Disclaimer: Percy Jackson and the Olympians is owned by Rick Riordan, not me.
Zoe lay flat on her back in her garden, tracing the glittering body of her namesake with her hand. Her fingers drew shapes in the air: a tall girl, a circlet and the bow and arrow that were always present on her shoulder.
The stars glowed brightly above her and for a second, Zoe thought that the girl among them was smiling down at her. She dismissed it as the work of her overactive imagination and too much Coca-Cola with dinner.
As she took another sip from the fourth can of Coca-Cola she had managed to slip out without drawing her mother's attention, she thought about the furor the innocently twinkling lights had started, years before she was born.
At first, there had been several theories as to why the stars had re-arranged themselves in such a distinct pattern. Religious institutions cried it was the work of God, feminists insisted it was a Divine Sign, chauvinists used it to claim superiority over womankind, science believed it to be the result of a series of complex phenomena that had occurred in outer space. A con man in Texas managed to convince over a hundred young girls that they too could be among the stars for a fee. His scam was exposed when an almost 16 year old girl phoned the police, saying that she too had been approached by him while camping with her sisters. Later that week, policemen raided his house but were unable to find him. As Officer Ted Smith put it, 'The house was deserted apart from a wild animal in the basement. However it ran away before we could identify and hand it over to the local zoo authorities. Search parties with qualified experts have been combing the area with no success since then.'
For some strange reason, every girl who had fallen for his trick spent the rest of her life with stale air coming out of her ears at regular intervals, lending a whole new meaning to the term 'airhead'. Zoe remembered seeing a show on TV in which a group of scientists claimed that they would find the cause. However, a month later the 80 year old sponsor suffered a heart attack and died, leaving them with no funds for their project.
Zoe's mother was an eminent astronomer and a professor at one of the finest universities in the world, where she taught students to see the stars and unravel mysteries of the universe by night. Her fame was mainly due to her explanation of the new constellation that had seemingly popped up overnight, confusing star-gazers world over.
She was the one who published the widely accepted theory that perhaps the constellation had been there all along and modern astronomers had simply missed it. The almost absurd theory gained great weight when all older pictures of the sky, dating as far back as the Greeks, showed the stars exactly as they were positioned in the sky, complete with the 'new' constellation. Religion was happy about science's slip up and science was happy to have a new area of study. Women and men continued to argue about the different interpretations that could be heaped upon it.
The constellation had been named Zoe Nightshade, after an old Greek text unearthed by an archaeologist in his own garden in San Francisco, leading to a new debate over whether Columbus truly was the first visitor to the Americas.
Zoe continued to observe Zoe Nightshade, making her way across the sky. She noticed that the moon was glowing near the constellation, as if afraid to move away. A shooting star streaked through the sky in a dazzling burst of silver light. Zoe closed her eyes and made a wish.
She had loved the glittering bow slung casually over Zoe Nightshade's shoulder since she was a little girl. Zoe wished that she could hold it for just a single moment, feel the sharp tip of the arrow and weight of the bow in her hands.
She reopened her eyes and saw that Zoe Nightshade was almost beaming now.
Suddenly, her view of the sky was obscured by a small girl. She did not cover the sky with her silhouette, instead she made it fade out of view as an original casts a weak imitation out of the viewer's mind. The moon literally paled in comparison and the stars seemed to shift in the night sky to better illuminate her slim frame.
Zoe inhaled sharply and her nostrils were assailed by scents that most humans had almost forgotten: pure snow, a wild animal's fur and the elusive scent that clings to pinecones long after they are removed from their forests.
She opened a small black bag that she carried on her shoulder. From it, she retrieved a package and held it out. Zoe reached for it with trembling hands and noticed that the girl's fingers were freezing cold, though not unpleasantly so.
Then, without saying another word, she turned and walked away into the moonlight.
Zoe looked down at her lap. She now had a silver bow and quiver full of arrows in her hands.
"I never realised just how inaccurate the commercial version of Santa Claus was. How could you, Coca-Cola?"