A/N: I'm sorry. I've had a lot on my mind recently, and I think this story was a long time coming.

Disclaimer: Credit to Rick Riordan for the characters. Credit to Julie Schumacher for her book.

Finally and most importantly, a trigger warning for depression/suicidal thoughts, especially because this is set more in the early 2000s, so treatment was kind of a joke, and there was far more stigma regarding mental illnesses.

They can hear someone screaming the moment they step off the elevator. At first, it's hard to tell what the person's saying—the sound swells and falls, a high-pitched moving ribbon of noise—but as they walk down the narrow hallway (her mother reaches for her hand), Annabeth can hear the word "Out" and then "Let me out of here."

They hang up their coats and lock up Athena's purse and Frederick's keys in a metal locker. The door creaks as her mother shuts it. The screaming rises and fades. Her mother glances at her father, and Annabeth can tell what she's thinking just like that. We should have left Annabeth at home.

They have to walk through metal detectors. The button on her jeans trips the alarm, and a security guard with a fat beer belly steps forward and waves a wand up and down the front of Annabeth's stomach. "Any knives?"

"What?" Annabeth's brain is numb because of the screaming. "Letmeoutletmeoutletmego." It fills the hall and seems to suck up the cool air around them all.

"Do you have any knives?" he repeats, speaking slowly with a bored expression plastered across his face. "Anything sharp? Corkscrews, Swiss Army knives, nail files, knitting needles, razor blades, paper clips, scissors?" He looks tired as he goes through the spiel. The bags under his eyes match the bag of his stomach.

"Not with me," Annabeth says stupidly, as if saying that she's left her knife-and-scissor collection in the downstairs lobby.

"Go ahead, then."

The screaming continues.

"For Rachel Elizabeth Chase," her mother says, leaning forward on her tiptoes and speaking into the metal box by the doorbell. "We're her family. Her parents and her sister."

Through the narrow window in the door, Annabeth can see two men partly dragging and partly carrying a screaming person toward them. It's a tall, skinny girl dressed in grey pajama bottoms and a dark green t-shirt, and she is flailing and fighting with all her might, hurling her body back and forth, her long ginger hair whipping one of the men, who is probably twice her size, across the face.

Her mother and father and Annabeth all stare at her, as if watching some terrible, new reality TV show.

"Oh my god," Athena says.

The screaming girl lifts her head and looks toward the window to meet Annabeth's gaze. Her eyes are green and unfocused. Her face is a mask, waxy and pale.

"She almost looks like Rachel," Annabeth says.

And then their mother falls down in the hallway beside Annabeth, her elbow knocking painfully against the tile, and the screaming girl on the other side of the glass is dragged into a room by the two men, who quickly lock her away.

…

How did her sister fall through a hole in her own life and into some other life below?

Annabeth's not sure how it happened. Sometimes she still has trouble believing that it happened at all.

…

It was a regular afternoon after school in September. These things never happened on special days. It was the normal days when things had to go wrong. Rachel was at the kitchen table, dipping Oreos into a thin liquid. Rachel was the only person Annabeth knew who liked her Oreos in orange juice, and she liked them soggy, and she liked it with no pulp at all.

"Put that away," their mother said. "I'm making dinner."

Rachel kept dipping. Up, down, up. Another wet Oreo.

"We're having pasta," their mother said.

Annabeth picked up her books and put them in her backpack, effectively clearing off the table.

"Have you both finished your homework?" their mother asked. The school year had just begun. Annabeth was in ninth grade while Rachel was in eleventh, and it was the first year they were in the same school in a long time, both being in high school and all.

"Not yet," Annabeth said. "I still have Algebra 2. I have to graph some functions."

"And you, Rachel? Do you have any homework?"

Rachel shrugged in slow motion. She was almost five foot seven and bony; Annabeth used to tell her she looked like a praying mantis until she'd hit her own growth spurt, surpassing her sister at five foot nine.

"Your grades weren't very good last year," their mother said. "You have so much potential. You need to apply yourself and get organized. Where did you put the planner I gave you a month ago?" Like Annabeth, Athena was the sort of person who enjoyed making lists and then crossing things off them.

Rachel didn't answer. Annabeth had seen the calendar on the floor of her bedroom, most of the dates blacked out with sharpie.

"You'll want to start thinking about college soon," their mother said. "Instead of moping around the house, you should—"

"Don't," Rachel interrupted, her voice flat. She opened her fingers like a hinge and let go of the Oreo, which slid to the bottom of the glass.

Athena put a pot of water on the stove. Annabeth could tell she was starting to get annoyed but was trying not to show it. "Sometimes I wish I could get into that head of yours and see what you were thinking." She glanced up, inspecting Rachel more carefully then. "You haven't combed your hair. You used to keep it so neat."

"I wish I was dead," said Rachel.

…

Rachel already had a therapist, a person their mother had started sending her to in the summer, after she got fired from a babysitting job: she'd turned on the water in the tub and clogged the drain, then taken the kids for a walk to the playground.

Now because they were all going through a tough time, their mother had insisted on all of them attending therapy. Frederick and Athena both shared one, and because Athena didn't want her to feel left out, Annabeth got her own.

Annabeth's was an old woman with a white cap of hair and a pea green sweater. She had thin, purple glasses, and a weary, kind smile. She looked like somebody's grandmother. When her mother had dropped her off here, saying to call her if she needed anything, Annabeth had half expected the therapist to offer her cookies or hard candy—that ovular, pink type wrapped to look like a strawberry with the twisty part green and the torso red with a little yellow seed pattern.

The Grandma Therapist shut the door.

They sat in two armchairs right across from each other. By each chair's side, there was a small table. On the Grandma Therapist's table, there was a small clock. On Annabeth's, there was a similar clock, a tiny pot of succulents, and a box of tissues which she knew she wouldn't need. Ever, probably.

The Grandma Therapist said it was nice to meet her. She said her name was Hestia. She talked about confidentiality next. She said that as long as whatever Annabeth said didn't endanger Annabeth's life or anyone else's, everything would remain between the both of them. Like a secret. She said Annabeth could say whatever she liked. She said sometimes her clients feel more comfortable with their shoes off or with a blanket. She said that was fine too. She said she hoped Annabeth would trust her. Then she put her hands on her knees, and she waited.

Annabeth looked at the rug on the wooden floor between them. It was one of those homey, coiled types supposedly woven from rags. Someone should've warned this woman about her, Annabeth thought. She wasn't much of a talker. Her mother liked to call her "reserved." Rachel said that, socially, Annabeth had the skills of a three-horned toad.

"I don't know what we're supposed to be doing here," Annabeth said finally after a reasonably awkward silence.

The Grandma Therapist spread her hands out. "We talk. That's it. You tell me what you're thinking, and what you're experiencing. Your mother told me you might want to talk about your sister."

"Oh." Annabeth wasn't quite sure she understood what she was supposed to say even after that. Rachel was Rachel. She was a slob, and Annabeth was neat. She was emotional and fun, and Annabeth was straightforward. That was the way they had always been—the way things fit and felt right between them.

Eventually the therapist made another short speech, at the end of which they both agreed that it was probably hard to be the younger sister of a person who was depressed. "Did it come on suddenly?" she asked, her white hair catching the light from the window. It seemed more silver. "Or did you see signs?"

What would the signs have been? Annabeth wondered. Rachel had always been largely unpredictable and goofy and moody. She could fit eight large marshmallows into her mouth and still sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with perfect pitch. She could write with both hands at the same time, signing her own name backward and forward. She could paint murals on her bedroom walls, and then she could also draw stick figures falling off cliffs with sarcastic one-liners to make Annabeth laugh. Once, at their grandparents' cabin, she had tried to tie Annabeth with strips of cloth to the underside of a bunk bed, so that when their cousin Magnus climbed in to go to sleep, she could drool on his head.

If there had been signs of a change, Annabeth had been blind to each and every one.

The Grandma Therapist leaned forward in her chair. "Depression is an illness, and no fault of the person who suffers from it. Sometimes there are causes we can point to, and sometimes there seems to be no cause at all."

They looked at each other.

"Are there any questions I can address for you?" the Grandma asked. "Do you ever worry that you might suffer from depression someday too?"

"No." Annabeth knew she wasn't like Rachel. She wasn't affected by the things that affected her. It was like, growing up, Rachel had occupied a certain space and developed a certain kind of personality, and Annabeth had taken what was left over. Rachel was the storm on the horizon; Annabeth was the needle on the barometer that always pointed to steady.

"There's no real reason you should worry," the Granda Therapist said. "Though there is a genetic component. Depression can run in families."

Run, Annabeth thought, was not the right word for what was happening inside Rachel. Ever since that afternoon in the kitchen, the clockwork within her seemed to have stopped. One day she was arguing with her about whose turn it was to use the hair dryer and diffuser, and the next day (or was it the next week?) she was wrapped in a blanket on the floor of her room, picking at her hangnails and refusing to talk.

Looking down at the coiled rug at their feet, Annabeth remembered a game she and Rachel used to play when they were little. She called it Lifeguard, and it involved Rachel being a drowning victim on the living room floor. She would launch herself off the couch and onto the rug and flail around as if disappearing into the sea-blue carpet. Annabeth was always the lifeguard. She was supposed to stay on the couch and throw her a rope (they used ribbon or string), which Rachel struggled to tie around her waist. If she couldn't tie it (if, for example, the water was cold and her hands were numb), Annabeth was allowed to leap off the couch and drag her to safety, the two of us scrabbling toward the tile floor in the hallway (Rachel was always gasping for breath), until one of their parents saw them thrashing around on the carpet with a mess of string and told them they would have to play outside. For a year or two, Lifeguard was their favorite game.

"You're smiling," the Grandma Therapist said. "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking about Rachel. That Rachel's going to be okay," Annabeth said.

"So you're an optimist."

"No. I just know she's going to be okay."

The Grandma Therapist pressed her lips together.

Annabeth didn't care what she thought. She didn't know Rachel the way Annabeth did. Annabeth knew that Rachel always came back again, no matter how deep the water, and no matter how hard her fall.

…

Rachel got worse.

…

Maybe, Annabeth thought, Rachel shouldn't have told them how bad she felt. Maybe once those words were out of her mouth, they gave her permission to fall apart. Rachel stopped doing her homework. She lost weight. She fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the day but wandered around the house in the middle of the night, wearing a long-sleeved black t-shirt and underwear and a pair of old socks. Whenever their parents talked about what she was going through, they said she was "down."

Annabeth thought about Alice in Wonderland and the rabbit hole. No one had saved her then, and she had fallen to no man's land, getting high with the caterpillar, drunk with the Mad Hatter, listening to the Queen of Hearts spit utter and complete nonsense, and the Cheshire Cat grin at nothing and everything in particular. Annabeth's heart beat a little bit faster.

Rachel dug her nails into the fleshy part of her palm, leaving red half-moons, scarlet crescents. It bled.

"What are you doing?" Annabeth asked.

"What?"

She pointed at her sister's nails. A drop of her blood ended up on her finger.

Rachel wiped it off. "Nothing. Hand me my pills, won't you?"

Annabeth gave her the little brown bottle that lived by the toaster—antidepressants. Rachel swallowed a pill every morning and every night before she went to bed.

She unscrewed the childproof cap while Annabeth watched. She linked her arm through Annabeth's as she dry swallowed the tiny white capsule. Rachel was rowdy and theatrical where Annabth was private. Her hair was long and bright red while Annabeth's blonde hair barely touched her shoulders. But they had always been close. They were like right and left hands laced tightly together.

Rachel twisted the cap back onto the bottle. "Life sucks," she said.

"Sometimes it does," Annabeth agreed. "But sometimes it doesn't."

"You're such a compromiser." She slumped against the kitchen counter.

"Okay," Annabeth agreed again. "I guess I am."

…

Their parents' therapist must have told them to be more parental. They came home from their sessions armed with pamphlets and books on parenting. They went around the house inventing rules. Rachel and Annabeth weren't going to be allowed to sleep late on weekends. There would be no more "lingering" in their bedrooms; they were supposed to find "productive uses" for their time.

Athena in particular liked to enforce this new set of rules. She was always telling Rachel to get off the couch. "I don't want you sitting there watching TV all day," she said.

But Rachel wasn't watching TV. She was sitting on the couch not doing anything. Annabeth was keeping her company, sitting beside her.

"Mom's turning into a real nag," Annabeth said.

Rachel rearranged her long legs underneath her. "No big surprise there." Her voice was dull and without expression; all the shine had gone out of it.

They sat on the couch and watched Simba, their ancient tabby, arrange himself into an orange coil on his favorite chair. He glared at them for a minute, then went to sleep.

Annabeth turned up the volume on the TV and switched it to the Spanish channel. Her teacher had suggested that everyone watch it, but she could barely understand a word.

Rachel was poking at the back of her hand with a paperclip. "Do you hate school as much as I do, Annie?" she asked.

"You don't hate school," Annabeth told her.

"Why don't I?"

"Because you have friends there," Annabeth said. "And you like to learn things."

On TV, a woman held up a package of diapers and said something incomprehensible.

"You should try to remember when you're sad what it's like to be happy. You just have to remember." Annabeth took the paperclip away from her. "Everything's going to be okay. This is just a phase you're going through. Pretty soon you'll feel better."

Rachel rested her head on Annabeth's shoulder. "You're really annoying sometimes, Beth," she said.

…

It was an unnaturally sunny Friday afternoon toward the end of September after school when Annabeth's already distracted study session was interrupted with pure chaos.

Her mother started shouting Rachel's name.

