ANTI-HERO, j.grace

TWENTY SEVEN

      Klein Maddox couldn't help but smile at the boy standing in front of her, despite how much she desperately didn't want to. She didn't want to smile at anyone, Klein. Didn't want to see another demigod for the near foreseeable future.

She'd never been the self-wallowing type, but all that the Maddox girl had wanted to do was hide along the edges of the strawberry fields and cry while she inevitably angered countless Demeter kids for squatting on their grass.

It was stupid, the reason for her tears. But finding Andrew Miller (perhaps and first and, at this point only, crush ever) kissing one of the Hermes girls... well, Klein had quickly discovered why they called it a crush.

And Andrew Miller had quickly discovered why so many campers called Kieran Maddox his sisters guard dog.

The entire scenario had left Klein Maddox mad at the word and exceptionally embarrassed. Because not only had she watched her stupid crush kiss another stupid girl, her stupid brother had pushed her stupid crush right into the stupid lake.

The lake!

"He was ugly, anyway."

"Shut up, Kieran."

"I'm serious. Even a blessing from Aphrodite wouldn't save him."

"Shut up, Kieran!"

The Maddox boy plopped himself on the ground beside his twin, "If anything, I did you a favor."

She gaped, "You pushed him into a lake!"

"He made you cry."

"You embarrassed me."

"He made you cry."

"So you pushed him into the lake?"

"Well it was that or I jinx him to tap dance for the rest of his life." Kieran shrugged, "You tell me which one I should have picked."

Klein sat there quietly for a moment before a short bit of laughter bubbled from her, "You should have gone with the tap dancing."

"I figured you'd say that." Kieran let out a bit of a laugh, grinning before turning to face the girl once more. "Come on, you had to at at think it was a little funny."

Punching her brother right on the arm, Klein scolded him with another "It wasn't funny!"

But it was funny, and the twins would laugh about it every time either of them found themselves with a crush because 'you remember what happened that one time, don't you?'.

       The Maddox girl had expected to become a human pancake. She absolutely did not expect to wake up sitting at a cafe table with an entirely new outfit on.

Gone were her sweatpants and her (Will's) Henley shirt, of which the Apollo boy was most certainly going to kill her for. Instead, Klein donned a woven cotton romper with a tight long sleeve underneath (because suddenly the freezing winter had turned into blooming trees and a pleasant warmth), and her age-old sneakers had been replaced with a new pair of Converse. 

Her first thought was: how the absolute fuck? Her second: what the absolutely fuck?

"My sweatpants." She whispered dejectedly to herself, but Leo snorted out a laugh beside her at having heard.

Jason was still blinking from the sudden sunlight, but the first person he was able to focus on was Piper, and the first thing he managed to do was let out a little choking sound.

The Maddox girl couldn't blame him - Piper's newly acquired outfit made her want to choke too.

The McLean girl was wearing a turquoise dress with black leggings and black leather boots, as well as a snowboarding jacket that rather debatably matched the rest of the outfit.