ANNABETH

Annabeth is sitting on her bed, having just returned from her 5 o'clock Philosophy and Gender class, when Piper comes in, looking annoyed and half frozen.

"Freaking idiot," she mutters as she adjusts the strap of her camisole before throwing her backpack on the ground and throwing herself on the bed.

"Where's your shirt?" is all Annabeth can come up with to say.

"Reyna," is how Piper responds, and Annabeth's not sure what to make of it.

"She took your shirt?" Annabeth asks. Then it dawns on her. "Oh, god, you two did the high school romance novel of studying, didn't you?"

"If you mean we brought out our books, got bored with the reading five minutes in, and then fucked with the lights on, then, yes, that's what happened."

Annabeth chuckles and goes back to her Spanish work. "Good to know," she says. "Next time try to pick up your shirt, okay?"

"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on," grumbles Piper. "Also, can you throw me my backpack?"

Annabeth leans over in her bed, refusing to touch the ground because, yeah, too much effort, and manages to fling the backpack at Piper.

"You couldn't have just handed it to me?" Piper asks, giving her a look of disbelief.

"You couldn't have just gotten it yourself?" Annabeth replies, and Piper rolls her eyes and pulls out her work.

"You're annoying sometimes, you know that…" But Annabeth's got a feeling that maybe, just maybe, Piper doesn't believe it, because of the smile on her face.

The days continue as the week fades into the weekend, Piper deciding to go out that Friday night ("Are you going to invite Reyna?" "Fuck, no, I'm finding someone else to sleep with!" "Don't bring them back here unless you text me first! I'm skyping my friend Clarisse tonight." "We'll go back to their place, don't you worry.") on her own, promising to text Annabeth when she's heading home.

The next morning, Annabeth wakes up at nine to see Piper conked out in her bed in a pair of dark grey jeans, a shirt she hadn't been wearing the night before, and her leather vest. She laughs as she makes her way into the bathroom, filling a cup of water for Piper after she finishes up her shower.

When she hears muttered complaining a little while later and, out of the corner of her eye, sees one of Piper's black sneakers go flying across the room, she looks up from her copy of Gilgamesh. "Having trouble?" she asks.

"Sneakers," Piper says into her pillow, her comments muffled. "Won't come off."

Annabeth just laughs again, going back to her book. After the second shoe goes careening off of their mini fridge, Piper falls asleep again and stays asleep until eleven.

Annabeth goes to lunch on her own when she realizes she forgot to eat breakfast other than a couple of crackers, getting a table near a window so she can people watch out the window, and slowly eating a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. And then, ringing loudly through the mostly-empty dining area at 11 in the morning on a Saturday, her text tone goes off. She pulls out her phone, and it's Piper, asking Annabeth to pick up "some sort of carbohydrate" for her. Annabeth replies to tell her she'll try and smuggle something substantial out in a napkin, and manages to slip out past the card swiper with a wave and a complex maneuver of moving the sandwich from hand to hand.

She gets into her dorm to see Piper face down in her bed still. On first glance, she assumes Piper fell back to sleep, but when Piper's hand limply sticks out from the comforter and she mumbles, "Food?" kind of pathetically, Annabeth laughs and hands it to her.

"Party a little too hard last night, Piper?" Annabeth asks. "Oh, and I got both of us those M&M bars you like."

"You are an angel," Piper mumbles. When she sits up, Annabeth has to hold back a horrified giggle of surprise. Piper's hair is pulled all the way over to one side, the dark blue poking out of one part, but the undercut not doing what it was supposed to. Dark black mascara was smudged with bright blue eye shadow to make her look like she'd been hit, and whatever she'd been wearing the night before was replaced with a shirt that said, "Coronade Family Reunion 2009." Piper looks up at her, studying Annabeth's expression. "What?"

"I'm about eighty percent sure you got in a fight with a family reunion in 2009 last night," Annabeth says delicately. "Just go look in the mirror."

"Why?"

"Just do it. I don't want to be responsible for your reactions."

Piper, surprisingly, just laughs at herself when she looks in the mirror. "Oh, Annabeth," she says, waving a hand. "This is absolutely nothing. Now where's that M&M bar?"

Annabeth stares at her. "What did you do last night?"

"Made out with three different guys," Piper begins, "drank a bottle of red wine that some very charming young lady offered me – turns out the girl who's in my non-honors cool kid English class is 21 and extremely willing to break the law when I smile at her – and then gave up on the guys and made out with her until I got bored and came home."

Annabeth nods. "And the messed up hair and different shirt?" she asks, looking down at Piper's bizarre outfit.

"Okay, so guy number two and I might have gotten a little further than making out," Piper says, shrugging. "He started feeling me up and I told him he had to trade shirts with me if he wanted anything. And he did, but then I just got to point out the jackass in the blue sparkly tank top to everyone, so, really, I won."

Annabeth will never understand this girl. "So you never went home with anyone?"