Abandoning her books, Annabeth ran downstairs in time to see her mother trying to count the pills in the bottle, but her hands were shaking, and the little tablets rained down on the floor.

Rachel was only supposed to take two antidepressants a day, but she took a lot more. A handful.

Rachel was swallowing one small oval pill after another with a glass of juice. She didn't seem to hear Athena's voice at all, and Annabeth was only paralyzed with an unfamiliar feeling crawling up her spine as she watched them go past her sister's lips and down her throat, down, down, down into the rabbit hole.

...

They drove Rachel to the hospital. Annabeth sat in the backseat beside her. For some reason, she had brought her schoolbooks. Rachel closed her eyes and slept. Traffic was terrible.

"Annabeth. Keep her awake," her mother said.

So Annabeth pinched Rachel. Hard, above her elbow. It felt good to do it.

"Ow," she said. "Jerk." She opened her eyes and grinned at Annabeth. Annabeth didn't think she was trying to kill herself. Why would a person who was trying to kill herself smile at her sister?

"She's okay, Mom," Annabeth said. "It must have been a mistake."

Her mother started to cry.

…

Annabeth didn't cry. She wasn't a crier.

She didn't cry in fifth grade when their cat, Simba, got hit by a car. And in seventh grade, when she had an enormous splinter dug out of the bottom of her foot, she hadn't flinched. "Fearless," her father had called her.

She thought of the episode with the splinter while they waited in the emergency room, Rachel chewing on her hands in the chair next to her and her mother around the corner, sobbing into the phone.

Eventually, a nurse called Rachel's name.

A doctor interviewed her by herself in a room down the hall. He came back fifteen minutes later and said that Rachel hadn't done herself any serious damage and didn't need medical treatment, but he was going to admit her for a few days. They had a room upstairs.

"Upstairs where?" her mother asked.

They left Annabeth in the waiting room by herself, and she understood that it was her job to remain very calm. She recalled the splinter incident while she waited some more. Rachel had held her hand and put her forehead close to Annabeth's and made her look at her, away from the doctor with his tray of instruments, even while the bottom of her foot had been on fire.

"I'm right here for you. Right here. You're amazing, Beth," she had said.

And because her sister had said it, she was.

…

The reason people went to the hospital when they were depressed, her parents explained that night, as if she were six instead of fourteen, is so they'd be safe. Rachel needed a safe environment. Once she felt secure again, and more like her old self, they would bring her home.

"How long will that be?" Annabeth looked at the pizza they had ordered for dinner, which no one had touched.

"Not very long," her father said. He glanced at her mother. "The important thing—for Rachel—is that we try not to overreact."

He pushed the pizza box toward her. "We should eat. Beth, are you hungry?"

The phone rang. They let the answering machine pick up. "Hey, Rachel, why aren't you answering your cell? It's Silena. We thought you were coming over at seven-thirty. Get your nutty self over here, fast." They heard people laughing in the background. The machine beeped its goodbye.

"They'll take good care of her at the hospital," her father said. "And we'll see her tomorrow."

Her mother was wiping up an invisible stain on the table. Annabeth found herself wondering just how long one person could clean the same spot.

Annabeth took a slice of pizza from the box. Someone had to eat it.

"She's going to be fine," her father said.

"I know that," she answered.

...

They didn't see Rachel the next day—Saturday—because that was the day when the two attendants shut her in a room and locked the door.

A nurse with the name tage of Hera told them through an intercom that they would have to come back another time. In order to receive visitors, all patients, according to the adolescent psych ward rules, had to be compliant. Compliant meant physically and emotionally willing to follow procedure. They could ask to meet with a social worker, Hera continued in a droning voice, but as far as visiting, that wouldn't be possible until Rachel stopped arguing with the staff and learned to follow procedure.

Annabeth and her parents stared at her through the narrow window.

This kind of thing happened sometimes, Hera said. It wasn't unusual and was probably best considered a period of adjustment. The first few days were often difficult. She removed her finger from the button, tapped the glass twice, and walked away.

...

Annabeth's mother spent the rest of the day in bed with a headache. Her father spent it pacing his office and trying to grade university papers. He was thin and restless, like Rachel; neither one of them was very good at sitting still. Every now and then he came in from his pointless rearranging to check on her. "Do you have any homework?"

"You already asked me that," Annabeth said.

"And what was your answer?"

"That I don't do homework on Saturday. I always do it on Sunday."

"That's right," her father said. "Now I remember." He sat down next to her on the couch and they thumb-wrestled twice; he beat her both times.

After he pinned her the second time he pinched her chin and told her she was turning out to be a decent kid. "Love you," he said.

"Thanks, Dad."

"I wasn't finished." He spread out his arms above his head. "Love you like this: as big as the sky." Her father was corny. He liked corny phrases.

"We've just got to be patient," he said. "That's all there is to it. It's going to take time but she'll come out of this with flying colors.

"Okay," Annabeth said, compliant.

...

The very next day after breakfast, they went back to the hospital. They walked through a sudden rain to the double doors of the main entrance, then shook the water from their clothes and crossed through the emergency room waiting area, where people with dislocated arms or broken fingers—things that were probably easy to fix—waited their turns the way we had done two days before.

Her mother pushed the button for the elevator and turned to her as if discovering her existence for the first time. "Are you sure you're up for this?" Her mother was short, unlike her, but Annabeth worried she would grow up to be a lot like her anyway: determined, stern, and a pain in the neck. "That was traumatic yesterday," she said. "You can wait in the lobby if you don't want to come."

"Of course she wants to come." Her father put his hand on her shoulder.

Annabeth felt like their private puppet. Let me make her talk!

The elevator opened. Everyone else who filed in with them was carrying flowers and Get Well! balloons. A little girl was dressed as if she were going to a birthday party.

They got off on the fourth floor (no one else got off with them) and nodded to the security guard.

"Let's not say anything to upset her," her mother said. "We'll just be ourselves."

Who else would we be? Annabeth wondered.

Annabeth had brought Rachel's favorite pajama pants and a sweatshirt that said NEW YORK SURF CLUB, but the nurse who answered the door and let them in said Rachel couldn't have them because the sweatshirt had a hood on it and the pants had a string. "No ropes, no strings. And nothing sharp," the nurse said. "I'll keep these behind the desk so you can take them home."

Beyond the desk where the nurses worked, Annabeth saw a group of kids—maybe a dozen of them—sitting in gray plastic chairs in a semicircle. One girl was asleep sitting up. The others didn't seem to be doing anything. A boy lifted his head and stared at her blankly, and she thought of the animals at the zoo, living their lives behind glass while a series of spectators either ignored them or hoped they would get up and do something worthwhile.

The nurse—her name tag identified her as Kayla—said that Sunday mornings weren't technically set up for "socializing," but since they hadn't been able to see Rachel yet, she supposed they might stay for a short visit.

"Where is she?" Her mother hugged her arms to her chest.

One of the kids—he had short blond hair and what appeared to be fifteen or twenty stitches in his forehead—pointed toward a set of open doorways on the right: "She's in her room."

Annabeth couldn't help but wonder what was wrong with him, perhaps intrusively. She did her bet not to stare. Was he crazy? Was he depressed too?

Rachel's new bedroom, like every other bedroom on the adolescent psychiatric ward at Goode Memorial Hospital, had two narrow beds, both of them bolted to the vinyl floor, two wooden cubbies bolted to the wall, a grey smeared window that didn't open, and a bathroom door that didn't lock.

She was reading a comic book on the bed nearer the window, her long legs straddling the mattress. She was wearing jeans and a hospital gown. The gown was printed with teddy bears holding stethoscopes.

"Rachel," their father said. "Hey. It's great to see you."

Her sister turned toward them where they were clustered in the doorway. There was something different about her, Annabeth thought. There was something new about the way she looked at them, as if they weren't the family she had expected.

Annabeth thought her mother was going to cry again; instead, she rushed forward. "We tried to visit you yesterday but you were...upset." She sat down on the bed next to Rachel and touched the side of her face, her arms, her hair. "You look good, sweetheart."

Rachel put down her comic book. Her skin was blotchy and her hair was braided. Rachel never wore braids. "They locked me up," she said. "I wasn't 'upset.' I was throwing a fit. They wanted me to eat something disgusting, and when I wouldn't eat it, they decided I was anorexic."

Their father told her that throwing a fit was probably a bad idea and that she might want to maintain an even keel.

One of the nurses from the desk poked her head through the doorway, seemed to count them, and nodded.

"Ten-minute checks." Rachel picked at her fingers—it seemed she still hadn't kicked that habit. For some odd reason, it made Annabeth feel a bit better. So she was not entirely gone. "Someone sticks their head in here and stares at me every ten minutes, even at night." She tugged on the hem of Annabeth's t-shirt. "What do you think, Beth? Nice place, huh?"

"Great," Annabeth said. "It's really elegant. The architecture is astounding. Very structurally sound."

Rachel's expression changed slowly; she almost grinned. "Let me show you around." She swung her leg over the bed and stood up. "Closet," she said, pointing with a flourish at the wooden cubbies. "For all those up-to-date hospital fashions. And look in the bathroom: no hooks. And no shower rod. They don't want you to hang yourself. I can't even hang up my towel."

Their father was standing in front of the window, facing out, even though there was nothing but a parking lot to look at.

"No blinds on the windows," Rachel said, still posing like a game-show hostess. "No shoelaces, no razors, no scissors or pencils. No cell phones. No music."

Annabeth was waiting for her to say that she didn't need to be there; she was waiting for her parents to tell her it was time to come home.

"I know this is hard," their mother said. "Just do what the doctors and the nurses tell you. We're supposed to meet with the doctor on Wednesday."

"Why aren't we meeting with the doctor until Wednesday?" their father asked without turning around.

"Because," her mother said. Her voice was taut. "That's when they told us we could get an appointment."

Rachel sat down on the bed again. She flopped face-first against the sheets and let her mother scratch her back. Rachel loved to be scratched. Annabeth had once told her she suspected she had been a cat in another life. Rachel had said she hoped it was an orange tabby cat like theirs. For her hair, she'd said. "I wanted more clothes," she mumbled. "I thought you would bring some."

"We'll bring them next time," her mother said.

"And I want my hairbrush." Rachel's eyes were closed. "And I want underwear and socks and a pile of t-shirts. And some gum and a book. I need something to read."

"Your father's writing this down," her mother said.

Her father searched for a pen, but he hadn't been allowed to bring one in. Too pointy and sharp at the nib.

"And bring me a sandwich?" Rachel asked. "The food here is terrible."

My mother kept scratching, her fingers tracing a circle on Rachel's back. What kind of sandwich and what kind of bread? she wanted to know. Would mayonnaise or mustard taste better with turkey?

They tried to talk normally for a while. Rachel said the kid with the stitches in his head had been hospitalized four times and knew some of the people who went to our high school. The nurses were mean to him, she said. Some were mean to her also. Most of the day, she said, the patients sat around doing nothing; they had nothing to do.

Another nurse poked her head through the door: "We need to ask you to wrap things up."

"I'm like a bug under a freaking microscope in here," Rachel said. She reminded their mother about the sandwich. It was of utmost importance.

They stood up. Their mother hugged Rachel; their father kissed her.

"Little Beth. What the heck are you doing over there?" Rachel asked.

Annabeth walked toward her, and she reeled her in and held on to her tightly, her bony arms a collar around her neck.

"Do me a favor?" Rachel asked, with her mouth by her little sister's ear.

"Sure," Annabeth said. "Name it."

"Save me," she said.

...

In the car back home, her father was particularly positive. He went on about how nice it had been to see her, to see the nurses being attentive. Her mother was silent, watching the trees go by outside.

Annabeh wasn't listening at all. No, she was thinking about Rachel asking to save her. She wasn't serious, Annabeth thought. What was she supposed to save her from?

Her mother turned around finally from the front seat and she assumed Annabeth understood that Rachel's "situation" was confidential. Obviously, she said, Annabeth would have to be very, very discreet. There were very few people at school, for instance, who would need to know.

"I'm sure Beth understands that," her father said, speaking for her again. This time, she didn't mind so much.

Because Annabeth did understand. "But you're talking about an American high school," she pointed out. "Everyone in the building probably already knows."

"We're going to tell her guidance counselor and the nurse, but that's it," her father said. "They'll keep it quiet."

"Sure," Annabeth said, remembering the kid with the head full of stitches.

Her mother gave her a look which Annabeth pretended to take seriously but actually mostly ignored.

...

At school Monday morning, the first two people Annabeth ran into (she didn't know either one of them) said they felt bad about her sister, and how long did she think she would be locked up? The third person asked her what it was like on the crazy ward.

Annabeth went to her locker to get her books. In math—a subject she ordinarily liked and did well in—they took a quiz, but she only answered about half of the questions. In English they were reading Hamlet out loud, and she had to read about Ophelia losing her mind. In history she put her head down on her desk. She just wanted to think for a few minutes but she ended up falling asleep. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She thought it would be Mr. Chiron. He'd been Rachel's teacher in ninth grade too. But it wasn't Mr. Chiron.

It was Percy Jackson, who lived down the street from her but who she'd probably spoken to about twice in her life.

Percy had failed at least one grade and seemed to be getting through high school on his own special schedule. "Hey. Beth. Annabeth Chase." He was sitting behind her, poking her neck with a pencil eraser. "I heard about your sister."

Annabeth lifted her head off the desk and wiped a ribbon of spit from her cheek. "I didn't think you knew my name."

"Yeah," Percy said. "I know it. I know a lot."

