ATHENA THE BRAIN Read online

  Ignoring her misgivings, she heard herself say, “Well I guess I could at least give it a shot.” Picking up the quill pen, she wrote her name on the sign-up sheet.

  ARE YOU MY ROOMMATE?” A FAMILIAR VOICE asked.

  Athena looked up from the built-in desk in her new dorm room to see Pandora standing in the doorway. Oh, no.

  She’d known she would be sharing the room. One of the closets had already been full of clothes when she’d come upstairs to the dorm after her last class that day. But until this moment she hadn’t known who her roommate would be.

  “Guess so,” Athena said, trying to smile. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Pandora. It was just that she talked too much.

  “Got a lot of homework, huh?” asked Pandora as she tossed her school things onto her bed. Their room was small, with an identical bed, desk, and closet on each side. The bathroom and showers were down the hall.

  Athena nodded. “There should be a law against homework on the first day of school.”

  “Wouldn’t that be cool?” Pandora came closer and craned her neck for a peek. “What are you working on?”

  Stop being so nosy, Athena wanted to say. But instead she replied, “Something for the Invention Fair.”

  “Really? What?”

  Athena sighed. She and Pallas had stayed up late her last night on Earth, and her first day of school had been tiring. “Um, Pandora, I’ve got a lot of work to do, catching up and all, so . . .”

  “Oh, sure, I understand.” Pandora was quiet for about half a second, then she offered, “Need any help?”

  “No, thanks,” Athena answered automatically. She didn’t want anyone to think she couldn’t keep up with her workload. “Don’t you have any homework?”

  “Me? Nope, I finished it in study hall,” said Pandora.

  If a mortal like Pandora can keep up, I should be able to, thought Athena. Too bad she hadn’t taken a study hall instead of one of her classes, though.

  Without asking first, Pandora picked up the stack of sketches Athena had set on the bed and began looking through them. She studied the top one–a drawing of an oval. She turned it upside down and then right side up again. “What’s this?”

  “Those are my invention ideas, for the school contest. I call that one an olive,” said Athena. “It’s a little fruit about the size of the tip of your thumb. I made it to jazz up the celestial salad the lunch ladies make, to add something a little salty and different. I haven’t drawn the tree it grows on yet, but it’ll be evergreen, with pretty silver-green leaves on branches you can weave together to make crowns.”

  “Hmm. I’m sure it’s tasty, but I’m not really a salad person,” said Pandora. She frowned as she went on to the next sketch. “Why did you draw a picture of Poseidon’s new pitchfork?”

  “I didn’t.” Athena moved closer to point out the differences. “This invention’s called a rake, and it has way more prongs than his trident.”

  “But what does it do? Slay Chimeras or calm the Furies?”

  “No,” said Athena, beginning to feel a little embarrassed. “It’s for mortals to use for farming and yard work. I was thinking about all the leaves and hay I saw in the farm fields when I was flying up to Mount Olympus this morning. That’s what gave me the idea. My rake could sweep those up better than any broom.”

  Pandora wrinkled her nose, obviously unimpressed. She probably thought hay rakes were too boring to win.

  Pandora picked up another drawing. “What’s this one?”

  “I call it a ship,” said Athena, crossing her fingers that she would like at least one of her ideas. “It floats in the sea like a papyrus sailboat or a reed raft. Only it’s bigger, so it holds lots of people.”

  Pandora considered it, cocking her head. “I’ll give this one a maybe.”

  Athena nodded, feeling a little let down. She’d thought her inventions were pretty good, but Pandora’s lack of enthusiasm was discouraging.

  Knock, knock.

  “Who is it?” called Pandora. Dropping the sketches on Athena’s bed, she crossed the room to throw open the door. Aphrodite stood just outside in the hall.

  “Where did you come from?” asked Pandora, poking her head out to glance up and down the hallway.

  “Nine doors down,” Aphrodite said as she stepped inside. “Artemis has the room next to mine.”

  “You’re not sharing?” asked Pandora.

  Aphrodite shook her head. “She needed a bed for her dogs, and I needed more closet space. So we each got our own rooms.”

