. He wanted her to concentrate on her jumps alone.

  As she prepared to run, she tried to remember everything he’d taught her. There were four parts to a jump: 1) the approach to the board, 2) the takeoff after your foot hit the board, 3) the flight through the air, and 4) the landing. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and tried to picture herself doing them all perfectly. Then she opened her eyes again.

  Okay. Go! she said under her breath. As she sprinted toward the take-off board, she was conscious of her arms and legs pumping rhythmically. So far, so good. As she hit the board, she kept her head up, looking ahead as Hades had trained her to do. A hard push-off and then she was sailing over the pit, cycling her arms and legs forward.

  Thump! She on her rear in the pink sand. It magically swirled up from the pit high around her. It whirled into the air overhead and quickly formed the numbers fourteen and five. Then it all fell back into the pit again.

  Seeing her score, Hades punched a fist in the air. “Fourteen feet, five inches! Awesome.”

  “Thanks,” said Persephone. But she knew she’d have to hit at least sixteen feet in order to win. And to do that, she needed to land forward instead of backward. Every part of her jump needed to be just right.

  “Try not to tense up as you land,” Hades instructed as she stood and brushed the sand from her chiton. “When your heels hit, your knees need to give a little. That way your hips can move forward.”

  “Okay,” she said. And she would try. She really would. But despite her best efforts, she wasn’t sure she had what i
t took to be a championship jumper. In fact, it was kind of Artemis’s fault that she had to do the long jump at all.

  Artemis had made a rule that each participant in the Games had to enter at least two events—one team and one individual. If not for that rule, Persephone would’ve been happy just to compete as a member of MOA’s cheer team—the Goddessgirl Squad.

  As she left the pit to get ready to practice her jump again, she wondered why Hades had such confidence in her abilities. Did she have more potential than she thought? Or was he only fooling himself?

  3

  Aphrodite

  Thursday, early afternoon.

  WHERE IS EVERYONE? APHRODITE WONDERED. She was sitting alone at the four goddessgirls’ usual table in the cafeteria, waiting for her friends to show up for lunch.

  Suddenly, across from her, Artemis plunked down her lunch tray. It hit the table so hard that Artemis’s silverware bounced up in the air. Her three dogs, who followed her almost everywhere, dove under the table to sniff around for random food crumbs.

  “Everything okay?” Aphrodite asked, taking a sip of nectar.

  “No.” Artemis flopped into her chair. “Hermes’ Delivery Service is behind schedule. So the new targets we ordered and those silly stuffed beanbag animals for the relays still aren’t here yet.”

  Aphrodite jabbed her fork into her nectaroni. She was getting a little tired of Artemis’s attitude. Sure, the girls-only Olympics had been Artemis’s idea. But all the MOA girls had worked hard on them. These Olympic Games belonged to all the girls. And those “silly” beanbag animals—to be handed off in place of batons in the relay races—had been Aphrodite’s idea.

  Besides the relays, the girls at the Academy had voted to include a two-hundred-meter footrace, long-jumping, thumb-wrestling, swimming, archery, and cheer in the Games. Seven events in all. It was a lot for a one-day Olympics, but some of the events would take place at the same time. Cheer was scheduled last.

  The idea to include cheerleading had also been Aphrodite’s. Of course, Artemis hadn’t been thrilled about that, either. She’d only gone along with it because Persephone and Athena had suggested it might get more girls to join in the Games—which it had.

  In fact, the cheer competition was shaping up to be the most popular event of the whole Olympics! And in Aphrodite’s opinion, giving the events creative girly-twists like pink sand (her idea, too) was going to make them that much more fun. But try to convince Artemis of that!

  “Don’t worry so much,” Aphrodite said mildly. “Hermes will come through. There’s still lots of time.”

  Artemis tore off three chunks of her hero sandwich and dropped them under the table for her dogs. “Not really. Just two days.”

  A brief scuffle broke out underneath the table, and one of the dogs knocked against Aphrodite’s legs. “Ye gods,” she said, scooting back her chair. “Couldn’t they learn some table manners?” She didn’t exactly dislike dogs, but they were so clumsy and . . . drooly!

  “Sorry,” said Artemis, hardly paying attention. “Hey,” she said, changing the subject, “how are your footrace practices going?”

  “Okay,” Aphrodite said, just as Persephone and Athena finally showed up. All of them except Persephone were going to be in the two-hundred-meter footrace as one of their individual competitions.

  Aphrodite had wanted to be in the relay race, too, so she could hand off those “silly” stuffed animals. But the relays and cheer were both team events and she didn’t have time to practice with two teams. So she’d decided on doing cheer with her friends.

  “Is Ares a good coach?” Persephone asked, overhearing.

  “Mm-hm. He knows what he’s doing. But he’s a little intense when it comes to sports, especially running,” Aphrodite admitted. Ares, her crush, was the fastest runner at MOA. He’d even won the footrace championship in the boys’ Olympics. Naturally he’d encouraged her to choose racing as her individual event.

  “How about Hades?” she asked Persephone. “Is he a good coach too?”

  Persephone nodded. “But he’s a lot more into the whole competition thing than I am. Still, it’s really nice of him to coach me. Especially since I’m new to jumping.”