Annabeth rubbed her eyes and watched Mr. Chiron hunt through his desk for a piece of chalk.

Percy poked at her shoulder this time.

She waited for him to come out with some kind of weird I-failed-a-grade-person remark.

"Is she at Goode?" he asked.

Annabeth nodded. There was only one other hospital near where they lived, and it was mostly for veterans.

"What does she think of it?"

Annabeth didn't answer. Mr. Chiron had found his chalk and was busy scrawling something on the board. His handwriting was loopy and clean, but the chalk sounded like nails squealing. She despised it, and tried to block out the unpleasant noise.

"I know someone who was there once," Percy said. "That's why I'm asking. Goode's okay for car accidents, or maybe for having your appendix out, but the psych ward has a lot of problems."

"What kind of problems?"

Mr. Chiron snapped his fingers at them.

"Meet me on the bus," Percy said, waving to Mr. Chiron and not even bothering to lower his voice. Mr. Chiron just shook his head, seemingly accustomed to Percy's antics. "I'll tell you then."

...

Annabeth nearly missed the bus because her locker was stuck with the zipper or her coat, and she had to kick and shove and basically transform into a member of Sparta to unjam it. When she finally collected her books and ran out of the building and found bus #13 in the lineup, she saw that Percy Jackson was sitting in the back with a bunch of guys in black-tshirts. He was engrossed in a conversation with a shorter, skinny, pale boy with dark hair and a permanent scowl on his face.

Annabeth found a seat alone somewhere in the middle. She and Rachel had gone to a nearby private school through the eighth grade (Half-Blood Learning Academy), so they were both considered freaks and hopeless cases when they got to high school. Annabeth in particular because she was so quiet. It was nearly October and, so far, most of the people who acknowledged her in the halls were her sister's handful of friends.

They rode past the strip mall and the grocery store and turned left at the park, the bus chugging its way through a tangle of suburbs. Jericho, New York—the part where they lived—was full of suburbs. Most of the houses were alike except that some had porches (like hers) and some had an extra-large garage.

Percy Jackson got off at the second-to-last stop and so did she. She studied him for a minute. His jeans had a hole in them, down one leg, fifteen or twenty inches long, and down the arm of his long-sleeved T-shirt in ballpoint pen someone had written LOST CAUSE. "Hey," she said. "Did you forget your backpack?" The bus was disappearing around the corner.

"No. I don't bring one," Percy said. He wasn't carrying any books.

"What do you do with your homework?"

"I do it at school. Or I just bring home what I need. The necessaries, you know?" He pulled a wad of folded paper and a pen from his pants pocket. "Less than ten percent of homework is educational," he said. "I've seen the statistics."

They looked at each other. "So," Annabeth said.

Percy ruffled his messy hair. It stuck up in all sorts of directions, and he looked like he'd just rolled out of bed, but in the attractive way that Annabeth had never quite mastered. "I think I should cut this again," he said. "What do you think? Do you cut hair?"

"Not like that," Annabeth said. It was starting to rain.

"You think my hair's ugly?"

"I think you want it to be."

He cracked a smile. "Good answer. Clever." Percy tilted his head to look up, his Adam's apple sharp and pointed. "Do you remember my older brother?"

"Not really." She had a vague memory of an older sort-of-Percy-like person who had dropped out or graduated and moved away a few years before.

"Luke," Percy said. "That's his name. Luke. Short for nothing, but my father called him Lucas, and we haven't seen my father for years, which is probably a good piece of luck all around. I like to tell people he left for milk one day and never came back, but he didn't like milk, so that wouldn't make sense." He looked at her as if she were a question he was hoping to answer. "Do you want to come to my house so you don't get wet? I could make us a snack."

"No, I don't think so." Annabeth started home. But then she turned around and saw that Percy was still standing behind her. "Did your brother Luke have to go to Goode? I mean, to the psych ward?"

Percy held out his hands to catch the rain. "It's kind of a long story," he said. Behind him, above the trees, a white sheet of lightning filled up the sky.

"Is your brother crazy?" Annabeth asked. "Or was he depressed?"

"Are those my only two choices?" Percy asked.

A car was approaching so they moved to the curb. The rain was coming down harder. "We just saw Rachel yesterday," Annabeth said. "She's going to be fine."

Percy kicked at a clump of weeds growing out of the sidewalk.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing. I'm just thinking you're probably afraid to be seen with me. You're probably thinking that talking to me is like committing social suicide."

"Not really." Annabeth shook her head.

"Why not?"

"I don't really know anybody," she told him. "I don't hang out with people from school." She wasn't quite sure why it would be social suicide even if she did know people. Percy and his friends were just punk music kids and druggies, she thought. It wasn't like they were thought of freaks or anything, just a bit noisy and disrespectful and unorthodox.

"Huh. Interesting," Percy said. "So you've got nothing to lose by coming to my house. Am I right?"

...

Annabeth had never been inside Percy Jackson's house, even though it was only a couple of blocks away from hers. Because the outside was dull and ordinary (garage on the right, tree on the left), she expected it to be dull on the inside, but it wasn't. It was bright and artistic, with oversized abstract paintings on the walls.

They went into the kitchen. Percy opened the refrigerator. "Do you want something to eat? You want some chocolate? Some soda? Cigarettes?"

"No, I'm not hungry. And I don't smoke."

"I don't either. Just trying to be polite. You know—the full range of offerings." Percy was opening and closing cabinets, clearly searching for something.

Annabeth looked around. The walls were a bright cobalt blue, and instead of a table and chairs the kitchen had a booth, like in a diner. The booth had silvery vinyl seats and a black stone surface between them to eat on. She sat down. "So. What's the long story about your brother you were going to tell me?"

"Do you like chocolate chip cookies?" Percy asked. "Chocolate's good for you. It lightens your mood."

Annabeth told him she didn't want anything, but he took two plates from the cabinet and set them on the counter. She considered asking if he read a lot since he seemed to say random things very confidently, and she decided against it when he began to talk.

"Okay, Luke," he said. "It's a drugs-and-violence story, mostly. He was pretty destructive. He liked to hang out with people he shouldn't have. Bad judgment, you know? Then finally, a couple of years ago, he punched his hand through the door at a counselor's office and got arrested, and everything went downhill from there."

Annabeth remembered the kids she had seen at Goode, staring at nothing in their plastic chairs. "Are most of the people on the psych ward—you know..."

"No. Are they what?" He was very straight to the point. It forced her to step out of her comfort zone and do the same.

"Violent like that. With a lot of problems. And messed up on drugs."

Percy grabbed two cookies from plastic tupperware, one on each plate. He warmed them up.

"I don't mean anything against your brother," Annabeth said. "But Rachel wouldn't punch a hole in a door, and she's not destructive. She's just—" Annabeth remembered her parents' word. "Down. It's a totally different situation."

"Yeah." Percy held a plate toward her. His eyes were sea green, the color of the ocean. They were the most beautiful things she had ever laid eyes upon. "Everyone's different. Taste this," he said.

She eyed them suspiciously. "Why are they blue?"

"Food coloring."

She took a bite of the gooey cookie (it wasn't good, but it wasn't bad, either, but she thought that was more because she was weirded out by the color) and tried to get used to the idea that she was actually having a conversation with Percy Jackson—Percy who had played in the pond when they were little, Percy who wore black clothes every day of the week, who sat at the back of the bus with the local druggies, and who went to school but didn't own a backpack or carry any books. Inside her own backpack, the pencils and pens were in separate compartments, and the notebooks were organized according to color. "Did you fail ninth grade?" she asked.

"Some of it."

"So that's why you're taking ninth-grade history?"

"I'm making up for a couple of classes here and there. And I like Mr. Chiron. He and I have an understanding." Percy carried his plate to the sink and washed it. "The problem with Goode is that they like to lock people up," he said. "You probably haven't seen them, but they have these little isolation rooms. They're like padded cells."

Annabeth remembered Rachel being locked away.

"That probably won't happen to your sister." Percy ran his hand through his hair dark again. He was really quite attractive. It was a shame he was so odd. "But there are better places you could send her."

"She's not going to be there long," Annabeth said.

Percy shrugged. "Okay. But if your parents want some names of other places, let me know. My mom's got a whole list. She hated the doctors that worked at Goode. Especially a guy named Kronos. Dr. Kronos is nuts."

Annabeth stood up. "My parents know what they're doing," she said. "But thanks for the cookie."

"Sure. Whatever." Percy followed her to the door. "Here's my phone number." He gave her a white card with his name printed in red in the middle. P. JACKSON, it said with a number below.

"Why do you have business cards?" she asked. "Are you dealing drugs?"

"No. Do you think everyone who has a business card is dealing drugs?"

She stuffed the card in her pocket and picked up her backpack. "Just because your brother hated Goode doesn't mean it's a terrible place."

"It wasn't only my brother," Percy said.

"Okay, and your mom. But—no offense—what would your mother know about hospitals?"

Percy opened the door. "My mom's a psychiatrist."

...

They weren't allowed to see Rachel on Monday, but on Tuesday before dinner they talked to her on the phone—using all three extensions—for several minutes.

"How was your day, Carrot?" her father asked. Carrot was one of the nicknames he had invented for Rachel when she was little.

"It sucked," Rachel said. Her voice sounded thick, as if she'd swallowed a mouthful of syrup. "Hang on a second."

"What's the matter?" her mother asked.

Annabeth could hear someone swearing, but it wasn't her sister.

"Somebody's flipping out in the hall behind me," Rachel said. "A couple of the kids in here—they're certifiable. A guy across the hall tried to burn down his house. With his parents in it. And also his dog. We gave him a hard time about the dog. Animal rights and all that."

"Did you see the doctor this morning?" her mother asked. "You had an appointment with him, didn't you?"

No answer.

"Rachel?"

"What? Oh, he was late," Rachel said. "Actually, he never showed up. So I worked on a puzzle."

"What else did you do?" her father asked.

"Hold on," Rachel said. "What? I'm talking to my parents. Yes. I'm on the phone. I got permission."

"Sweetheart?" her mother asked.

There was a pause and an intake of breath; Annabeth knew Rachel was getting ready to cry.

"Most people in the world are so freaking normal," she sobbed. "Everyone in the world is normal other than me."

"Well, I don't think—" her father began, but she cut him off.

"All day they keep asking me how I feel. That's all they do. They go around asking and asking and asking." Her voice came out in hiccups and broken stutters and pain.

"What do you say to them?" Annabeth asked. "Do you tell them you're sad?"

"No." She took another deep breath. "It isn't like sadness."

"Then what is it like?"

Another pause.

"I can't describe it," Rachel said. "I don't know how."

...

Dinner was extra quiet that night. Four chairs, three people.

"Who's her doctor?" Annabeth found herself asking.

"Don't worry about it," her mother said.

"I'm just curious," Annabeth nagged. She even sounded like her mother. It bothered her more than she would've liked to admit. She knew that if Rachel was here, she would've told her to shut up or else she'd become Mom. She would've snapped her fingers, her green eyes lighting up wickedly. Just like that, she'd say, and Annabeth would shut up.

Her mother ended up spouting some big speech instead, beating around the bush. She said Rachel's "situation" was complicated. It wasn't as if she had a broken leg. Finding the right sort of drug and the right sort of treatment could take a while. But the important thing to remember was that Rachel would get better. A lot of people suffered at one time or another from "the blues." It was fairly common. Annabeth's father's uncle, whom she'd never met and had barely heard of, had apparently once been depressed, but he had fully recovered. And so would Rachel. They just had to be patient. She was getting the best of treatment.

"In fact," her father said, glancing at her mother as if to say, I am sharing this tidbit of information with Annabeth, "we're finally going to meet her psychiatrist tomorrow at ten-fifteen. What was his name, Athena?"

"Kronos," her mother said. "Dr. Kronos." She picked up her chopsticks—they had ordered Chinese, and nobody had bought groceries in over a week—and told her not to worry. That everything was going to be alright.

...

That week at school, Annabeth did her best to avoid people like the plague. She did homework at lunch, ducking her head, and she continued to sit alone on the bus. Rachel hadn't always sat with her, but it still felt strangely empty regardless. Her efforts paid off, though, because no one asked her about Rachel. No one except Percy, who leaned toward her in Mr. Chiron's class and tapped her on the shoulder. "Hey," he said. "So how's she doing? Is she doing okay?"

Annabeth nodded.

In case she had accidentally thrown the first one out, Percy gave her a second business card. "Call me whenever," he said. "I'm usually not doing very much."

"Mr. Jackson, please stop bothering that female student," Mr. Chiron said.

"Yeah, okay. Her name is Annabeth," Percy said.

"I'm aware of her name; just leave her alone," Mr. Chiron sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose like a tired father with too many toddlers. Annabeth didn't really blame him.

A few minutes later, Percy tapped her on the shoulder again and said that if she needed to find him, he'd be at the back of the bus on the way home from school.

...

The next evening, Annabeth shrugged her jacket over her shoulders. "Ready?" she called loudly up the stairs.

"Ow," Frederick muttered. "I'm right here."

"Right," said Annabeth. "My bad. I didn't see you."

"Clearly." His features were pinched down seriously. "Actually, tonight your mother and I are going to go alone."

Annabeth felt uneasy, as if someone had run the tip of a feather up the back of her neck. "Is something going on?" she asked. She heard Percy's voice in the back of her head. My mom's a psychiatrist. "Did you meet her psychiatrist? Is he really weird?"

"Why would her psychiatrist be weird?" her mother asked.

"I don't know. Why can't I go see her?"

"I'm not going to stand here and argue with you," her mother said.