  “What about Persephone?” asked Pandora, pulling her head back in. “Is she on our floor too?”

  Aphrodite smiled at Athena, raising her brows. There was sympathy in her gaze. Pandora’s questions probably got on her nerves too, Athena realized. She smiled back, glad someone else understood. “Persephone is living at home with her mom this year,” Aphrodite told Pandora.

  At the mention of “home,” Athena felt a pang of loneliness even in the midst of the excitement of making new friends.

  “Artemis and I thought you might be feeling a little homesick,” said Aphrodite as if reading her mind. “So we’ve decided to have a ‘Welcome to MOA’ party.”

  Before she could add another word there was a clatter in the hallway, and Artemis rushed in. Her three dogs bounced in behind her, tails wagging. She dropped a bowl of chips on Pandora’s bed, then hurried to open the room’s large window. She didn’t seem to notice when her dogs began gobbling the snacks.

  “Come look!” she shouted. “Someone’s raining all kinds of weird stuff down on Earth. It’s the wildest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  All four girls crowded at the window to gaze outside. A storm of objects that looked suspiciously like those in Athena’s sketches had appeared out of nowhere.

  They whirled high in the air within a tornado for a few seconds. Then they began to fall, one by one. As gravity pulled them toward Earth, lights in villages and cities far below began to flicker on. Voices drifted upward through the clouds, reaching their ears.

  “Ow!”

  “Stop!”

  “Ow! Ow!”

  “Why are the gods angry with us?”

  “What’s going on? Whose voices are those?” asked Athena.

  “Mortals,” said Aphrodite. “They’re complaining so loudly, we can hear it all the way up here.”

  “Whoa! Somebody at the academy is going to be in trouble for this prank,” said Artemis.

  Pandora’s eyes got big, and she turned to Athena. “When you were inventing stuff and making your sketches, did you block your brainstorming?”

  Athena shook her head. Block her brainstorming? What was that supposed to mean? “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” she stammered. “I mean, I don’t know how.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Aphrodite, looking worried. “Where are these sketches?”

  Athena pointed toward the stack on her bed.

  Artemis had already discovered them and was flipping through them. “Doggone! These look exactly like the objects in the storm.”

  “You should never make sketches without bespelling them to stay put on the page first,” Aphrodite cautioned Athena.

  “WHO’S DOING ALL THIS BRAINSTORMING?” a voice boomed from the courtyard below.

  “Zeus is out there!” whispered Pandora, her eyes wide. At the mention of the principal’s name, Artemis’s dogs glanced up with interest for a second, but then went back to chomping snacks.

  Athena peeked outside. Zeus was standing in the courtyard, with his fists at his hips. He did not look happy.

  Nervously, she waved a hand to get his attention. “Umm . . . Dad, er, Principal Zeus! I think I did it. I’m sorry!”

  “Theeny? Is that you?” roared Zeus, looking up at her in outrage. “You can’t go around whipping up a storm of ideas willy-nilly! Don’t you know that everything a goddessgirl does affects mortals down there on Earth? There are rules, for godness’ sake!”

  His loud voice bounced off the walls,
echoing around the courtyard and throughout the school.

  “But I didn’t know,” Athena called back.

  “It’s all in the Goddessgirl Guide. You should have memorized all two thousand and one rules by now,” he called back.

  “But I just got here today,” Athena protested. “I haven’t had time–”

  “NO EXCUSES!” Zeus boomed, so loud this time that the mirror rattled on the wall. Muttering to himself, he stomped back inside the academy.

  Just then Athena noticed that there were tons of students in the courtyard. Even more hung out of the doors and windows of the school building, craning to listen. They’d heard everything. How embarrassing! She slid down the wall to sit on the floor below the window. “I stink at being a goddessgirl,” she moaned.

  “Don’t worry,” said Artemis, trying to cheer her up. “Zeus’s bark is worse than his bite. He’s always giving me demerits when my hounds get too rambunctious, but then he forgets all about it.” She knelt down and gave her three dogs a group hug. “Doesn’t he, guys?”

  “Really?” Athena asked hopefully.

