BLAH!

Hello, my people. How are you today?

SCHOOL IS OVER! YES!

And guess who was emotionally broken inside when they found the average on their report card! ME!

And guess who finally got over it! NOT ME!

And guess who's already got thirty-three of the one hundred eighteen elements of the periodic table memorized... in SONG!

ME! (I seriously need to get a life.)

Disclaimer: Just remember, I do not own this!

Piper

Piper woke up in her bed at the Aphrodite cabin the next Saturday. So much had changed in so little days. First finding out she was a demigod, then her mom being the goddess of beauty, for god… gods… sake…

Piper got out of bed. No one was in the cabin—they probably all left for their free weekend, which had no lessons scheduled throughout the entire two days. She began to walk toward the small washroom to brush her teeth when she tripped over somebody, falling forward on her hands.

"Oh my gods, I'm sorry!" the girl cried out, helping Piper up. "So sorry!"

"No problem," said Piper, getting to her feet. She glanced at her, then back at the ground. "I hope this isn't a personal question I'm asking right now, but what were you doing on the floor?"

"Cleaning," the girl said simply, holding up a bucket full of cold water with suds and a sponge.

"I thought the harpies cleaned everything," replied Piper.

"Not inside the cabins," said the girl. "Drew makes us do all the work, seeing how she got the role of camp counsellor after Silena died."

"That's horrible," said Piper. "But she doesn't look as if she knows what a sword even is, much less hold one. Why don't you guys just tell her to do her own share of the work? Does she, like, have a torture chamber somewhere? Or a hidden pet dragon she feeds disobedient children to?"

The girl laughed. "No, nothing like that," she said, drying her wet hands on her jeans. "She's got charmspeak. She'll just force you to wear"—here she lowered her voice ominously—"the shoes of shame."

"The shoes of—what?" asked Piper. The girl pointed up at the wall where, standing on a wooden pedestal, sat a pair of matching black shoes.

Piper waited an explication on why they were so horrible. When she didn't get one, she asked, "What's so bad about them? Are they, like, enchanted or something?"

"Enchanted so that you can never take them off!" the girl wailed. "They're horrible! You see the colour—the shape of it? Whoever wears them is shamed for life!"

Piper blinked. "I really hope being related to you doesn't come back to haunt me when I'm older," she decided.

"The name's Lacy, by the way," the girl said casually, dropping her spontaneous horrified disaster tantrum. She stuck out her relatively dry hand to shake.

"Lacy. Nice to meet you." Piper thought she remembered the name. "Will mentioned you," she recalled. "Using you as an example of why not every child of Aphrodite is a mean and sassy brat."

"Oh," said Lacy dumbly. "Thanks? …I guess."

"What are you two doing?" Drew demanded, poking her head in from the doorway. "Lacy, keep scrubbing!"

Lacy froze at her voice, but Piper took this as an opportunity to make fun of Drew and replied with a soldier's salute, "Yessir, reporting for duty!"

Drew rolled her eyes and disappeared outside again. Lacy stopped swaying and faced Piper.

"Wow," she said. "You're lucky she didn't say 'Lacy and Piper, keep scrubbing'. If she did, this cabin would be the sparkliest of them all." She sighed and dipped her sponge in the bucket again, crawling down to her hands and knees.

"Here, let me help," said Piper, dipping her hand into the (freezing) water and pulling out a second sponge.

"Thanks, but you don't have to," said Lacy.

"Just let me help you," said Piper. "Relax."

Lacy laughed. She dropped her sponge and laid down on the wet floor, stretching her limbs out wide for no apparent reason.

"Relax…" she repeated.

"Not like that!" Piper laughed, throwing Lacy's sponge onto her face. Lacy lifted her head and blinked twice, the sponge rolling off.

"Ha ha," she said, and picked up her fallen sponge again. Soapsuds were stuck to the back of her hair.

Even when they finished wiping up the floor they stayed in the cabin and chatted on their beds, Piper mostly just asking lots of questions that led up to conversations. Piper once asked what kids of Aphrodite usually did, and Lacy replied that they were usually mean popular kids, and for the next hour they talked about bullies at their other schools.

"I go to a school in New York," Lacy said. "But even there I can't seem to get away from Drew. She goes there too."

"Ugh," said Piper.