"Write your sister a note. Write something supportive."

"You can go with us next time," her father said.

She grabbed a piece of paper and quickly scribbled Rachel—I miss you. Feel better. Beth. Then she added a P.S. in code. Rachel had invented the code when they were younger, and she had drilled her until both of them were good at it. The code involved replacing every letter of the first word in a sentence with a letter two places later in the alphabet, and every letter of the second word with a letter two spaces earlier. And so on. Back and forth.

She held the pen tightly in her hand and wrote, Tgogodgt rfgq? Which meant Remember this?

Her father looked at his watch. "Almost finished?"

It had been a while since she'd written code. Oqo ylb Fcf bgrafcb og, she wrote. Mom and Dad ditched me.

"You know the rules," her mother nagged. "It's a school night. Get your homework done. No socializing and no boys in the house while we aren't here. There are plenty of leftovers in the refrigerator you can eat for dinner. We'll be back in two hours."

Annabeth folded the note in half and creased it and handed it to her father. "You're supposed to bring her a book," she said, noticing that her mother was holding a sandwich and a stack of clothes. She looked around on the shelf in the hall and found a book of fairy tales—Rachel loved fairy tales—and gave it to her mother. Then she stood at the window and watched her parents drive away. If she was allowed to visit her next time, that meant Rachel would be staying at Goode for over a week.

Suddenly, she felt like she couldn't breathe. Except that was nonsensical. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and then did that a few more times. See? She could breathe. It was all in her head. But the lump in her throat was stubborn, and it wouldn't go no matter how many times she swallowed thickly.

Annabeth reached into the pocket of her jeans, found a crumpled white card with blue writing, and picked up the phone. "Percy?"

...

Measure each angle in diagram 3A, recording your measurements below. Indicate whether the angle is acute or obtuse.

"Obtuse means stupid," Percy said. He had come over right after she called him, but once he showed up, she had second thoughts. She told him that her inviting him was against the rules, that he could only stay for half an hour and she was going to be doing homework the entire time.

"Thanks for the warm welcome," he'd said dryly. She had noticed that about him too—he was very sarcastic, but it wasn't like how Rachel had got when she was particularly moody. It wasn't mean. Now he was leaning over her shoulder at the kitchen table, reading the questions on her math worksheet.

"How's she doing?" he asked. "How long has it been—almost a week now?"

"Six days," Annabeth said without missing a beat. On the inside of her backpack were six black check marks all in a row.

"Is she coming home soon?"

Annabeth didn't answer.

"Dang," Percy said. "That's really hard. Even if you pretend it doesn't bother you, it probably does. They like to hold on to people at Goode. And they like to prescribe a lot of drugs." Percy was very blunt, Annabeth had quickly realized. It was part of the reason she found him especially odd. She had a nagging feeling he knew it went against social cues, but he didn't care anyway. She wasn't quite sure if she admired his boldness, or if she found it irritating. He tapped a finger against her worksheet. "You got the first two wrong, by the way." Definitely irritating right now.

Annabeth blinked at the paper, at him, then back at the paper. Stunned. She never got them wrong. "No, I didn't."

"Yes," he said. "Yes, you did. I think your mind is in Alaska."

"Why Alaska?"

"I don't know. Alaska has one hundred thousand glaciers. It covers like five percent of the state. I think ice is freezing over your brain too." His eyes gleamed.

Annabeth scowled, reluctantly reaching for a huge eraser to start it over.

He stood up and stretched and opened the refrigerator. "You're supposed to offer me something to eat. You know, the whole hostess thing. Do you know how to cook?"

"Do I look like a housewife?" She erased her answers to the first two problems while Percy closed the refrigerator and ran his finger along her mother's cookbooks.

"It's not really a gender thing," Percy said. "Girl or boy or in between, you'll starve if you don't know how to cook," he explained, honest as always.

"Dr. Kronos is her doctor," she said.

Percy's finger stopped on The Joy of Cooking. "I'm thinking ramen," he said. "Or macaroni and cheese. Those are probably our best options. Do you want to put tuna in the mac and cheese?"

"Did you hear what I said? Kronos is the doctor you warned me about."

"I heard you." He took a pot from the cabinet and started filling it with water. "Finish your homework. I'll make the noodles."

She put her worksheet away and closed her books. "It could have just been that your mom didn't like him. I mean, didn't like Kronos," she said. "My parents met him and they think he's okay."

"I'm looking for cheese," Percy said. "And I mean real cheese. This orange powder that they give you in the box is radioactive and not the fun, Spiderman, Incredible Hulk kind. The gas and bowel problems kind." He opened the refrigerator again, found a block of cheddar, and started to chop it up with a knife.

"You aren't listening to me," Annabeth said. "And we have a grater."

"I am listening to you," Percy said. "I'm a very good listener. My hearing's been tested."

Annabeth gave him the grater.

"The confusing thing," he said, "is that whenever I ask you how she's doing, you say you aren't worried. But that doesn't make sense."

She watched him peel some mold from the cheese. "It's not like I don't worry at all," she said. "It's just—"

"Just what?"

Annabeth wasn't sure what to say. Why was she talking to Percy Jackson about Rachel in the first place? "She's always been moody," she said. "And worrying doesn't do any good, does it?"

"Probably not," Percy said. "Do you want to work on this cheddar?"

A few minutes later, she was opening a can of tuna and putting the noodles into boiling water. When she turned around to ask him something, Percy was holding a manual razor quizzically.

"Where did you find that?"

"I don't know. It was just here. You should only have electric razors in your house," he said. "In case your sister tries to cut herself. You know that, don't you?"

"Why would she cut herself?" she asked, looking at him critically.

"It's pretty common," Percy said. "Kids in the hospital pick it up."

Annabeth was staring at him.

"And you should hide the aspirin and all the other drugs. And any booze your parents might have. I bet they've got some alcohol up there in that cabinet. It's up there, right? Don't worry, I won't drink it. I don't drink." He pointed at the liquor cabinet over the sink.

"Rachel doesn't drink, Percy," Annabeth said. "She would tell me if she did. And the only drugs she's taking are antidepressants."

"Do you know which ones?"

"No."

"I'd be curious," Percy said. "But that's just me. Are the noodles ready? Where do you keep your spices?"

Annabeth looked at the pot almost boiling over on the stove. "I'm trying to remember why I called you tonight."

He found two plates in the cabinet and two forks in the drawer. "Maybe you couldn't think of anyone else to call. Did you have other choices?" He pointed a fork in her direction. "You don't talk very much," he said. "I talk more than you do. But maybe there's something you've been wanting to say. Go ahead, I'm listening."

Annabeth drained the noodles. The steam rose up from the sink, a cloud of it enclosing both she and Percy. "I wonder if being depressed is like being underwater," she said. "Like Rachel's trapped underwater and she has to breathe all her air through a straw." Feeling vaguely embarrassed, she dumped the noodles back into the pot.

"I think that's asthma," Percy said unhelpfully.

"Forget it." Her ears felt warm with humiliation, and she asked if he was going to wash his hands before they ate, or if he just liked being a heathen.

"Sure. Did you want me to say a blessing, too? O Creator of the Universe, please bless this yellow cheese and these golden noodles—"

"Could you possibly be quiet for a change?" Annabeth asked.

"I could try," Percy said. And for about forty seconds, he did.

...

"Why are these glasses in the sink?" her mother asked when she and her father came home. "Did you have company while we were gone?"

"No." She had washed the plates and the silverware and the pot and the grater, but she had forgotten the two drinking glasses.

"You used two glasses just for yourself?" Her mother stood over them like a detective searching for evidence.

"Yes," Annabeth said, blinking owlishly. "I drank something twice. I was very thirsty."

Her mother took off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet. She had been increasingly crabby the past few days. Standing above her, Annnabeth could see the gray stripe down the part in her hair; she had forgotten to dye it.

"How's Rachel?" Annabeth asked.

"A little impatient," her mother said. "And a little tired. They're trying a new kind of medication but it makes her drowsy. She liked the book you picked out. I read her a story." Her mother looked at the refrigerator door. It was covered with pictures of Rachel and Annabeth: an almost-two-year-old Rachel holding a newborn Beth on her lap. A Halloween picture in which Rachel was a witch, and she was a fairy. Both of their school photos from kindergarten on. In the pictures taken of the two of them (at the lake, at her grandparents' house, on the swings at the playground), they looked like two stairsteps: Rachel always twenty-one months older and half a head shorter.

Her mother straightened a photo. "You and Rachel were always so different. As soon as she was born I could see exactly who she was. She was a fierce little red-faced thing. But you were quieter. You were an observer. As soon as you were old enough to walk, even though you were younger, it seemed you were keeping an eye on her."

"Mom, why haven't we told anyone?" Annabeth asked.

Athena touched the gray stripe in her hair.

Annabeth pointed out that no one had sent Rachel a get-well card. Even their grandparents didn't know she'd been hospitalized. And she pointed out that when Will Solace's father, down the block, had open-heart surgery, everyone had brought casseroles to his house and walked his dog until he got better.

"We don't have a dog," her mother said. "So we don't need anyone to walk it."

Leaving out the fact that he'd been in the house half an hour earlier, Annabeth told her mother about Percy and about his brother, what Percy had said about Goode and about Dr. Kronos.

Her mother picked a fleck of cheese off the table. "That sounds like third hand information, Beth. And I don't think it's a good idea for you to be consulting the neighbors about your sister."

"But Percy's mother is a psychiatrist."

"I remember Percy's mother being a little unusual," her mother said.

She stood up and put her shoes back on. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. I'm going upstairs. Here: I forgot to give you this." She reached into her pocket and handed Annabeth a folded piece of paper. On the front it said, Miss you too. Annabeth opened it up and turned it over. At the bottom of the page, in Rachel's pinched square writing, was a sentence in code: Aqw bgbl'r amkc.

You didn't come.

...

"Tell me what you're thinking and what you're feeling," the Grandma Therapist said.

Apparently someone had decided—since they were still living through a "period of stress"—that Annabeth would have a regular appointment every Tuesday at four-fifteen.

She pushed her spine against the back of her chair. She wished their chairs didn't face each other. Talking to a therapist, Annabeth thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, "Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?"

"I don't see what good this is supposed to do," Annabeth said. "Our sitting here talking."

The Grandma Therapist nodded. "The idea at first," she said, "is that you start to trust me."

Annabeth didn't understand why trust was relevant: it wasn't as if she were telling her secrets. "Rachel's been in the hospital," she said.

"I heard. Your mother spoke to me on the phone about that."

"Do you think Goode is a terrible hospital?" Annabeth asked.

"No. But I'm not an expert." The Grandma Therapist looked at her as if it were her turn to talk. It almost always seemed to be her turn, and it was exhausting. The Grandma Therapist wore white plastic glasses that matched the white of her hair. She wore one silver earring, and Annabeth sort of wanted to ask what happened to the other one, but she didn't.

A couple of minutes ticked by.

"Where is it coming from?" Annabeth asked. She meant Rachel's depression. She understood unhappiness when it came attached to something: to someone dying or to a friend moving away or to being disappointed. But Rachel's unhappiness—or whatever it was—seemed to exist independently, on its own. She pictured stunted, faceless creatures manufacturing it in a cave somewhere, like a toxic gas.

"I'm not sure what you're asking. Where is what coming from?"

Annabeth turned sideways in her chair and kicked at the leg of the little table where she kept the plant and the clock and the tissues and the jar of stones.

"Never mind."

"Are you angry about something?"

"No."

"It seems as if you're angry. Or maybe upset. You're not looking at me."

"I'm not upset." Through a slit in the blinds, Annabeth could see a slice of grey sky full of clouds. She tried not to picture the Grandma Therapist as a giant ear, thinking it rude even if she wouldn't be able to read her mind. "How long does it usually take?" Annabeth asked.

"Do you mean, how long does it take for a person to recover from depression?"

Annabeth nodded.

"That varies a lot from person to person. Every instance of mental illness is unique."

Annabeth took a couple of stones from the jar. "It's not 'mental illness.'"

The Grandma Therapist tilted her head.

"That's not what it's called," Annabeth said. "That makes it sound like Rachel's crazy."

"I'm not saying your sister is crazy," the Grandma Therapist said. "I wouldn't use that word for anyone."

Annabeth kicked the leg of the table again.

She stood up and lifted the table carefully, setting it down out of reach. Then she sat in her chair again, facing her. "You still haven't told me what you're feeling."

"That's because I don't like the word feeling," Annabeth expounded.

"Why not?"

Annabeth told her about her family reputation for being stoic. "I'm not a crier," she said. "I never cry."

"Maybe that's something we should talk about."

Annabeth tried to push herself even farther back in her chair.

"It isn't easy to live with uncertainty." The Grandma Therapist folded her hands. "Maybe you wish you could wave a magic wand and put everything back the way it was."

"I don't want a magic wand." Was she making fun of her? "I just want Rachel to get better."

"Of course you do." She slowly leaned toward her, and Annabeth felt her heart begin to pound. "But aren't we here primarily to talk about you? About what you're going through and how you're feeling?"

"No." Annabeth looked down at the Grandma Therapist's shoes. They were made of boiled wool or felt and looked like slippers.

"Why not?"

"Because. There's no me without Rachel," Annabeth explained. Simple.

...

"Try not to say anything to upset her," her mother berated.

"I'm not going to upset her. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't treat me like a six-year-old." Annabeth looked out the car window.

They didn't talk on the way there. The security officer—a woman this time—looked at the licorice and squeezed Rachel's pillow. "Just checking." She winked.