  When the others nodded, she felt a little better. After Artemis went for a fresh bowl of chips and ambrosia dip, the four girls sat two on a bed, opened bottles of nectar, and ate snacks.

  “I’m sure everything seems hard now, but you’ll pick it up in no time,” Aphrodite assured Athena.

  “My first semester here at the academy was a fiasco,” said Artemis, tossing chips to her hounds one by one. “I couldn’t get the hang of Spell-ology for the longest time. I kept sneezing and turning everyone into dogs. Or fleas.”

  “Remember what I did back in fifth grade?” said Pandora, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, yeah! Who could forget?” said Aphrodite.

  “What?” asked Athena.

  “I accidentally opened a box of disasters in Mr. Epimetheus’s class, and most of them escaped to Earth,” Pandora admitted. “I thought Zeus was going to send me back home for sure. Or worse. But he didn’t.”

  If Pandora hadn’t gotten expelled for such a big mistake, surely Zeus wouldn’t expel her for her brainstorming blunder, thought Athena. Although she missed Pallas, she didn’t want to be banished to Triton Junior High again.

  She was enjoying her new friends and her new classes here at MOA too much. At the same time she felt a little guilty for having so much fun. But Pallas would be making new friends too. She’d understand. Wouldn’t she?

  Hours later, after Aphrodite and Artemis returned to their rooms and Pandora had gone to sleep, Athena stared tiredly at all the homework she still had to do. She would’ve given up on the Invention Fair altogether, but now she felt like she owed the mortals for what she’d accidentally done to them that afternoon.

  No matter what the other girls said, she still thought she stunk at being a goddessgirl–at least so far. Maybe things would go better tomorrow.

  She sat at her desk and got to work.

  THE NEXT MORNING ATHENA OVERSLEPT. Not a good start to her second day. Then, while dashing to class, she tripped over something on the stairs and fell, skinning her knee. She picked up the object to examine it, then tucked it in her bag. It was a little ship–one of the inventions that had magically appeared when she’d brainstormed yesterday. Most of them had fallen to Earth, but this one apparently hadn’t made it that far.

  Mr. Cyclops gave her the stink-eye when she slipped into Hero-ology class late, but at least he didn’t scold her in front of everyone. For some reason, all the desks had been pushed against the walls on two sides of the room today. A long table stood in the middle of the floor, and a three-dimensional map covered its entire top. The teacher and students were all standing around it.

  “You’ll each find your hero somewhere on this map,” Mr. Cyclops was saying. He’d collected the little statues yesterday at the end of class, explaining that they were never to leave the room.

  When Athena got close enough, she saw that the huge map was very realistic. There were roads, valleys, villages, and castles with moats around them. The tallest mountain stood nearly a foot high, and strange, scaly beasts peeked from the seas and oceans.

  “What did I miss?” Athena whispered to Aphrodite.

  “We’re beginning our quests,” Aphrodite whispered back. “I made Paris fall in love with a pretty mortal named Helen. He just took her to his fortress in Troy to show her around. Isn’t that romantic?” She sighed blissfully.

  “Smooth move, Bubbles,” Medusa said sarcastically. “In case you hadn’t noticed, someone else was already in love with Helen. My hero–King Menelaus from Sparta.”

  “He was?” Aphrodite looked sweetly mystified. “Oops.”

  Medusa called Mr. Cyclops over to complain. His eye studied the map carefully, but he didn’t seem mad about what had happened. Instead he said, “This is somewhat irregular, Aphrodite, but I like that you were able to set up roadblocks to success for two heroes at the same time.”

  Anyone else would have gotten in trouble for making such a mistake, thought Athena. But Aphrodite was so glamorous and nice, you just had to excuse her, no matter what she did. Unless, of course, you were Medusa, who was now looking rather grumpy.

  “Remember, you’ll all be graded on the creativity of the quests you design, and also on your ability to get your heroes out of trouble,” Mr. Cyclops told the class. “So don’t make things too easy on your heroes. They must be tested in ways that prove they’re heroic. Otherwise they’d just be ordinary mortals.”