  Aphrodite swirled her straw in her nectar. “I know what you mean about the competition thing. It’s nice of the boys to help, but sometimes they push too hard. Maybe it’s just because Ares is the god of war, but lately he’s been treating me like a soldier he’s training for battle!”

  The others all laughed at that, and Aphrodite joined in. Still, she wondered if Persephone worried about letting down Hades as much as she worried about disappointing Ares. She’d like to run faster—as Ares kept urging her. But she hated to break a sweat. As the goddessgirl of beauty, it was so un-her!

  Just then, from the corner of her eye, Aphrodite noticed a beautiful, fair-skinned goddessgirl in a feathered cloak. She had blue eyes and blond-gold hair. Just like Aphrodite. But the most striking thing about her was the fabulous gold necklace she wore, which was studded with dazzling jewels.

  “Wow. Look at her,” she whispered to her friends.

  Artemis glanced over one shoulder. “That’s Freya,” she said, waving to the girl, who waved back. “She’s one of the Norse goddesses. I met her at target shooting practice with her friend Skadi. They’re good—at archery, I mean.”

  “How about her?” Aphrodite asked, nodding toward another goddessgirl who walked by right then. The girl’s red robe sparkled with jewels. A flat-topped hat with beads hanging from its brim partly covered her glossy black hair. “I love her robe, and her hat is fantastic.”

  “Her name’s Mazu,” Persephone told the others. “She was in Medusa and Pandora’s tour group this morning, with another girl called Wen Shi. Pandora told me they’re swimmers from China. And get this: Wen Shi brought five pet baby snakes with her.”

  “Oh!” said Artemis, looking at Persephone. “Wen Shi must have been that girl we saw on the tour this morning. The one who didn’t back away from Medusa’s snaky hair.”

  “Makes sense,” said Aphrodite, grinning.

  As she, Persephone, and Artemis traded more stories about the athletes they’d met, Aphrodite realized that Athena wasn’t saying a word. Her head was bent forward so that her long, wavy brown hair hid most of her face as she quietly ate her bowl of yambrosia stew.

  Was something the matter? Relationship problems, perhaps? Aphrodite had a knack for sniffing out that sort of distress. As the goddessgirl of love, such matters were of deep concern to her!

  Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Athena’s crush, Heracles, for a couple of days. And a quick glance around showed that he wasn’t in the cafeteria. Since he always wore a lion-skin cape, whose jaws fit around his head like a helmet, he was hard to miss!

  Leaning toward Athena, Aphrodite said casually, “I haven’t seen Heracles in a while. What’s up with him?”

  Immediately Athena set down her fork. “He and the rest of the wrestling team went to a meet in North Africa to compete with some giants. He’s not sure they’ll be back in time to see our Games.”

  “Oh, no,” Aphrodite said sympathetically. No wonder Athena seemed sad. “Hey,” she said in an attempt to cheer her up, “Want to go to the Immortal Marketplace with me after lunch? I’m going to look for a cute new running outfit for Saturday.”

  Athena smiled but shook her head. “Can’t. I need to do some practice sprints to prepare for the footrace. And I really should start studying for next week’s Hero-ology quiz.”

  “Okay, but you’re missing out,” Aphrodite said. “Shopping is tons more fun than studying!” It had never made sense to her that Athena—the best student among them—would study for a quiz that was days away.

  On the other hand, maybe if she spent as much time studying as Athena did, she’d make top grades too. Only, shopping was so much more enjoyable than studying, especially when you did it with friends. But when Persephone and Artemis also said they were too busy, Aphrodite decided
to go shopping alone.

  After lunch she grabbed a pair of winged sandals from the big basket beside MOA’s bronze front doors. Slipping off her regular sandals, she parked them by the basket. And as soon as she was outside, she put on the winged ones.

  Instantly the sandals’ straps twined around her ankles and the silver wings at her heels began to flap. Whoosh! The sandals zipped her across the courtyard at ten times normal walking speed. With her feet just inches above the ground, she descended Mount Olympus, skimming past boulders and trees.

  In no time at all she reached the Marketplace, which was halfway between Earth and MOA. After skidding to a stop at the entrance, she untied her sandals. Then she looped the straps over the silver wings to hold them still so she could walk in the sandals instead of fly.

  The market was huge and dazzling, with a high-ceilinged crystal roof. Its various shops, separated by row upon row of elegant columns, sold everything a god or goddess could possibly desire. Persephone’s mom had a flower shop here called Demeter’s Daisies, Daffodils, and Floral Delights.

  And Hera ran a wedding shop called Hera’s Happy Endings. Even though her shop kept her crazy busy, Hera had promised to be at their Games on Saturday to hand out prizes.

  The visitors at MOA had given Aphrodite lots of fashion ideas she was eager to try out, but she didn’t have time to window shop today. She was on a mission. Her goal: to find the cutest running outfit ever!

  After some searching, she found the perfect one at Cynisca’s Spartan Sportswear. A cute, short, sparkly pink chiton that came with a pair of cropped matching leggings. It was mega-dorable!

  On her way out of the Marketplace with her new purchase, Aphrodite passed through an atrium. At its center was a myrrh tree surrounded by a garden full of fragrant flowers.

  “Mew, Mew.”

  Hearing the sad mewling sound, Aphrodite stopped in her tracks, startled.

  “Mew, Mew.” There it was again! It was coming from that garden. Setting her bag down, she searched among the flowers for the source of the sound.