AUTHOR’S NOTE: Okay, so, I don’t remember whether or not I set ages for the Three Brothers (Z, P, H), but I was just looking up something about them and it turns out that Hades is the eldest, and I totally forgot Zeus is youngest… hmmmmm… Well, anyway, I guess I’ll just leave it as the opposite, or maybe I’ll just leave it open for interpretation… Dang it. I’ll just leave it ambiguous.
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After being thoroughly directed never to set eyes on Persephone ever, ever again, I sat in my evil lair, contemplating the amount that my life sucked and how many girlfriends I would ever have in my life (prospective amount: zero, for those wondering)(Hestia. Is. Not. An. Option. And. Never. Will. Be. One).
Once upon a time, when I was little, I was actually cool. Well, not cool like popular, or anything, but I was totally the king of the jungle gym on the playground, when we were in elementary school. I would wiggle my way onto the inside, between one of the triangles of metal, and climb it from the inside. Nobody was as good as me.
Well, then two things happened. The first thing to happen was that Zeus “accidentally” stepped on my fingers while he was climbing the outside and I the inside. I fell. I never climbed the jungle gym after that.
The other thing that happened was that we grew up. And when we grew up, different things made a person cool. It was no longer things like climbing that would make a person idolize another. By the time we got to middle school, the hip thing to do was skateboard. I had no interest in skateboarding, so I slowly became distanced from the rest of the kids.
And then, in high school, the cool thing to do was go to parties and get drunk and do girls. Well, as the only tenth grader in high school who hadn’t tasted alcohol in his life, I was not cool, not that it even made sense to bother, at that point in time. But I needed to impress Persephone. But she didn’t seem like the kind of girl to be that impressed by thugs who drink themselves into stupors so bad they can’t walk six steps before puking it all back onto the floor. She seemed like the kind of girl who would stay home and read.
So I was fine with missing out on most parties.
But one day, Zeus actually told me about a party he would be attending that evening. He was about to go out to pick up Hera so they could go, but he stopped in the living room and sat down on the couch with me.
“Sup, Hades?” he asked me.
“Reading,” I grunted, motioning to the book propped in my right hand. I decided to look up at him, and found he was dressed rather dapper for just any old keg party.
“Listen, I know you don’t need to plan on getting with any party girls, or anything, but I just wanted to help you out by saying there’d be girls from out of town.”
I stared at him a moment, unsure of what he was trying to tell me. Was Zeus trying to make me more of a man by getting me to interact with ladies other than Artemis, who was hardly a girl anyway?
My brother ran his hand backwards through his hair, a little exasperated. “I’m trying to boost your self esteem, in a sense. I really didn’t think it’d be this difficult. Just come tonight. Put on a nice shirt. Drink some booze. Kiss a girl. Have a life. It’s almost sad to watch you live a life without all this.”
At that moment, I wasn’t sure whether or not to take this as a compliment or a complete insult. Zeus was, in some ways, being a really good older brother by trying to help me do the things that would make a tenth grader cool. That was really sweet of him. What a guy. But, at the same time, it was almost insulting to hear him say this, because he was basically telling me I was an embarrassment.
Whatever the case, I guess you could say I was in. I didn’t exactly want to be cool, because that would be like abandoning my friends, but I didn’t want to spend yet-another-Saturday-night alone in the basement of my parents’ house.
“I guess I’ll come,” I said.
Zeus clapped me on the shoulder, grunting with approval, and stood up, adjusting his tie. “I hate these things, you know,” he mumbled, “but Hera’s really into the sophisticated look. Also, it’s a bit more than just a party. It’s an anniversary, hence the fancy clothes. Aphrodite and Ares are celebrating theirs, and I figured it wouldn’t be bad for you to come.” Those two had been together for two years now.
+ + +
Poseidon had also decided to come, so, both of us dressed in button-downs and ties (Zeus was right: they were restricting and utterly uncomfortable), he drove us to the party and I became the designated driver to get back home. That meant that, if I did choose to taste beer, it couldn’t be more than a sip or two. Poseidon had experience with parties, but not as much as Zeus. The former had gone to a few before this one, and knew the tricks of the trade. Music could be heard from inside, and all the lights were on. The sillouettes of acquaintances and strangers danced within the windows. I, without experience, was on my own as Poseidon plunged right into the crowds, possibly in search of a beer.
I stood at the front door, not entirely willing to go inside after my brother. But how could I let myself just miss out on this part of my teenagerhood? I had to do this, even if I never did one again, never chose to continue this sort of lifestyle. So, with a burst of semi-courage, I took my first step into social acceptance. In other words, I entered Ares’s house and was immediately engulfed in a crowd of half-drunken high-schoolers.
The air smelled unmistakably of alcohol and sweat, and the music was so loud I could feel the bass vibrating under my feet. The lights were on in what appeared to be the front hallway, but were a bit dimmed, as though the light were coming from a secondary source, rather than the ceiling. I guessed there was a lamp on somewhere, but, under these circumstances, it would be more important to find a companion than to stand there contemplating the electricity powering the different rooms of the house.
Just as I realized how much of a loser I looked like, I was accosted by a stranger with the stench of alcohol radiating from his clothing and mouth as he yelled over the music to me, “Hey! Enjoying the party, brah? Yeah! Yeah! I get the slugs in the jar! How ’bout you, man? Man!”
Unsure what he was even trying to say with the last few parts of that dialogue, I ended it by muttering something about finding my friends and slithered my way through the crowd, emerging in the kitchen. I did not really have friends to find, but it seemed like a good enough excuse, and it wasn’t as if he would’ve heard me.