Annabeth opened the licorice strings and started to tie them into knots while waiting. She thought about spelling Rachel's name with them. She thought about the way Rachel would roll her eyes when she told her their parents hadn't wanted to let her come.

"Here she is," her father said, and when Annabeth looked up, she saw the person he had probably mistaken for her sister. She was about the right height but her hair was oily and unwashed, and her lips were swollen, chapped, and bloody. She was wearing a pair of shapeless green pants and a hospital gown.

"It's good to see you, sweetheart," her mother said.

The Rachel-like person sat down.

Her father threw Annabeth a look: Easy does it.

"Did you have a rough day?" Her mother leaned forward in her chair. "You look a little tired. Have you been sleeping?" She tucked Rachel's hair behind her ears, wiped something from her face (was Rachel crying?), found a tube of lip balm in her pocket, and applied it carefully to Rachel's lips. Her father and Annabeth had both turned to stone.

"It's alright, Rosy Rachel," her mother said. "You're just worn out. It'll be alright." Slowly and awkwardly, because Rachel was taller and much longer-limbed than she was, her mother pulled Rachel onto her lap. Rachel sagged against her. "There we go," her mother said. She had turned into the mother Annabeth remembered from when she was little, the mother who would come into her room at night when she was sick and scribble pictures on her back with her fingernails. "Sweet Rachel," she said. "Beth came to see you."

Her father excused himself to get a cup of water.

Annabeth passed Rachel the licorice ("Hey, Rachel"), but she didn't seem to notice.

"Should I read to you again?" her mother asked. "Should I read you a story?"

Rachel pushed her face into her mother's shoulder. She had bitten her fingernails down so far there was almost nothing left of them.

Clumsily, because she still held Rachel on her lap, her mother opened the book she had brought with her: Classic Fairy Tales for Children, the book Annabeth had picked out the week before.

Her father came back into the room, and all of them listened while her mother read from "Snow White." Soon the seven dwarves were weeping around the coffin. Right before the prince came, Annabeth wrote Rachel a note. Love you, it said in code. As big as the sky.

Rachel picked up the crayon—she wasn't allowed to use pencils—and circled one word. Uma: sky.

...

"There are always going to be ups and downs," her father said in the car. "Two steps forward, one step back."

Rachel had asked Annabeth to save her.

Annabeth opened both the back windows, and even though it was cold, no one asked her to close them.

They pulled out of the parking lot and stopped at a light, and she watched the traffic come and go. How could everyone keep driving as if nothing had happened? She wanted to get out of the car and slam the door and stand in the middle of the intersection and stop every single passing vehicle and grab every driver by the collar so she could say, Look. Look what's happened to my family. Look.

...

Annabeth went to bed early that night and woke up a few hours later to the sound of her parents engaged in their new hobby: arguing in the kitchen. The kitchen was directly under her bedroom; their voices floated toward her through the vents.

"All I'm saying is that we should ask for another opinion," her father said. "There have to be other options out there."

"Out where?" her mother asked. "We can't be changing our minds every day. We're supposed to be consistent and stay the course."

"Stay the course?" Her father was shouting. "My god, Athena, she can barely hold her head up. She's drugged to the gills. Have you really looked at her?"

"Do you think I'm blind?" her mother shouted back. "Of course I've looked at her. What else do I spend my time doing?"

Her father said something Annabeth couldn't hear.

"Better drugged than trying to kill herself," her mother said.

...

Percy wasn't at school the next day, so Annabeth decided to call him that afternoon when she got off the bus.

"No, I'm sorry. He's out for a bit. Is this Annabeth? How nice that you've called—really, that's sweet. This is Percy's mother, Sally. I'm so glad you two are becoming friends."

"Um, yeah. He was absent today so I was just calling to—"

"All these years and you've lived so near each other, just down the street, and now—well, I'm delighted to see it."

"Great," Annabeth said. "So maybe you could tell him—"

"He's a person with character. Real moral fiber. I've often told him that he has an old soul. And a lot of horse sense. And that isn't common in a person his age, as I'm sure you know."

"Right," Annabeth said, feeling awkward. "Would you ask him to call me?"

…

Rachel, Annabeth wrote. I'm sorry you weren't feeling well yesterday. Annabeth bit the tip of her pen and switched to code. If there's anything you need me to do—

"Someone's at the door for you, Beth," her mother called. "It's a young man."

A young man? Annabeth folded up the letter she'd been writing and went down the stairs and saw the familiar unruly black hair, the torn jeans and t-shirt, the sea green eyes. "Hey, Percy."

Her mother stood in the hall, a department store dummy.

Annabeth resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Mom," she said. "You remember Percy Jackson."

"Nice to see you again," her mother said, all cool politeness. "Beth, it's getting late for visitors."

"It's Friday, Mom," Annabeth said. "Besides, Percy and I are working on a history project together." This was a lie, and her mother probably suspected that it was a lie, but how would she prove it?

Percy followed her down the hall and into the kitchen, where he immediately opened the refrigerator. "Are these eggs organic?" he asked. "I could make us an omelet."

"It's nine o'clock, Percy. Didn't you have dinner?"

"Yeah, I ate. Just antsy," he supplied for some sort of explanation. He closed the refrigerator and pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. "My mom said you called me."

Annabeth felt her face flush. It sounded awful out of context. "You weren't in school today," she briskly expounded. "So I was just wondering."

"Wondering what?" He never allowed her to speak in half-sentences before pressing. He never made things easy for her. It was equal parts infuriating and endearing, but Annabeth was starting to think that was just Percy overall—annoying and amazing and adorable. Wait, not the last one. Just annoying and amazing.

"Why you were absent. Were you sick?" Annabeth asked.

"No. I had some stuff I needed to do." He was watching her closely.

She sat down across from him. "You're probably absent a lot. I go to school every day," she informed him.

"Yep." He picked up her index finger and tapped it against the table. "You're pretty faithful."

Her mother breezed into the kitchen and noisily poured herself a glass of water. Annabeth unfolded the note she'd been writing to Rachel and picked up a pencil.

"Okay, about Paul Revere," Annabeth said. "Was it 'One if by land and two if by sea' or was it the other way around?" Her mother left.

"I get the feeling your mother doesn't like me very much," Percy said dryly.

"She doesn't," Annabeth agreed. She smoothed out the piece of paper. "We went to see Rachel last night."

"Yeah?" Percy stood up and paced around the kitchen, picking up a jar full of sunflower seeds. "These are good for you, right?"

She said they probably were. "She didn't look good," she said. "My mom read her a story. A fairy tale for little kids."

Percy unscrewed the lid of the jar and tossed back a handful of sunflower seeds. "Are you okay?"

"I wasn't talking about me."

"I noticed."

"Most people don't know what it's like," Annabeth said.

"Then tell me. What is it like?" Percy leaned against the cabinet, crossing his legs with a graceful ease.

"I think it's like a trapdoor," Annabeth said. "Rachel's depression—it's like a trapdoor under her feet. Sometimes the trapdoor is closed and she walks right by it, but all of a sudden one day it opens and she plunges through. And there she is, walking around underneath us, under the life she's supposed to be living, but she can't find a ladder and she can't get back." Annabeth started doodling on the piece of paper. "I guess that's my metaphor for the day."

"It was a simile," Percy said. "If you use the word like, it's a simile."

She stared at him. "How do you know things like that?" she asked.

"I pay attention. I don't think teachers think I do, but I do," Percy said. "I stay alert." He screwed the lid back onto the jar and set it down by the stove. "Can I have some water?"

"Sure. Glasses are behind you." She was starting to wish that she hadn't called him. He was distracted half the time, and he had a penchant of asking all the wrong questions, questions that made her parents look bad and ignorant, questions that made Rachel irresponsible. Questions that made her uncomfortable. "Did everything turn out all right with your brother?" she asked finally. "I don't remember his name."

"Luke?" Percy filled up a glass. "Luke lives in Cleveland."

"Oh. Is that good?" She scrunched up her nose in confusion.

"For him it is. He wants to be an EMT—you know, one of the guys in the ambulance who shows up when you dial 9-1-1."

"That's great. Well, thanks for coming over, Percy," she said.

"Do you want me to leave now? Am I dismissed?" he mocked.

She shrugged.

He noticed the paper she'd been doodling on. He turned it toward him. "What is this?" he asked.

"It's just a note," she said. "Sometimes I write them to Rachel in code."

"You write code?" His eyes burned holes into her.

She avoided his piercing gaze and ended up explaining how it worked—two letters forward in the first word, two letters back.

"Write me a sentence," Percy requested.

She wrote him a sentence. Kv dccjq tgcnna jmlcjw.

He took the pencil out of her hand. She watched his lips move while he figured it out. Finally he nodded. "You don't need to feel lonely right now," he said in reply to the code.

Annabeth felt a tightening sensation at the back of her throat, but she fought it down.

Her mother's voice found its way into the kitchen. "Are you two working on your history project?"

...

That night, Annabeth had a dream that a genie who looked like Mr. Chiron came out from behind the bathroom mirror in a cloud of blue smoke and offered her three wishes, and after she wished for world peace and an end to global warming and the melting of the ice caps, he clapped his hands and said, "That's three" (counting global warming and the ice caps separately instead of together), and then he yelled at her and told her she'd forgotten Rachel. "What on earth were you thinking?" he asked, fading back into the mirror.

Annabeth got out of bed, finding it rather difficult to sleep. She contemplated calling Percy, thought about all the weird things he'd surely make of the dream, and decided against it.

…

"Are the appointments… helpful?" her mother asked later the next afternoon.

Annabeth thought about the Grandma Therapist. She wasn't sure—she didn't know what they were supposed to accomplish.

When she was in the Grandma Therapist's office, she generally wanted to be anywhere else. When she wasn't in her office, she often found herself thinking about her coiled rug and her jar of stones.

"There are a lot of therapists out there to choose from," her mother said. "You want someone you can talk to."

Annabeth told her she might as well stick with the person she had.

…

She came home in the middle of October, on a Saturday, after twenty-two days in the psychiatric ward at Goode. The leaves had turned while she was gone. From the living room window, Annabeth watched her unfold her skinny long-legged self from the car and look up at the house. She scanned each window, left to right, as if she were trying to read it and memorize it. In her arms she carried a paper bag full of clothes and her favorite pillow. Annabeth opened the door and watched Rachel walk toward her.

"Hey there," Annabeth said.

"Hey yourself. I'm back from the hellhole." She gave Annabeth a one-armed hug, smiling wryly.

Her mother asked her not to swear.

Rachel took a long shower while their parents and Annabeth all pretended not to wait for her, and then the four of them ate lunch together. It felt awkward and formal (they didn't normally eat lunch as a family), and none of them seemed to know what to say. Rachel tucked her long damp hair into the back of her t-shirt and started to talk about a kid at the hospital whose parents had sexually abused him so that he ended up in foster care. With gruesome detail.

Her mother interrupted her and changed the subject. "I'm going to plant some bulbs this afternoon," she said. She went on and on about where she was going to plant the bulbs and how she was going to make sure that squirrels wouldn't dig them up. Her father nodded and listened as if he would be tested on the subject later.

Annabeth felt as if she were eating lunch with someone else's family—with a group of well-meaning but unpredictable strangers.

"We could go for a walk this afternoon," her father said. "Or maybe Rachel wants to call a friend?"

"No. I'm drained. I'm going to take a nap." Rachel went up to her room and slept until dinner.

At six o'clock, they were sitting around the table again, her father offering a rambling description of his plan to fix the next semester's curriculum. Rachel sat next to Annabeth and ate almost nothing. Her arms were bony, as narrow as blades.

Annabeth decided to fill up the air in front of them with a description of a food fight in the cafeteria at school and a story about a girl in her gym class piercing her belly button with a needle; and then, without thinking about it, she described one of the quirky, aimless conversations she'd had on the bus that week with Percy.

"Percy?" Rachel pulled back her thick red hair as if removing a barrier between them. "Do you mean Percy Jackson?"

"I was only talking to him," Annabeth said.

Rachel crushed a lima bean with her fork. "Interesting," she said. "You don't like him, do you? You know he was left back at least once. There's something weird about that family."

"He's in my history class," Annabeth said. "Don't make a big deal of it."

"I don't think I'm making a big deal. I just asked you a question."

"You asked me two questions."

"Let's make it three, then," Rachel said. "Why are you hanging out with Percy Jackson?"

"Does 'hanging out' mean dating?" her mother asked. "You aren't dating him, are you?"

So what if she was? Annabeth most certainly was not, but that was hardly the point. She crumpled her napkin and put it in the center of her plate, quickly fed up with the intrusive interrogation. "May I be excused?"

"After you clear the dishes, you may be excused," her mother said. Her tone suggested that Annabeth barely spoke English.

"I've cleared them about a hundred times in a row now," Annabeth said.

"That's because you weren't locked up in a psych ward," Rachel said. She licked her fork. "Like lucky me."

…

The next morning, there were half a dozen pills lined up on the kitchen counter for Rachel, a little multicolored cluster.

"What are all those for?" Annabeth asked.

"They're to keep me from turning into a werewolf." Rachel picked up a bread knife and clutched it in her fist. "Someone stop me before I kill again!" She swallowed the pills with a glass of juice. "God, those are tasty. You really should try some." Half an hour later, at 10 a.m., she was asleep on the couch.

"They're still working some of the kinks out of her medications," her father said. "And I'm sure she's tired. It's hard to sleep in a hospital."

Annabeth wondered whether Goode had changed Rachel. "Do you think we should hide her pills?" she asked.

