Hi! I should be writing my chapter for a story request but instead I'm writing more of this. Kind of sad but I like doing it. Speaking of requests, if there's anything anyone wants to see in this story just put it in a review or PM me and I will think about putting it in.

Thanks for catching that mistake from my 23rd chapter, HoO Storys. And that review was…well…

Nobody: Percy and Annabeth shadow travel to Goode for the dance and then shadow travel back, using Mrs. O'Leary, that's how she's back again when Laura, Amy, Joey, Mark, and Jack are walking home.

"Jack!" Laura squealed before catapulting herself at Jack. Yeah. That's right. They were still dating. Almost a month later, with no sign of breaking up in sight. And, to make things worse, that meant he was now a part of our group- a permanent fixture, you could say. It was funny- before Percy, it had always been three girls and two guys, and Percy had completed it- Joey and Amy, Percy and Annabeth. Me and Laura. And then Percy left, and that meant there was one more guy needed and Percy was supposed to come back and complete it but Jack had taken his place. Laura and Jack. Not me.

I was pretty much the seventh wheel, because I knew that in a year or two Annabeth and Percy would come back from a summer hand in hand and kissing like Joey and Amy or Jack and Laura. And every feeling for Annabeth had melted after a while. So basically, I was the seventh wheel. It was no secret that Annabeth had gone out on Valentine's Day with Percy and ditched us at the dance, no secret that she'd come back really happy even though she swore nothing had happened.

"Where are we going again?" Amy asked.

"Golden Gate. The ice cream parlor. A restaurant. And hey, Laura?" Joey said. "Jack's not coming with us." Her face fell but he kept talking. "Remember? This is a Remembrance Day." I wasn't sure who came up with it- but it was going to be fun. We- the five of us- were going to hang out in the way we hadn't since Percy's arrival into our lives and visit our old haunts without Percy. The way it used to be, with no Jack, no Percy.

"I have to go," she said, before kissing him. I almost gagged. Maybe it was overdone, but still. Joey and Amy didn't used to give us- me and Laura- this much disgusting PDA. Of course, I'm sure Laura now thought it was really sweet when they kissed since she had her own special someone, but it was still really annoying when the other single person suddenly started kissing some guy that became her boyfriend and was suddenly causing twice as much PDA as Joey and Amy. Not that I was jealous or anything. It wasn't like Laura and I had been dating. We were just friends, we'd both agreed. I had no right to be disappointed.

I was anyway.

Amy shot me a look. She'd been giving me that- the same, same look- every time Jack and Laura kissed in front of me. It was getting really annoying. She wasn't looking at Joey or Annabeth. Always me!

Laura and Jack broke apart and he cheerfully bade us goodbye before we set out for McDonald's, to order chicken nuggets, burgers, fries, the works. And lots of ketchup packets. It was sort of an old tradition, having a picnic of McDonald's in Golden Gate Park, even though you could get McDonald's pretty much anytime, anywhere.

We picked a spot far away from where we'd seen Annabeth and her friends in January, because why would you want to dig up that horrible stuff when it's a day about remembering when everything was perfect?

"Hey," Joey said, "how's Percy doing, anyways?" Annabeth allowed herself a smile, her gray eyes lighting up like stars.

"He's doing good. He's actually getting good grades and he's training." I didn't know what training meant but I chose to let it go, waiting for Annabeth to keep talking. "It's nice to see him actually trying to get everything." None of us knew what that meant, when Percy was with us, he had Annabeth to keep him going. Now she wasn't by his side and we'd known he'd been kicked out and given detentions and things like that.

"What did you think of Mr. Mason?" he'd been very ADHD, our last Greek teacher, and while we'd taken a test on the Gorgons had somehow constructed a bronze airplane and flown it around the room and Annabeth had had this fond smile on her face like she was remembering the same things happening somewhere else.

"That airplane shouldn't have been possible. And where did he get that bronze? And the other stuff. It was like he had just pulled it out of his pocket or something, and, well. He didn't even have pockets, or any sort of tool in sight!" Amy said. She had taken a few Industrial Tech/Woodshop classes but hadn't gone on with it, preferring her music classes instead, even though she wasn't able to play the recorder in band or anything like that- it was a beginner instrument but she'd stuck with it past third grade.

Annabeth, meanwhile, just watched with that smug smile on her face like she knew everything we didn't and she probably did, she knew every single teacher we'd had and it was crazy and really, oddly realistic and so Annabeth.

"It was probably in the desk. I don't know how he managed to put it together and make it fly, though. Reminds me of Hephaestus- the blacksmith god?" Joey still looked confused, and Annabeth rolled her eyes.

"Joey, he's one of the Olympians. He's the god of fire, and blacksmiths, and he got thrown off a cliff by Hera when he was born. You don't remember?" she seemed personally affronted, as if she knew Hephaestus, a mythical god, personally, and I said so.

