Gone Girl.¹

Epilogue

gone girl.
━━━ the epilogue.

❀

Amaryllis didn't like many things about the United States. She didn't understand the point of Thanksgivings-it felt incredibly weird celebrating a holiday that watered down the colonization and the genocide of Indigenous people-or why everyone was so obsessed with their country to the point of ignoring the existence of other countries. She didn't like it when kids from her school would make fun of her accent or how the teachers refused to learn the correct pronunciation of her name. She truly hadn't realised how difficult it was to be an immigrant in the U.S until she had to attend high school.

The only thing Amaryllis enjoyed about American culture-if you could even call it that-was Halloween. It was very similar to Apokries, the Greek Carnival season, only in Halloween everything was much more intense and everybody made it a much bigger deal than it actually was. But Amaryllis loved how people would decorate their houses with big carved pumpkins, how they would watch horror movies just to scare themselves and how kids would dress up to play trick or treat.

So when Rachel sent her an invitation for the Halloween party she was planning in her father's lake house, Amaryllis was counting down the days.

She had invited Percy and Annabeth as well, although she couldn't invite any more demigods from the Camp, since that would attract the attention of monsters. Still, there would be people from her Academy and some of her old friends from Goode, since it was her previous school. Amaryllis had invited Annabeth to her house, so they would get ready together before Percy picked them up. He had gotten insufferable ever since he got this driver's license and insisted on driving them everywhere.

Amaryllis' room was a mess; there were piles of clothes everywhere as she was trying her best to figure out the last details of her costume. Her and Percy had agreed to go to the party dressed as Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann from Pirates of the Caribbean. Amaryllis had tried to replicate the costume from the movie by wearing a puffy white shirt underneath a long dark vest and dark pants that weren't too tight but not too baggy either. She had even thrifted a coat that looked awfully similar to what the actress was wearing in the movie.

"Where is my fucking hat?" she groaned as she looked around for her pirate's hat.

Amaryllis' mother, who was sitting at the bed, fixing Annabeth's hair into two buns, gave her the side eye. "Μίλα όμορφα," she said.

Annabeth rolled her eyes. "Did you look inside the wardrobe?"

"Yeah, I obviously looked-" She stopped herself. "No, actually, I didn't."

Amaryllis opened her closet and went through a lot of her things before finally finding her hat. She let out a cheerful scream and showed it to her mother and best friend, who both looked unimpressed.

After a few seconds, her mother was done with Annabeth's hairstyle. "Done," she said. "You look great, honey."

Annabeth had decided to go dressed as Leia Organa from Star Wars. She had borrowed a white bed sheet from Amaryllis and with her help, they managed to turn it into Leia's costume, after also taking one of Stavros' belts. She looked great and she seemed to think so too, because once she saw her reflection in the mirror, she grinned.

"Thanks, Mrs Kalomiri," she said. Her mother sighed. "Uh, sorry. I meant Ioanna."

"Mom, how do I look?" Amaryllis said.