"Your mother's taking care of that," he said.

Annabeth looked up at the cabinet over the sink, where her parents kept some wine and a bottle of gin.

"It's great having her back," her father said. "Isn't it?"

Annabeth agreed that it was.

He put his arm around her shoulders. "You know we're all counting on you," he said. "You're the steady Eddie of this group."

Annabeth nodded.

"There might be a period of adjustment," her father said. "But the worst is behind us." He gave her a squeeze. "We got through it. Right?"

…

Percy called her that afternoon as she was doing her homework. "How are things going so far?" he asked. "How's the reentry?"

"Okay, I guess." Annabeth carried the phone into her bedroom. "She sleeps a lot."

"How much is a lot?" She could picture him running the palm of his hand across his hair. It was strange, if not a little endearing.

She told him she wasn't counting the hours. "We just want to put all this behind us."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Percy said. "Do your parents have to take time off from work this week to stay home with her?"

"What do you mean?" Annabeth flopped down on her bed. "She's going to school. You'll see her tomorrow. She'll be on the bus."

There was a silence. "Going back to school so soon will probably be hard for her," Percy said.

"What else is she going to do?" Annabeth asked. "She's a kid. Kids go to school."

"Yeah, mostly they do," Percy said. Another silence. "My mother might be willing to talk to your parents."

Annabeth remembered what her mother had said about Sally Jackson. "I don't think my parents want to talk to anyone. Besides, Rachel seems fine, mostly. Tired but fine. And my parents seem fine. And I guess I'm fine also."

"Glad to hear it," Percy said. "Unanimity. Family harmony. Very impressive."

"Are you making fun of me?" she asked.

"Yeah. Is that going to bother you?"

She thought about it for a minute. "No," she said. "Probably not."

"That's what I like about you," Percy said.

"What?"

"Hang on a second."

She heard him talking to someone—probably his mother.

"Okay, sorry," he said, coming back to the phone.

She wanted to ask him what he liked about her, but she didn't know how to raise the subject. So she told him she'd see him on the bus, and she hung up the phone.

…

The next morning at breakfast, Rachel contemplated the multicolored pills on the kitchen counter. She took the first pill while her mother watched. She took the second pill and the third. "Ho-hum," she said, swallowing the rest of the pills all at once with a glass of juice.

Then she handed her mother the empty glass and turned to Annabeth and showed her the pills in a little wet cluster under her tongue.

…

They walked to the bus stop together over a carpet of leaves. The air was cold and smelled somehow of metal. "Do I look bad?" Rachel asked.

"No."

"Maybe that's because you're looking at my feet."

Annabeth stopped walking and faced her. Rachel was two inches shorter than she was, so she had to look down, which might have made the bags under her eyes seem bigger. "You're pale," she said. "But not very."

"Pale is okay," Rachel said. "Pale is acceptable." They kept walking. "The only pills I didn't take are the ones that make me tired," she said. "In case that's why you're sulking."

"I'm not sulking." The morning was gray; clouds were collecting in layers above them. "I don't think you should do that, though," she said. "Mom thinks you swallowed them." Rachel had spit the pills into the bushes when they left the house.

"I need to stay awake at school, for god's sake," Rachel said. "I'll be behind in all my classes."

"You're going to catch up fast," Annabeth told her. Their mother had written her a note that said, Please excuse Rachel Chase for her lengthy absence. She was ill.

Rachel took off her backpack and unzipped it. "Do you know what one of the nurses at the hospital told me? She said I was selfish and self indulgent. She said I was putting my entire family through a very hard time."

"The nurse doesn't know you, Rachel," Annabeth said.

"Nobody knows me." Rachel rooted through her backpack.

Annabeth wanted to tell her that she knew her. Didn't she? "You should probably tell Mom you didn't swallow those pills," she said.

She didn't answer.

"What are you looking for?" Annabeth asked. "We're going to miss the bus."

"I don't give a shit about the bus." Rachel folded a stick of gum into her mouth. Her hands were shaking. "If you want to tell Mom I didn't take the pills, you can go ahead. I'm not going to stop you." She zipped up her backpack. "If you want to rat on me and watch Mom get all bent out of shape, that's your decision. I'm just trying to stay awake at school like everyone else." She was looking at Annabeth, tight-lipped, trembling, waiting.

They were both waiting. Leaves were falling from the tree above them. "It's okay," Annabeth said. "I'm not going to tell."

"Thanks, Annie," Rachel said. "Sorry if I've been a jerk lately."

"You aren't a jerk."

They started walking again. "Being in a piss-poor mood is one of the side effects of some of these drugs," Rachel said. "Freaking mood swings and irritability. Did I mention that?"

"No, but I guess I'm finding out about it," Annabeth said.

…

A good day. Two good days. Rachel went to school and came home and didn't seem to care about the kids who gawked and whispered about her in the hall. At dinner, she entertained them with an imitation of her science teacher, Mr. Dionysus.

And then a bad day. Rachel refused to get out of bed. Her mother called in sick to work, brought Rachel's pills upstairs in a cup, and told Annabeth to eat something before she went to school.

…

As a precaution, her mother said (not that anything was wrong, and not that Rachel wasn't doing well, because of course she was), her parents had decided to sign all four of them up for family therapy.

"You've got to be kidding," Rachel said.

"Of course I'm not kidding." Her mother smiled a tight little smile. "It'll give us a chance to talk to each other. And to meet other families. Families who might be going through…"

"Going through what?" Rachel asked. She was back to picking at her fingers.

"Well, through something similar. To what we're going through."

When Rachel asked what "we" were going through, her mother said she would rather get into that conversation at a later time.

The group met on the fourth Friday of every month at Goode. ("My favorite place. They have such a nice mental ward," Rachel said.) On their way to our first session, she draped one of her legs across Annabeth's lap and fell asleep in the car.

The group—about eighteen of them—met in a conference room with a low, pockmarked ceiling. They sat in a circle of plastic chairs. The girl on Annabeth's right had a lot of metal in her face and what looked like a homemade tattoo on the side of her neck. Annabeth couldn't tell what it was. Maybe a bat or a butterfly.

Rachel passed Annabeth a note by scribbling something on a slip of paper, then crumpling it up and dropping it at her feet. Annabeth picked it up. K jmtc jgt yaacqqmpgcq, it said. I love her accessories. Rachel had drawn an arrow pointing toward the tattooed girl.

The woman who was running the group—Annabethnoticed that she blinked every few seconds as if wearing ill-fitting contact lenses—asked them to reflect about their family's methods of communication.

After several minutes of discussion, the family across from them tried to agree that they wouldn't yell at each other as often. "Not so much as we're used to," the mother said.

The blinking woman said she thought everyone in the room could probably benefit from the family's comments. Calm and consistent ways of speaking were especially important for people with depression and mood swings, she said.

Annabeth took a pen out of her pocket and wrote back to Rachel. Aqw lctcp vqnf kc: yjcv gq kv jgic vq zc fgrtguugf? You never told me: what is it like to be depressed? Annabeth crumpled the note and tossed it under her chair. She quickly stepped on it without looking. A minute later, she bent as if to scratch her leg, then picked the note up.

One of the fathers on the opposite side of the circle complained that kids didn't listen to their parents anymore. He said that personally he was sick of it; he was sick of his son coming in late and going who knew where with his sloppy friends, all of them sloppy and rude like his son—they had no self-respect.

The boy who must have been his son didn't even react. He wore the hood of his sweatshirt pulled forward so that it hid almost all of his face, and he didn't seem to notice that his father had spoken.

Another crumpled piece of paper landed by Annabeth feet. She dragged it under her chair with her sneaker while the parents in the family that had agreed not to yell so much began to shout at each other.

Annabeth reached down and opened her sister's note. In the middle of the paper Rachel had written the word sad (ucf) and crossed it out. Lower down and to the side she'd written small and crossed it out. Then, at the bottom of the page, in pinched-looking letters in the corner, she'd written nospace nolight noair.

The blinking woman called a five-minute break. Annabeth put the note in her pocket and went out to the hall and found the girl with the homemade tattoo taking out some serious anger against a vending machine. "Do you have any money on you?" she asked.

Annabeth had a dollar but told her she didn't.

Rachel sauntered out into the hallway. "Look," she said. "That's Kronos. That guy over there with the little goatee." She waved. "I guess he's busy. He's off to ruin somebody's life now. Bye, Dr. Kronos! See you in therapy!"

The tattooed girl laughed.

"Why don't you get a different doctor if you hate him so much?" Annabeth asked Rachel.

The tattooed girl answered. "Because all psychiatrists are crazy. That's why they're psychiatrists." She looked at Rachel. "Have you got anything on you?"

Annabeth thought she was still asking for vending machine money, but Rachel understood her. "All my meds are at home," she said. "Sorry."

"Next time," the girl said. She touched a metal stud in her lip. "How many times were you in?" she asked.

"Once," Rachel said. "How about you?"

The girl held up three fingers, then walked away.

"I'd rather drown myself in a sink than go back to Goode," Rachel said.

"You wouldn't have given her any pills," Annabeth said. "Would you?"

"What do you think?" Rachel asked.

"I think it would be stupid."

She grabbed Annabeth's jeans by the belt loops. "And are you calling me stupid?"

"No."

"Good." She shook her gently, jerking the belt loops back and forth.

"Everything I tell you is confidential, Beth," she said. "Every single syllable."

Annabeth nodded.

"You're the only person I can trust. There's no one else. I need to trust you."

Annabeth told her not to worry. She could.

…

The good days outnumbered the bad ones, which seemed important. In Annabeth's mind, she tried to stack the better days against the days when she came home and found Rachel in bed, or the day when she found her in the kitchen standing in front of the sink with the water running.

"What are you doing, Rachel?" she asked.

"I don't know," she said.

She reached around her and turned off the water.

When the Grandma Therapist asked her how her sister was doing, Annabeth felt it was important to be loyal to Rachel, so she said fine.

...

"Do you like pizza?" Percy asked on the phone one day.

"I guess."

"You guess?"

"I don't know," Annabeth said. "I like cheese, I guess."

Percy muttered something incoherent under his breath. "That's it? That's kind of plain, don't you think?"

"So am I," Annabeth pointed out.

He hummed in agreement. "Can you come over?"

"Probably. Why?"

"I discovered pineapple on pizza a couple weeks ago, and now I'm making three different pizzas with all sorts of different fruits on them. I need someone to try eating them."

"Why don't you call your other friends?"

"You're probably the least biased, especially if all you eat is cheese."

"How did you know I'd be the most unbiased?"

"I don't know." He paused. "Just had a hunch."

She swallowed noisily. "I'll be over in ten. I want to check on Rachel once first."

…

"Hey." Rachel's friend Reyna stopped her in the hall by a long row of lockers. Rachel had been home for eleven days. "I just thought I should mention something. You know, maybe it's none of my business. But Rachel isn't in class as often anymore."

"She's been taking some sick days," Annabeth said. "And sometimes she has a doctor's appointment. It's not a big deal."

"Yeah, I figured." Reyna removed a hair from her sweater. "But I'm talking about the days when she's here at school. Like today. She's in the building somewhere but she isn't in class."

"What do you mean, she isn't in class?" Annabeth felt as if her entire body had been dipped in a vat of cold water.

"We're in the same math and the same science," Reyna said, "and she used to cut class once in a while, but now it happens a lot. She wasn't there last period. She missed yesterday, too."

Someone bumped into Annabeth with an armload of books. Annabeth looked at Reyna's perfect, smooth, straight black hair and the perfect clothes she had picked out that morning, the beaded necklace and bracelet that matched. This could have happened to you, Annabeth thought. This could have happened to you instead of my sister.

"I have to go," Reyna said. "But I wanted to tell you. You know, in case."

In case of what? Annabeth had always liked Reyna, but now she wanted to uncap the marker she kept in her pocket and write something obscene on the front of her sweater. "Do you know where she goes?" she asked. "When she's not in class?"

Reyna was already walking away. "I think she hangs out in the bathrooms sometimes," she said.

…

"Rachel? Are you in here?"

There were two girls' bathrooms on the first floor, one on the second, and one on the third. It took Annabeth nine minutes, running up the stairs, to look in each one.

"Rachel?"

No answer. Annabeth didn't even know which classes she had decided to cut.

…

"Don't flip out on me," Rachel said. "I'm not ditching that often. I just need to think sometimes."

"Oh," Annabeth said. "About what?" They were walking home from the bus stop.

It was almost Halloween, and a couple of little kids in costumes were running around on the neighbors' front lawn.

"I can't sit there hour after hour with people talking at me." She moved her hands in the air like little puppets. "It all seems so pointless."

"Why is it pointless?" School could be boring sometimes, Annabeth thought, but as long as you went to class and read and learned things, it was hard to argue that it didn't have a point at all.

Simba was waiting on the front porch for them, cleaning his whiskers and looking annoyed.

"I think I'm failing French," Rachel said.

Annabeth dug her house key out of her pocket. "You could get a tutor."

"Yeah. Except that I'm also failing chemistry. I hate Mrs. Aphrodite. She's a walking fossil." Rachel picked Simba up and scratched his furry stomach. "You probably have all As, don't you?"

"No." Annabeth had a B in biology. She opened the door; the house was quiet. "How are you ditching and not getting caught?" she asked when Rachel put Simba down. "Doesn't the office call home when you're missing?"

"They only call if you don't have a written excuse."

"And?"

Rachel paused, then opened her backpack and showed her a note on her mother's new monogrammed stationery: Please excuse Rachel Chase at 11:35 today; she has a doctor's appointment.

