Annabeth hums to herself as she sticks her plastic fork into her fruit-bowl and pops a square of watermelon into her mouth.
It's a couple minutes after nine on a Tuesday night and the last rays of sunshine have already faded from the September sky. The cafeteria is dimly lit, and the young daughter of Athena is one of the last students at University of Manhattan Boarding School grabbing a snack before nine-thirty curfew.
Annabeth nibbles on a strawberry as she listens to the running of faucets and the clanking of dishes and silverware, the cafeteria workers cleaning up after another school day. Jazz music is trickling over the speakers, something that the other teenagers might not like, but Annabeth thinks is just fine.
One of the workers, a man in his early forties, sweeps by with a broom. He stops a couple tables away from her and looks up at the clock on the wall, discreetly inclining that Annabeth should skedaddle out of there before they have to kick her out. It is then that Annabeth realizes she is the last person left. She starts packing up her things, knowing that it's time to head back to her dorm to join her roommates.
She still has some homework to get done - five chapters of The Scarlet Letter, plus annotating for an enriched understanding and to react to the text, blah blah blah - and yet she doesn't feel the least bit stressed. Compared to what she's been through in the past month, getting an A in her AP English class seems like an incredibly, almost laughably minor thing.
For the first time in years, Annabeth feels at peace. Content. Secure. She feels like she's finally established something permanent, something she thought could never exist after the way people had played with and stamped on her heart, coming and going in and out of her life like they ran it. Who did they think they were?
Then she met that darn Seaweed Brain, and things started looking a little brighter. The grass seemed a little greener, the flowers smelled a bit richer, promises were dutifully kept and precious memories weren't carelessly forgotten. Even if she didn't have a place to call home, she had a place to land. And that was worth everything.
Later that night, while all Annabeth's roommates are soundly asleep, she is sitting up in her bed with the laptop that the inventor Daedalus had so graciously given her balancing on her lap. It's almost one in the morning, far too late to be up on a school night, but Annabeth once again got distracted with looking at Daedalus's inventions. Even if most of them seemed too complex and technologically advanced to come to life, Annabeth still found it interesting to study them.
There's one more thing to do before she goes to bed: check her e-mail.
You got mail, says the mechanical voice over the laptop speakers when Annabeth signs into her account and clicks on her inbox, and she can't suppress the grin that spreads across her face or ignore the way her heart beat gets faster when she sees who it's from.
Can't wait to see you on Friday :)
Love,
Seaweed Brain
It's so simple, yet so wonderful at the same time.