Piper shakes her head. "Nah. I was home around one thirty. The party was winding down around one, so I browsed the town for a little while to see what was going on in the place, but it's the middle of nowhere, so…Nope."

Annabeth laughs. "And you're not hung over or anything?"

Piper goes to the mini fridge and pulls out a water bottle, and shrugs as she chugs it. "I mean, I've felt better," she says, "and red wine does weird shit to your hydration, but it's not too bad. I take it you don't drink much."

Annabeth shakes her head. "Didn't really have much time in high school," she says with a shrug. "And I lived in a boarding situation for the second half of high school so it's not like we were too good at smuggling things."

To Annabeth's surprise, Piper snorts. "Oh, baby," she says with a smile, "oh, little angel. You obviously were one of the good kids in high school. I've been to a lot of boarding schools and, believe me, they tend to be some of the best with alcohol smuggling skills."

There was little Annabeth could say in response to that – when she was at Vanden, she was a goody-goody. It was before then that she was a bad kid. Annabeth simply shrugs in response and goes back to her bed, sitting down gently and picking up her book.

"You know what we should do tonight?" says Piper, mouth full of grilled cheese. "We should get drunk and watch movies and have the stupid girl talk that I was talking about the other day. Do you want to?"

Annabeth shrugs. "I mean, I would kind of feel bad drinking all your alcohol. I don't want to cramp your style."

Piper waves her hand away. "Style, schmyle. Don't worry about that – or the alcohol. Believe me, it's no problem."

"Are you sure?"

Piper sighs. "Look, have you taken a look at my last name?" Annabeth nods. "Well, you'll recognize that it's very much like a certain Tristan McLean. Money's no problem, Annabeth, because his assistant funnels some money into my account to make sure I don't starve or run out of clothes, but it's always got at least fifty dollars in there unless I get stupid with it."

The realization hits Annabeth as she looks over at the pictures posted on Piper's bulletin board. There weren't many of him, but there were enough to make an impact, and suddenly Annabeth gets it. "You're his kid?" Annabeth asks.

Piper nods. "The only spawn of an actor who managed to make it big even with a two year old throwing temper tantrums on set constantly. I got a reputation for being a horror show on sets because I was, you know, two and no one was paying attention to me. So I just sort of stopped associating with him."

"You stopped associating with your dad?" Annabeth asks. "How does that even work?"

"I mean, we're still family," says Piper with a shrug, "but he says I look more like my mom, which I will never know about because she disappeared after I was born, so I can pass for not being his kid. Plus," she says, gesturing to herself, "he looks, like, whiter than I am. People don't think he looks Native American enough to be my dad."

"But he is your dad," says Annabeth. "People don't believe you?"

Piper grabs the M&M bar off of the mini fridge. "Sometimes they don't. Usually what they don't believe is that he's not European.."

"What, like he just tans easily?" Annabeth says. "Wow, some people are idiots."

"You're telling me," laughs Piper. "Anyway, he doesn't know much about my mom, but what I figure is that she had to be Native American too."

Annabeth nods, not particularly equipped to deal with the conversation, as she was a blonde white chick. "That sounds like it sucks," she says. And just like that, Piper turns off the conversation and there's nothing more to be said about it.

"Yeah, whatever. I'll call Catrina to pick me up something for us tonight. Do you have any preferences?"

"Um," Annabeth begins. "I mean, I don't like grape flavored things. Or banana."

"Good to know," says Piper, and she pulls out her phone, says some stuff to that Catrina girl that Annabeth hardly recognizes, and then hangs up with a "later, babe."

"How do you do that?" Annabeth can't help but ask Piper as she chucks herself onto her bed and picks up her laptop.

"Do what?"

"Talk to people like that," says Annabeth. "I mean, I can barely talk to people in class. Or people at drive thrus."

Piper shrugs. "Guess I must have kissed the metaphorical Blarney stone as a kid."

There's a bit of silence as Piper appears to putter around on some social media site and Annabeth begins to doze off while reading an explanation of how to write in APA format for her Honors English class, until Piper closes her laptop closed with a loud clack and stands up. "Well, I'm going to go shower," she announces, and puts her laptop on the bed. "You don't have too much fun, Annabeth, while I'm gone."

As Piper saunters out of the room, doubles back for her towel and shower caddy, and saunters out of the room again, Annabeth begins to wonder just which idiot power decided on pairing them together and if, maybe, Piper McLean was the best thing to happen to her since Mr. Brunner, her guidance counselor at Vanden.

PIPER

Annabeth Chase was a giggly, cuddly drunk, it turns out.

She and Piper had attempted to do the girl talk thing, but, as luck would have it, neither of them were particularly good at it, nor were they interested. So, instead, the conversation shifted to a rousing game of "never have I ever."

Annabeth laughs into her screwdriver. "Never have I ever slept with more than one person," she chokes out between giggles.

"Oh, fuck you, Annabeth," Piper replies. "Fine. Never have I ever not had sex with a girl."

Annabeth stares at her, her expression a little unfocused through the haze of vodka. "God, you with your double negatives, Piper, control yourself!"