Annabeth looked at the signature; it was almost perfect. "You could get in a lot of trouble for this."

"Maybe. But the only way that would happen"—Rachel tore up the note—"would be if someone found out and told the school."

...

"If someone tells you to keep a secret, would you keep it?" Annabeth asked no one in particular.

Percy looked away from the bus window. He frowned at her. "It depends what type of secret. Why?" His eyes glittered with knowing.

"No reason."

"How's your sister doing?"

"Okay," she said, her voice curt, signifying that was the end of that topic. She listened quietly instead as Percy told her about blue whales, Green Day's latest song, and a DVD he'd rented from Blockbuster recently.

…

"Rachel's prescriptions," her father said. "They're going to try something new."

"What kind of pills are they?" I'd be curious, Percy had said not so long ago.

Her father opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything, her mother held up her hand: "I don't think Annabeth needs to know that."

Her father closed his mouth and pretended to zip it.

"Why are they trying something new?" Annabeth asked. "How would they know if something was wrong with the old pills?" She held a striped sock in one hand and a plain one in the other.

Her mother tucked the pills in her pocket and shook out a pillowcase with a snap. "What are you getting at?"

"Nothing. So are the new pills antidepressants?"

"I'll be downstairs if anyone needs me," her father said. He left the room.

Annabeth decided to segregate ankle-from knee socks. "Maybe you should get Rachel a different psychiatrist," she said.

"I don't think so." Her mother shook out another pillowcase.

"Percy's mother hated Dr. Kronos."

"That's enough, Beth."

"Percy says the doctors at Goode just lock the kids up and give them drugs, and if we don't even know whether the pills Rachel's been taking do her any good—"

"I said that's enough!" Her mother was clutching the rim of the laundry basket. Her knuckles were white. "Whatever you're trying to say, I don't want to hear it. It doesn't help to have you latching on to half-baked theories that you've picked up at school from people who wouldn't know a hospital from a hole in the ground. I don't have time for that, Annabeth."

Maybe you should make the time, she thought. She left the socks where they were and went back to her room.

About ten minutes later, she heard her mother carry the laundry basket downstairs. She listened for footsteps and the clink of dishes in the kitchen.

Then she went into her parents' room and opened their closet and unzipped the outer compartment of her mother's blue suitcase. She always hid their birthday presents inside it. She found the two bottles. Chase, Rachel, each of them said. She copied down the information from the labels and zipped the prescriptions back into the suitcase.

The music pounded, louder and louder, in Rachel's room.

…

The new pills (she started taking them the next morning) didn't make Rachel drowsy. They made her angry. She called her father a jackass.

"You people don't give a crap about me," she said.

Annabeth had already promised she could trust her. Who did she mean by you people?

…

"Were you checking the bathrooms again?" Percy asked.

Annabeth had just flopped down at the desk next to his. They were in Mr. Chiron's room, supposedly reading the morning paper. Every Monday they spent the first fifteen minutes of the period trying to find relevant or "stimulating" articles about current events. Most of the kids read the comics or did the puzzle.

"If you keep this up, your teachers are going to think you've got diarrhea." Percy crossed his legs at the knee and leaned back in his chair, the newspaper open on his lap. He actually read it; other than the faded long-sleeved t-shirt and the unruly head, he looked like a businessman on his lunch break. "Besides," he said, "didn't you tell me that you hate to miss class?"

"I should probably be checking the locker room," Annabeth said. She was still breathing hard from running. "But Rachel doesn't like gym."

Mr. Chiron decided to get out from behind his desk and circumnavigate like Columbus around the room. He was jiggling a piece of chalk in his hand. "Mr. Jackson? I'm sure you won't mind if I ask you to cease and desist from all conversation."

"Right," said Percy.

"Ms. Chase?" Mr. Chiron paused beside her desk, still jiggling his chalk. "Are you finding anything illuminating or relevant in this morning's news?"

Annabeth pushed her hair behind her ears and stared at the newspaper on her desk. "I'm still looking," she said.

"Good. You don't want to give up." Mr. Chiron leaned toward her and turned the page. Only after he was back in his chair at the front of the room did she notice that he had left a chalky thumbprint in the left-hand corner of an article about depression. Teenage Epidemic? the headline asked. And beneath the headline, in smaller letters: How Safe Are the Drugs?

Annabeth tore the article out (Mr. Chiron pretended not to notice) and wrote Percy a note in the upper margin: Vcnm ml vjg zsq? Then she watched him slowly puzzle it out. Talk on the bus?

…

A bunch of guys hooted and whistled when she sat on the last torn seat by the emergency exit, right next to Percy. "Hey, Percy Jay! Getting some action?"

Percy ignored them. "What's up?" he asked. He smelled like the ocean.

Annabeth was full of a nagging uneasy feeling. A stand of gray trees flickered by through her window. Rachel wasn't on the bus. Her mother had picked her up earlier for a doctor's appointment.

"Remember you asked me about the kinds of medicines Rachel was taking?"

Percy nodded. The bus dragged itself up a hill.

"I wrote the names down," she said. They had reached the first stop. The bus doors opened with a wheeze and closed with a sigh. In the seventh grade, she'd seen a movie about the human heart, and ever since, she'd thought that a bus door opening looked like the valve of a heart when the blood was pumped through. "I have them here in my pocket."

They stopped at a light. She found the piece of paper where she had written down the names of the drugs, and she showed it to Percy. She had even remembered to write down the doses. "So? What do you think?"

Percy barely glanced at it. "I think…that I'm not a pharmacist," he said. "You haven't asked, but I might as well tell you: I'm planning to be a chef. My mom trained me well, and I'm going to open my own restaurant. You can come if you want—I'll save you a table."

They went over a bump; her leg pressed against his, and she tried not to blush at the sudden contact. She put the piece of paper back in her pocket. "I'll eat in your restaurant," Annabeth said. "But in the meantime, would you help me find out about these pills?"

…

Chocolate chip cookies. She was almost beginning to like the taste, finally getting over the odd color. Truthfully, they were some of the best cookies she'd ever had in her entire fourteen years of life. And that was an awfully long time.

"Percy, I thought you were going to help me with this," Annabeth said.

"I am helping." He had set her up with a laptop at his kitchen table. "I offer clever commentary."

"You aren't helping. You're cooking."

"This is just a snack," Percy said. "But it looks pretty good." He had spread an assortment of crackers with a mixture of cream cheese and horseradish and capers (what the heck were capers?) and dusted the top of each with some kind of spice.

She looked back at the computer screen. The websites she had found so far were confusing. They talked about "suicidal ideation" and the side effects of antidepressants: weight loss, weight gain, nausea, dry mouth, dizziness, sweating, tremors, sleep disturbances, mood changes, blurred vision, kidney failure, seizures, and yawning. Yawning? One of the websites warned about the danger of any antidepressant prescribed to anyone under eighteen.

"You're going to love these," Percy said, putting a wooden platter of tiny open-faced sandwiches near her on the table and sitting down. "What have you found out so far?"

"I don't know," she said.

He looked at her hands, which were in her lap instead of on the laptop. "Did you try asking the computer to help you?" he asked sarcastically. "I've heard if you ask nicely, it'll hand you the answers."

She pushed it toward him. He ate a cracker. Then he said, after swallowing, "Maybe you should decide what it is you want to find out. And what you don't want to find out."

"What do you mean?"

"Forget it. Here." He handed her a cracker. "You've got to try one of these. The fresh pepper is crucial."

She ate a small bite—a corner of a cracker. It was actually pretty good. She told him so.

"Do your parents know she's ditching class?" Percy asked, starting to type.

"My parents are impossible to talk to. And Rachel told me not to tell them. I don't want them sending her back to Goode."

"There are worse things than Goode," Percy said. "Besides, if she had a relapse, they could send her somewhere else. They could send her to an RTC out of state, and that'd be way better."

"What's an RTC?"

"A residential treatment center." Percy kept typing. "Like a halfway house."

"So it's like a jail?"

"No." He rolled his eyes. "You worry about the most unrealistic, irrational things. It's a treatment center. Like the one near the Superstop, except that that one is for alcoholics. You aren't eating your snack."

Annabeth lowered her voice. "We're not going to send Rachel away to live with alcoholics." She pictured her sister in a run-down shack in the woods with a bunch of old men, all making crude jokes. She looked so small in her imagination, her face gaunt and pale, her hair dull and dry.

"Okay, whatever," Percy said, ceasing his scrolling. "Here's one of her prescriptions. And it's got a black box."

"A black box?" Annabeth pulled the laptop toward her. "Do you mean, like, the ones on airplanes?"

Percy looked at her as if to see whether she was joking. "Um, no. A black box is a warning. It means that anyone taking these pills should be kept 'under close observation.' There's an increased risk of suicide." He pointed to the screen. "'Especially during the first few weeks.'"

Annabeth stared at the laptop. "Close observation," she repeated. "What do they mean by 'close'?"

Percy picked up a cracker with a mound of stuff on it. "Open your mouth."

She took a bite. The stuff on the cracker tasted bizarre—lumpy and salty— like some sort of cross between a vegetable and a squid. She very much preferred the first cracker, but she just said it was okay instead.

"It means someone needs to watch her," Percy said. "Whenever they switch her meds like that, especially abruptly, you have to be careful. Someone should keep an eye on her."

Annabeth remembered what her mother had said: from an early age, even though she was younger, it had seemed to be up to her to keep an eye on Rachel.

"These might be too salty," Percy said, pulling a murky green sphere from his cracker. "Do you think I used too many capers?"

"Rachel doesn't swallow her pills sometimes," Annabeth said. Because she was nervous, she stuffed an entire cracker into her mouth.

Percy froze, then slowly closed the laptop. She couldn't quite read the look on his face, and it terrified the wits out of her. "Say that again?"

"I don't know whether she's still doing it," she said, trying to chew and talk at the same time. It had been a bad idea to eat it with one bite. "But I saw her put them under her tongue and then spit them out."

"Do you know if she's saving them?" he asked.

Annabeth was going to ask him why she would save them, but the pepper and horseradish collided at the back of her throat and squeezed off her airway as if someone inside her had turned off a faucet. She managed to take one small sip of air before she started to cough.

"If you're choking, just make the international sign for it," Percy said, holding his hands in front of his throat. "Because I know how to do the Heimlich. My mom made me take a one-day course a couple months back." He watched her cough for a while (he seemed to be hoping for an opportunity to show off his Heimlich maneuver skills), then finally shuffled off to the sink for a glass of water.

She drank most of it down and wiped her eyes while Percy watched.

"Are you crying?" he asked.

"No, I'm coughing." She drank the rest of the water. "I never cry. My therapist wants to talk to me about it."

"You never cry?"

She shook her head. "I've never liked the way it feels. It always reminds me of throwing up. You get little signals in your mouth. That watery feeling. It's the same with crying. I don't want to go there."

"Huh. I kind of like crying," Percy said, "not that I do it all the time," he added, the last part a bit hasty. He ate another cracker. "I'll bet you that crying is actually healthy. You know the human body is about sixty percent water? It's almost the same percentage that the earth is ocean." He began searching it on the laptop.

"I'm not sure where you're going with that," she said.

He put his hands in his pockets. In black ink, one pocket said right hand here. The other said other hand. She briefly remembered him telling her he was dyslexic a couple weeks back. "How are you doing right now?" He cocked his head, and she thought he looked a bit like a baby seal. "Sixty-five percent water? Seventy percent?"

Why on earth did she tell him anything?

"How long have you been going to a therapist?" he asked when she didn't say anything.

"Not very long. Forget I said anything about it."

"Don't worry. I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm good with secrets. But therapy's probably a good plan for you," he said, nodding to himself, almost like he was conversing with a council in his head, and they had agreed with his opinion.

She stared at him. "I should go home now." Annabeth stood up. But she still had one more question. "Have you ever been to a therapist?"

"Who, me?" Percy laughed, his voice hoarse, probably from the dry cracker. Or maybe not. "My mom's in the field."

…

"Do you think you're yawning a lot?" Annabeth asked Rachel. She had found her sitting on the couch when she got back from Percy's. She imagined a black box inside her, like some kind of new and mysterious organ.

"I don't know," Rachel said. "I yawn when I'm tired."

The TV was on, but they kept the sound low: they needed to slip past their mother's anti-TV radar.

"Are you sweating?" Annabeth asked. "I mean, more than usual?"

"What do you mean am I sweating? Do I look like I'm sweating?"

"No."

A commercial for sleeping pills came on. Rachel pulled her feet up onto the couch, her bracelets jingling.

"Do you have tremors?"

"Jesus, Beth, give it a rest." She shook out a blanket and lay down on the couch. "I'm going to take a nap. Scram."

Annabeth turned the TV off and went into the kitchen. Her mother was putting on her jacket and collecting her purse. "I need to run to the grocery store," she said. "Dinner at six-thirty."

"Okay."

"You'll leave me a note if you go anywhere?"

"I'm not going anywhere." Annabeth wondered if they were speaking in code, if her mother was telling her to keep an eye on Rachel.

She read the comics and the horoscope ("The events you have been looking forward to will not take place as expected") and went back to the study.

"Rachel?"

Where she had been napping on the couch, she saw only an indentation on a pillow.

She checked the living room. Empty.

She went to the bottom of the stairs. "Rachel?" She ran up the steps and saw that the bathroom door was closed. The water was running. "Rachel?" She rattled the knob. Panic started to start eating away at her now. It felt like her entire chest was concaving.

She ran back to her bedroom, found a nail file, and stuck it in the lock.