Against the door frame, I realized after bumping against them, were Demeter and Dionysus, tangled in some sort of strange kiss. I averted my eyes, glad they hadn’t noticed me, and looked around for a friendly, familiar face. Unlucky for me, that resulted in me leading myself to a very drunk Apollo, who handed me a cup of beer and slurred something unintelligible at me and stumbled off.
I examined the mostly-full red plastic cup in my hand, deciding it probably hadn’t been sipped from at all, as the rim wasn’t even wet. So I tentatively took a sip, just to see what it would taste like–
It sucked. It burned. It was terrible. I choked as I finished swallowing the three drops that had hit my tongue. Quickly, looking around to make sure nobody saw that, I remembered that everyone else around me was too drunk to see what a loser I was. So I stood up straight, found an exit, and traveled to the next room. I was determined to speak with at least one person that night. Similarly, I was determined to continue holding the drink, for fear of looking stupid and out of place. At a party, it is a bad thing to be uncool. Because drunk men will make more fun of you than usual, and drunk women will get mad because you’re not drunk enough to get a room with them.
But then I was too busy tripping over my own two feet, splashing the contents of the red cup all over the floor, to worry about being cool. And who else could possibly make me do that without even being near enough to push me but the forbidden girl: Persephone.
She was only standing a few feet in front of me, and I mark this as the first time we got that close. The forbidden girl rushed to help me up from the floor, and what better words could I have chosen than:
“Oh, hey–shoot, I just–”
“Are you okay?” This being the first time I had heard her voice, I took note of the way it sounded soothing to my probably-soon-to-be-deaf ears. She had a soft voice, one of care and sweetness. And no matter how hard I tried to tell myself Apollo would kill me, I was suddenly overly aware of the closeness of her body. Her hand on my elbow, leading me up to standing position. Her knees at level with my head–
What was she doing at the party?
Pushing all other thoughts from my mind, I had to keep my cool by answering, “Yeah, I was just…” but could not think up an excuse of any sort.
Then we stood for a while. I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. I reached over to the nearest surface and put down the stupid red cup. Once more I was overly aware of Persephone’s presence next to me.
And eventually, somehow, we ended up alone. We were in a place that appeared to be a guest room. The colors were that guest-room beige-and-green combination. Another couple had stumbled out of it moments before we got there, and the bedsheets were untidy. We sat on the wooden floor in the corner, with the lights on, the door open enough for a person to slip in or out, so as not to look suspicious. It was so much quieter up here, it was almost as if the party wasn’t happening downstairs.
“So you’re Zeus’s brother?” Persephone asked me. “You don’t look much like him. Or act like him. Or hang out with his crowd.”
“Yeah, neither does Poseidon.” I took a sip from a new cup, this one filled with tap water.
She fiddled with the label on her water bottle and, after a moment, unscrewed the cap to take a sip. “This stuff tastes funny,” she uttered quietly.
“Does it?” was all I could think of to continue the conversation.
“Well, it’s probably nothing… I mean, it could’ve been sitting the in the freezer, or something. You see, the plastic has chemicals in it, and those seep out into the liquids when they get frozen.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet that’s it. Or you could just be dehydrated.”
“I’m not really the partying type, so I wasn’t dancing or anything before I found you… So I don’t think that’s it.”
Talking flowed like this for fifteen minutes longer before the forbidden girl looked me in the eye. I tried to say something. I didn’t have more to say. I broke eye contact and we were submerged into a lasting silence.
Persephone’s water bottle and my water cup eventually grew to hold little liquid, and I wondered if we’d have to go back and get more, or if we could just sit here talking (or not talking) for the rest of the night.
“Demeter told me I should come tonight so I could get together with Apollo,” she admitted. My heart sank. “So I’d been looking for somewhere to hide before you came along.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t like him. He’s annoying.”
We bonded over that for a few minutes before I noticed that she didn’t really seem focused.
Suddenly, as though someone had flipped a switch within her, Persephone curled up in a ball and told me, “Hades, I don’t feel well. I think I should just go to the bathroom, or something. M-maybe I’ll see you later.”
She attempted to stand up, but fell backwards onto the wood. I reached out to her but didn’t know what I could do for her. Had that really been water in the bottle? Water couldn’t do this to somebody, even with some freezer-released chemicals from the plastic. Or could it?
“Are you sure you’ll make it over there?” I tried, unsure if she would make it to the door. “I don’t even know where it is.”
“I’ve been here before, I know where it is. Demeter took me over here once.”
“Are you okay?”
Persephone looked at me then, clearly trying to figure that out for herself. Finally, she answered, “No, I’m going to go try to be, though. Help me to the bathroom, please.”
I stood up and then took her hand (and told myself not to get all excited over it), helped her to her feet. I moved so that I had her arm and my other arm was behind her back, to catch her if she fell. We made it halfway to the door when she got scared.
“I think I’m going to puke,” she whimpered. “That wasn’t water. I hate parties.”
But she didn’t puke.
She passed out in a heap on the floor, falling face-first.
I couldn’t catch her.
I was torn between running to get help, getting her onto the bed, and going to check the water bottle. Figuring that choice three was the best way to handle things, I crossed back to the corner, unscrewed the cap, and took a whiff.
The smell of diluted alcohol hit my nostrils and I wondered how she hadn’t even noticed.
Forget it. Get her to wake up, my head told me. So I bent over her body, trying to think of ways to coax an intoxicated female back to consciousness. If someone found us with her passed out–
The door opened further and a face looked in. The face saw me, the face saw Persephone’s unconscious body, the face saw me bent over the unconscious body.
The face ran.
That was the end of my short-lived acceptance by the female race.
Talk