"I don't know him personally," Annabeth said, sounding offended, "but the stories I could tell…" she muttered under her breath, and all of us looked confused by her words- she didn't know him personally, but she could tell stories. Why was I even considering this? Hephaestus wasn't real. None of the Olympians were, and if Annabeth was a Hellenic Polytheist (a person who believes in Greek mythology and the Greek gods), then it wasn't really my business. I'd always assumed Annabeth was an aethiest, mostly because she'd never mentioned any beliefs or church or mosque or something like that, neither had her family, though they'd always seemed to believe something. Annabeth did know a lot about Greek mythology, so maybe she just remembered a lot of stories about Hephaestus. They were really easily remembered- Semele asking to see Zeus's true form so she burned to ash, Dionysus being sewn into Zeus's thigh to be a makeshift wound after her death. You can't easily forget that kind of story.

"What exactly do you mean?" Amy prompted, and Annabeth looked a little like a deer in headlights. "Do you worship the Greek gods or something? You do know a lot of Greek mythology- you sometimes seem to know more than our teachers, like Mr. and Mr. Stoll." Annabeth smirked.

"Well, yes, I do believe that there is something out there and why not the Greek gods? And Travis and Connor- Mr. and Mr. Stoll- do know less than me, mostly because I taught them, but then they stole my stuff, so I quit tutoring them, but then they put a spider in my cabin, and that freaked all of us out, and then I had to go exact my revenge and basically we have a half-feud but I know more than them. Their stories also aren't always accurate because they turn them into tall tales instead of actual myths, and that's not the myths anymore."

"Okay." Amy said. "So you do or do not worship the Greek gods?" she was Christian, by the way. Not one of the overly psychotic ones (sorry Christians) but she was still Christian even though her dad wasn't for some reason she'd never really explained to us.

Annabeth looked up at the sky and appeared to mouth an apology to the white clouds. "Kind of? I'm not, like, burning incense for them or something but it really kind of depends." Amy appeared satisfied by her answer and the subject was dropped before we finished the picnic and went to the ice cream parlor, because we were fifteen-year-old kids with a sweet tooth in each of us.

Amy got strawberry, Joey and I chocolate (obviously), Laura and Annabeth vanilla. Joey and I complained about Annabeth's and Laura's flavor, or lack thereof, while they defended the bland flavor of ice cream. Amy said nothing at all, she wasn't eating vanilla but strawberry would be the next thing we targeted in our ice cream flavor discrimination. Not that we were biased. It's just- why would you eat strawberry or vanilla when you could eat rocky road or chocolate? The answer is obvious. You shouldn't.

"But it's just, like…sugar flavor." Joey said. "There's, like, no flavor to it at all, but then there's chocolate, and even strawberry is better." Annabeth and Laura rolled their eyes. "What? It's a fact. Strawberry, well, it's okay, chocolate is the best, vanilla is good when you put in the Neapolitan flavor but on its own it just tastes like granulated sugar without the grains."

"How do you even know what granulated sugar tastes like on its own?" Annabeth asked. Joey gaped at her.

"Have you never been a kid that, while your mom isn't looking, takes a spoon of sugar and eats it?" Annabeth's eyes turned stormy and I thought to myself, uh oh. Joey's going to not be happy after this one.

"Joey, I think that you have forgotten that my mother isn't around, and so I have never been a kid that while my mother isn't looking, takes a spoon of sugar. I had Helen and she wasn't exactly a mother."

Joey apologized, but now Annabeth was dwelling on that, so the day had kind of taken a turn for the worse. It was still lighthearted, just a little darker on Annabeth's side. Amy had had the same, though she had never been that affected by the fact that her mother- hadn't her name been Demeter- wasn't at home. She'd seemed to wear it as a badge of honor, the fact that she and her father could get by just as well without a stay-at-home mom, even though most families had two or three kids and the mother at home to care for them. All of us were an only child, it was part of the reason we'd banded together in the first place- it's lonely.

"It's around four," Laura said, checking her watch, "where do you guys think we should go next?" I wondered about this. We'd already been to the park, now we were in the ice cream parlor, and we had about an hour left, and I didn't think any of us really wanted to hang out in an ice cream parlor for the next hour. Annabeth had an expression on her face like she was thinking, but for some reason I doubted she was thinking about what the rest of us were thinking- where to go in the next hour. She was probably still hung up on the Joey's words about her mother, and probably hurt. She'd told me she'd met her mother a few times, and I'd seen her once in the hallway at school, visiting Annabeth, though she'd never really seemed like a motherly figure, she was almost like one of those old maids.

"Maybe just go home," Amy said, "maybe we're trying too hard."

The rest of us agreed.