"You control yourself and answer the question," Piper replies.

"I have not," says Annabeth, "I drink, right?"

Piper nods. "And now you ask me something again."

"I think I have that part down," says Annabeth, the sarcasm make Piper laugh so hard she snorts. "Never have I ever had sex with someone I just met!"

"Oh, come on," Piper says, taking a sip. "That's not fair. You're targeting me!"

"You're targeting me!"

"That's because there's only the two of us in this room."

For some reason, that's the funniest thing Annabeth's ever heard, and she giggles for a few minutes. "How much vodka is in here?" she asks.

Piper shrugs her shoulders. "I think it's mostly vodka with a little orange juice. I don't know. I promise I'll hold your hair back if you puke."

"I haven't puked since ninth grade," says Annabeth, quite solemnly. "I refuse to puke." She sets her drink down on her table and pulls two waters out of the fridge, and with the coordination of a much more sober girl, tosses one with perfect aim over to Piper. "Catch, roomie!" she says.

Piper, rarely able to catch a beach ball with a thirty second notice, gets pegged in the forehead with a bottle of Aquafina and keels over to the side, falling on top of her pillow. She giggles for a few seconds into the pillow, her drink still firmly in her hand. "Ouch," she chuckles. "That better not bruise or I'll have to tell the RA that you are abusing me."

"Oh, please," says Annabeth. "You'll be fine."

Then there's a knock on the door.

"Well speak of the devil," Annabeth says. "Which one of us drank less?"

"Doesn't matter," says Piper quietly. "Just don't talk so they don't know we're in here."

"I'm going to answer the door," says Annabeth primly, and Piper's going to kill her. "It's only polite."

With an eye roll, Piper pushes the handle of Smirnoff under her bed and hides it with her pillow.

Annabeth smoothes her hair and opens the door to an RA who's about to knock again and hits her square in the nose.

"Ow," says Annabeth. "Hi, what's up."

"I was walking along this floor," says the RA, a guy in his early twenties with a goatee and an expression like he'd rather be anywhere else, "and I heard a lot of noise from this room. I want to inform you that you need to keep it down, ladies."

"Alright," says Annabeth. "If that's all –"

He peers around her into the room, getting a good look at Piper. "She alright?" he asks, nodding to where Piper looks like she fell asleep. Piper stays still, and, through a tiny slit in her vision, she can see Annabeth turn to her.

"Oh," says Annabeth, and Piper's praying she won't screw it up, "we were watching a movie and she, um, fell asleep. She's fine."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure!"

The guy nods to her and walks away without another word. Piper sits up as Annabeth closes the door and shoots her a glare. "You really don't know how to deal with people, do you?" Piper asks. "You don't open the door for the RA, you idiot. You pretend you didn't hear them, and then if they keep knocking you make it look like you were asleep so they leave you alone and they don't bother you anymore."

"But that's rude!"

Piper does a full body involved eye roll and drops herself back onto her pillow. "God, you're even more of a goody-goody when you're drunk. You're like the opposite of normal people."

"I'm usually the opposite of most things," is what she thinks makes sense to reply, and she gets a stack of movies from her closet and drops it in front of Piper. "All that talk about movies made me wanna watch a movie. Let's watch a movie."

"I don't want to watch a movie."

Annabeth turns to her and gives her such a petulant pout that Piper has to hold back a laugh. "Then you can sit there like a pathetic lump on a log and not have any fun while you suck the fun out of everything, you fun sucker." She then puts on a movie, throws herself into her bed with her cup in her hands, and dozes off before Hercules can even get to Philoctetes.

"Weirdo," Piper grumbles. The movie's caught her eye, though, so she pulls out her phone and toys with the idea of texting Reyna. Her curiosity about what the other girl was doing on a Saturday night is too much to avoid, so she types out whatever message comes to mind first and hits send. There's no response for a while, until Piper gets a "Just got in from a party with the lacrosse girls. What's up?" Piper hates how she uses perfect grammar and punctuation. Even in texts. Like, who does Reyna think she is? Piper nods at her skills at flirting as she types back "nuthin just watchin a movie" because of course Reyna wouldn't text with bad spelling. Unfortunately, Reyna just replies with, "I'm heading to bed. See you Monday in class!" effectively nipping Piper's goal of bothering Reyna all night.

Piper grumbles a little bit about hating school, and, after the movie ends and she still can't sleep, she gets up, turns on a desk lamp, and gets to work on the homework she's been neglecting all weekend. Annabeth's out like a light, so the likelihood that Piper will wake her is slim to none. Piper glances over at her roommate and can't help but laugh a little at the fact that, for once, she didn't wait until the light was off and Piper couldn't see to pull out her little stuffed animal before she went to bed. Not that Piper cared – she still kept the pillow made out of her baby blanket – but it was strange how much Annabeth seemed to try and hide it.

She seems to hide a lot.

Piper shakes off the odd feeling and gets to her French homework. She'd ask about it the next morning.