  Athena thought about that as she searched for her Odysseus figure. Where in the world had Mr. Cyclops put him? She finally found him standing on an island called Ithaca. It was in the Ionian Sea, west of Greece. She picked him up by the head, using two fingers.

  Aphrodite gasped. “Don’t hold him like that. You’re probably giving him a horrible headache.”

  “Oh! Sorry,” said Athena. Remembering what Zeus had said about how everything goddessgirls did had an effect on mortals, she carefully set Odysseus in her palm instead.

  “Hmm. Where should you go, little hero?” she wondered. Considering the map, she stifled a yawn. She’d fallen asleep last night in the middle of her reading assignment, but the last thing she’d read was that a quest should involve excitement, action, and travel.

  The map was like a game board, she realized as she studied it. Each hero would be working toward a goal, but also trying to outdo the others. And the godboys and goddessgirls who manipulated the figures would each be graded on how well their hero succeeded. Sort of like a chess game, only more interesting–and with tangible results.

  Athena yawned again. She was so tired it was hard to think. Resting her elbows on the edge of the map, she put her chin in her empty hand, just for a minute.

  “Careful–you’ll drown him!” someone shouted a while later.

  “What?” Athena awoke with a start and looked around in surprise. Her head had been lying on her forearms, which were folded on the edge of the map. She’d been sleeping standing up!

  “Fish him out!” Mr. Cyclops urged. “Hurry!” The whole class was staring at her in horror.

  Athena looked down at the map just in time to see Odysseus sink into the Mediterranean Sea. She must’ve dropped him when she fell asleep!

  “This is real water?” She reached for him, grabbing his foot in the nick of time. Something under the water’s surface nibbled at her finger. She bent to look closer. A grinning sea monster about ten inches long splashed out and licked her nose.

  “Ew!” she said, jerking back. Not only were the seas and oceans real, the beasts that lurked in them were too!

  Holding Odysseus in one fist, Athena quickly grabbed the bag at her feet with her other hand. After digging around in it a minute, she pulled out the little ship she’d found on the stairs on the way to class.

  “Here you go,” she said, plopping it into the Mediterranean Sea and setting Odysseus inside it. “This ship is just the thing to get you where you’re going. Once I decide whe
re that is.”

  “Good save,” murmured Aphrodite.

  “Thanks,” she said. “But I almost drowned poor Odysseus. What a terrible thing to do to a poor, unsuspecting mortal!”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get better at this stuff after a while,” said Aphrodite.

  But what if I don’t? worried Athena. What if I make a mistake and do something like that to another mortal someday? Like Pallas, for instance. That would be awful!

  Athena was beginning to think supernatural powers were nothing but a big pain. Every little mistake the gods and goddesses made could cause trouble. And the whole world was watching their every move.

  So was Mr. Cyclops. Although he only had one eye, it seemed to notice everything.

  “You’d better get going,” Medusa told her haughtily. “King Menelaus just commanded Odysseus to bring Helen back from Troy.”

  “You–he can’t do that,” Athena protested.

  Aphrodite gently elbowed her. “Yes, she can,” she warned.

  “But why?”

  “Because my king is your hero’s boss, that’s why,” Medusa informed her snidely. “Didn’t you do our reading assignment?”

  “Must have missed that part,” said Athena. There was no way she was going to admit to Medusa that she’d fallen asleep in the middle of reading her textscroll last night.

  “You’re only doing this to Athena to spite me, aren’t you?” Aphrodite said to Medusa.

  Medusa shrugged. “So? If Athena wants a good grade, her hero has to follow my orders.”

  With a huge sigh, Athena turned toward the map again. “Okay. I’m going, I’m going.” With one fingertip, she steered Odysseus’s ship through the Mediterranean Sea toward Troy. How was she going to get Helen away from Paris, as Medusa had ordered, without making Aphrodite mad?

  Meanwhile Poseidon, who must have overheard them, was busy helping his hero build walls around Troy to keep Odysseus out.

  Every time Athena tried to set Odysseus’s ship on an even course, Poseidon blew great puffs of air along the water’s surface, rocking the ship and pushing it backward.