"You can believe it," said Lacy. "But at least there I don't have to follow her every order." She paused, thinking. "Okay,"—here she scooted closer to the edge of her bed so that she could talk in a quieter voice to Piper—"so there's this girl who goes to my school, Sadie, and she has the cutest brother."

"Like, how cute?" Piper asked.

"From one to ten, he's like a twelve," Lacy said, and Piper nodded solemnly.

"Well, he doesn't go to school for some reason, which really sucks, but somehow Sadie convinced him to go to the last school dance, and—" Lacy stopped, being unable to suppress an excited grin and squeal.

"And then they and a bunch of other kids just left. We didn't even have time to talk about half of the things I was dying to ask him." Lacy stopped, a bit red. "But, anyway, who do you like?"

"No one," she replied, which was the truth.

"You know you do," Lacy sang with a smile, falling sideways on her bed, then backwards.

"No, I don't," replied Piper in the same sing-songy tone.

"And that boy you're always with?" Lacy pestered.

"Friend," said Piper. "Just a friend."

"And at school? Nobody there?"

"No."

"Home?"

"No."

"Neighborhood?"

"No."

"Youth club?"

"Are you just going to keep listing random places, or are we going to move on with life?"

"Fine."

Pause.

"Church?"

Piper threw a pillow at her.

They continued talking and before they knew it, the day had already gone by. They ate a quick dinner at their cabin's table, and then Piper went to the forges alone—she had a feeling Leo would be there.

Sure enough, he was. "Watcha working on?" she asked, walking over and peering over his shoulder.

"Chime," he replied just as casually.

"How's she looking?" asked Piper, stroking the crest of the decapitated head of Chime.

"Give me an hour or two, and she'll be able to fly without a remote," replied Leo.

"Like, by herself? With her own will?" asked Piper.

"That's what 'fly without a remote' usually means," said Leo. He sharply nodded his head upwards once, and large safety goggles that had been resting somewhere on top of his curly hair fell down to his nose and over his eyes. The plastic of the right lens had been dented inwards, deforming the way Leo's eye looked. Piper laughed.

"You might want these," said Leo, handing her a pair. Both eyes were dented.

"Aw, but Leo…" Piper complained like a three-year-old. "You're only working with screws and bolts at the moment. Do we really need these?" She held up the goggles and shook them in the air.

"Yeah, you do," said Leo. "You'll see in a second."

Piper sighed and strapped them on. "I look like an idiot," she decided, looking at herself in the reflective part of a silver cabinet nearby.

"I think you're letting this Aphrodite stuff get to your head," said Leo.

"I blame the shoes of shame," she muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Leo shrugged and kept working for a minute or two. "Nearly done with the easy bits," he informed Piper.

"Okay," she said, rubbing her hands together. "Let's see what is so important I have to wear these gogg—WHOOOOOOAAAA!"

"Yeah," said Leo, pulling his goggles back up to his head. Piper had tumbled backwards onto the table behind them, spilling everything that had been so neatly organized on top of it onto the floor, creating a large mess. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

"Oh, so it's my fault," said Piper, the sharp end of a screwdriver driving into her back painfully. She held out a hand for Leo weakly. "Help?" she tried.

Leo took it and effortlessly pulled her back up. She had been saved from harm, but the table hadn't. It was split right down the middle where Piper had fallen on it, both of its front legs bent back on themselves.

"Oops," Piper said. She turned back to Leo's workstation to find Chime lying there as if nothing happened.

"How long did you say this would take?" she asked Leo.

SUPER IMPORTANT NOTE

Okay, so you may have noticed the pen-name TheColorsOfTheRainbow in the review-answer portion of some of the chapters. She has a story called Beautiful Me, and it's about bullying. She asked me to mention it in my story because she really wants to bring attention to bullying, and because she wants to do something about bullies. And I agree. Bullying is an issue that needs to be stopped.

The story goes like this: Laura J. Williams is bullied at school. But what the bullies do not know is that Laura lost her mother to cancer when she was four, or that her father is always drunk, or even that she's never had a friend. Maybe if they knew more about her, she wouldn't be bullied so much. But they don't know, and they will do everything in their power to make Laura's life absolute hell.

So please. Go read the story. It really is amazing. (But it's not on FanFiction because it isn't a fan-fiction, so you can find the story at
articleInfo?id2358.)