Rachel was in the tub. She looked up at Annabeth, amazed, then took the headphones out of her ears. "What the hell's wrong with you?" she asked, pulling the curtain. "Can't you leave me alone?"

…

"You look a bit nervous today," the Grandma Therapist said. "Are you feeling nervous?"

"No." Her knee was bobbing up and down.

"Would you tell me if you did feel nervous?"

"Maybe." Sometimes when Annabeth talked to the Grandma Therapist, she imagined that her entire body was covered with little invisible doors, and it was her job to make sure they didn't open.

"I get the impression you aren't used to confiding in people," the Grandma Therapist said. "You like to keep things bottled up. Do you think that strategy is working for you?"

Sometimes, though she was a mild-mannered person, Annabeth found the Grandma Therapist terrifying. "I'm not going to fall apart worrying about things that won't happen," I said.

The Grandma Therapist waited.

"You asked if I was nervous," Annabeth explained. "And so I'm saying that even if I was nervous, I would be okay. Because there are things that can happen, and things that can't. And I'm not going to worry about the things that can't." She was talking too fast.

"All right. What are the things that can happen?" The Grandma Therapist smiled. Annabeth used to hate it when she smiled—it made her think she wasn't taking me seriously—but now she understood that it was her way of paying attention.

"Floods." Annabeth looked at the plant on the table beside her. "The basement flooding. That happened once. Or breaking your leg. Or getting mugged."

"Those are all things you're willing to concede," the Grandma Therapist said. Then, in case Annabeth didn't know what "concede" meant, she added, "You're willing to admit the possibility of those things existing."

"Yeah." Annabeth noticed that both of her hands were clutching the arms of the chair.

"You aren't looking at me," the Grandma Therapist said. "Is there a reason why?"

"No." She absentmindedly reminded her father telling her she was just like her mother: mulish and stubborn.

"All right. What are the things that can't happen?"

Annabeth still couldn't look at her. She was holding a number of invisible doors closed, and it took a lot of concentration. "Things get messed up sometimes," she said. "But then they get better. They don't just get worse and worse and worse. That isn't what happens."

"You want things to make sense. You want a reasonable pattern. Is that what you're saying?"

Annabeth didn't answer. She knew she wouldn't be able to explain it, but she used to have a feeling of a promise made to her—a kind of unbreakable, unassailable bargain with the universe: nothing terrible would ever happen to her or her sister. Now she wondered where that feeling had come from. I want that magic wand after all, she wanted to say. And I want a story with a happy ending.

"Annabeth?"

"Could Rachel have you as a therapist?" Annabeth asked. She was thinking out loud. Of course she would have to convince Rachel that the Grandma Therapist would be worth her while; at first, partly to try to cheer her sister up. She had made fun of the Grandma Therapist and pretended that she was a hundred and eight years old.

"No. I'm not a psychiatrist. Your sister needs more care than I can offer her. And I can't prescribe medication."

Annabeth nodded, then pulled a piece of fuzz off the cushion beside me. "Rachel's pills have a black box."

"I'm sorry?"

"On the label," Annabeth said. She explained that Percy had helped her look up her sister's prescriptions, and that at first she had thought, when he said "black box," that he was referring to the devices on airplanes. "Because whenever you hear about a plane crash," she said, "you always hear about people running around trying to figure out how the crash happened. And if they find the black box—you know, the recording—sometimes they can hear the pilots talking, and then they can understand what happened and why the plane went down. It made me think that if Rachel had a black box inside her, someone could find it and open it up. And they could keep her from crashing. That sounds really weird," she said. "Doesn't it?"

"No, not to me."

Annabeth plucked a yellow leaf from her plant. "I don't know why I'm talking so much," she said.

"Maybe you have a lot to say. Are you talking to your parents?"

"They're pretty busy." Her mother had dropped her off at her appointment; her father was supposed to pick her up in the lobby.

"This is hard for all of you," the Grandma Therapist said. "It's hard for each of you in different ways. Your part may be especially difficult."

It seemed odd to hear her refer to it as her "part," as if she had accidentally won a role in some awful play. Probably a Shakespeare one. "My part is to watch over Rachel." Annabeth plucked another leaf from the plant.

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"Because of the black box," Annabeth said. "Someone's supposed to watch out for her. It even said so online."

The Grandma Therapist leaned forward in her chair and held out her hand for the two dead leaves. "Your sister is suffering from an illness," she said. "But she still has choices. And she still has responsibilities—like everyone else." Her voice was soft. "Is there anything you think you ought to tell me?"

Annabeth shook her head.

She dropped the dead leaves into the trash. "Of course you want your sister to get better. But she has her work to do and you have yours. Ultimately," she said, "the responsibility for Rachel belongs to Rachel."

Annabeth looked down at the rug. "A drowning person doesn't rescue herself," she said because whenever she thought about the game she and Rachel had played when they were little, she pictured Rachel struggling and drowning.

"Good point." The Grandma Therapist folded her hands and peered at her over the rim of her spectacles. "Which is why it's so important—for your sister and for everyone else—that she learn how to swim."

...

Percy asked her about Rachel most days. It was like a habit, but Annabeth was fine with that. She liked habits. She liked routine. Routine meant things were going as planned.

She told him the same sorts of things each time, rotating through various variations of "fine" and "okay," and he was merciful enough not to press for more.

…

Some days, Annabeth was sure Rachel was getting better. She did her homework, dressed Simba in their mother's underwear, and spent an hour with a friend on the phone.

And then she would plunge.

Her parents' moods were tied to Rachel's. When she was happy, they were happy. When she was in tears, they were upset. Only when Rachel was asleep in her room did they follow each other down to the kitchen to continue the argument that never ended: This looks like a nice spot for fighting; let's shout over here.

Annabeth thought about leaving them a note with an arrow pointing to the vent above the cabinets: This is a heating duct. It leads to my bedroom. But she didn't do it. Instead, one night she put on her bathrobe and went downstairs and pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. "What are you guys talking about?" she asked.

"Annabeth. It's late," her father said, as if she didn't already know that and had been woken by their stupidity.

"Have you been talking about Rachel? Is something going on?"

"Nothing's going on." Her mother wiped her face with a towel. "Go back to sleep."

"I thought we were all about communication these days," Annabeth said. "I thought we were supposed to—"

"Beth, please. Just leave it alone."

…

But she couldn't leave it alone. "Did you swallow your pills today?" Annabeth asked. She and Rachel were walking to the bus stop. She'd left the house with two toaster waffles; she handed one to her sister.

"Yep. Every single pill." She took a bite out of the waffle. "I even swallowed the ones that smell bad. That fish oil makes me stink like tuna. So. Have you been talking to Mom and Dad about me?"

"What do you mean?"

She took another bite of her waffle, then threw the rest like a Frisbee into the neighbors' yard. "You don't have to lie about it," she said.

Annabeth saw Percy leaning against the fire hydrant near the bus stop.

"I've seen you talking to them," Rachel said. "And I don't blame you." She stopped walking. "Your life would be easier if I went back to Goode."

"Rachel, don't say that." Annabeth remembered the smell in the halls at Goode—air freshener and bandages and cafeteria food.

"And all it would take for Mom and Dad to send me back there," Rachel went on, "would be for someone to tell them I was spitting out pills or forging notes or falling asleep when I wasn't supposed to. And do you know what's sad?" She turned to face Annabeth; her eyes were underlined with dark half-circles. "You would probably be that person. Who else would it be?"

Annabeth heard the bus starting up the hill. Maybe if we keep moving, she thought—maybe if we get on the bus and go to school and move through the day, we'll be able to put this moment behind us.

"I just want you to be okay, Rachel," Annabeth said. "I just need to know that when you—"

"Stop." She tucked her damp hair into her sweatshirt. "You need to stop hovering. I don't want you checking on me anymore. I don't want you asking me a thousand questions. You're worse than Mom."

Percy was waving them toward the bus.

"Do I look alright?" Rachel asked.

She was painfully thin. "You look great," Annabeth lied.

…

"Get your jacket," Percy said, standing on her front porch.

"What?"

"Your jacket. It's cold. I thought that much was obvious." He looked more on pins and needles than usual. He was peering into the nearby flower pots, and the glass behind her, and up at the trees that rustled in the evening air.

Annabeth blinked owlishly. "Yeah, it's cold outside. I thought you were coming in."

Percy quickly shook his head, bouncing on his toes to keep warm. Or maybe that was just his avid restlessness. "No. I'm taking you somewhere. Hurry up."

Annabeth blinked again, and then she grabbed her jacket and did as he said.

...

"I didn't know there was a cider place around here," Annabeth said, sitting across from him at a little metal table. It was warm inside the barn-shaped place, and people, mostly middle-aged and old, filled up the tall ceilings with lively chatter.

"Yeah. I found out about it a couple days ago from my friend's girlfriend." He tapped his feet against the ground. Once upon a time ago Annabeth would've mistaken it for him being nervous, but now she knew that Percy was never really nervous, and he had this thing called ADHD, so he never sat still.

She took a sip from the cup—it was scalding hot on her tongue—and winced. It was good—not too sweet.

Part of her wanted to ask him if this was supposed to be a date. With the exception of the old people, it was sort of romantic. It smelled like apples and sugar, they had a box of cinnamon sugar donuts in front of them, and there were yellow strung lights across the ceiling and walls. Soft music was playing. But then she also thought Percy was the type of guy to take a girl somewhere special and not call it a date, and then date her but not call her his girlfriend, not because he had commitment issues, but because he just didn't care for labels.

She glanced at his converse, random phrases sharpied all of them, and at his long-sleeve shirt, advertising The All American Rejects. She fiddled with the LiveStrong bracelet around her wrist and the hem of Rachel's hand-me-down Britney Spears t-shirt. If it was a date, she wouldn't have been wearing what she was.

Percy didn't care for labels because he knew what he thought about everything, and that was enough for him, she realized.

"Do you like cider?" Percy finally said after an awkward silence. He didn't seem bothered by it, though, and she wondered if she was the only one who found those moments awkward. The same went for her therapy sessions. Perhaps the Grandma Therapist never found it uncomfortable. It was a revelation.

Annabeth picked at the donut, taking tiny bites at a time so as not to spill all the sugar. It wasn't working anyway. Brown sugar fell onto the scratchy and red, plastic tablecloth."I guess. I don't don't like cider," she explained when he arched a dark eyebrow.

"You're pretty indecisive, aren't you?" Percy noticed.

She bobbed one shoulder. "I guess." Then she realized what she'd said, and she cracked a reluctant smile.

He smiled too, his teeth peeking over his lips. It was the most beautiful smile she had ever seen, and with the lights glowing above his head like a halo, she felt her heart beat faster in her chest.

"There we go," he murmured, seemingly to himself. And then, louder, he said, "You said you don't cry, but you don't smile much either."

Her smile fell from her lips, just like that. "Yes, I do."

"No, you don't," he countered. "But it's okay. It's awfully pretty when you do, and I suppose it makes it more special when you do."

Her throat suddenly felt tight. "Why did you bring me here?"

"I wanted to see if their donuts were as good as they claimed."

"And?"

"They're okay."

"But why me?" Annabeth pressed. It was different for her to keep asking, to willingly continue a conversation, and maybe it was because of that reason that Percy caved.

He sighed. "I thought you could use some time away from your home."

She didn't move.

"You know what I think? I don't think you smile much for two reasons."

She didn't say anything.

"You didn't smile much before your sister was depressed, so I think you're just naturally pretty reserved," Percy speculated. "But I also think you don't smile, especially now, because I think you feel guilty for being healthy."

That constricting feeling was coming back again.

"I think you don't think you're allowed to be happy when other people aren't. And I also think that's stupid."

They looked at each other.

"I have to get home soon," Annabeth said.

"I know. You always do."

Only that made her feel so much worse.

He stood up, brushing off the sugar from his hands. "I'll walk you home."

…

"Why are we having a cookout in November?" Annabeth asked Percy. "It's freezing out here." It was Saturday afternoon and they were in his backyard. The yard was fenced, and the fence was covered with some kind of ivy.

"This is the best time of year for outdoor grilling." Percy dragged a metal fire pit away from the house and started filling it with sticks. "In the summer we'd be too hot sitting around a fire. It'll be even better out here in January." He took a pack of matches from his pocket, crumpled some newspaper in with the twigs, and lit it. "How are you doing? Seventy-five percent water? Eighty percent? What are you thinking?"

Annabeth watched the fire grow bigger.

"I don't know. Maybe my brain is fried," she said. "I can barely think straight anymore."

Percy unfolded two folding chairs. "Do you want something sweet? Something in the marshmallow family? Or how about veggies—maybe a tuber?"

"I'm not going to stay very long," she said. "Rachel's been at Thalia's all day, but she's coming home at five-thirty."

They sat down. Percy poked the fire with a stick.

"You shouldn't put your life on hold for her," he said.

"Who says I'm putting my life on hold?"

The wind shifted, blowing the smoke toward them. "You don't talk about anything else," he said. "You only talk about your sister."

"She asked me to save her," Annabeth said.

Percy snapped some twigs and tossed them into the fire. "She shouldn't have."

"Why not?"

"Because it's not fair." He looked annoyed. "And because you can't do it. Are you sure you don't want my mom to talk to your parents?"

"Yeah. I'm sure."

They watched the flames for a while.

Maybe it was the ivy-covered fence or the smell of burnt wood, or maybe it was the shallow dimple in the corner of his mouth, but something persuaded her to kiss Percy Jackson. She leaned forward and kissed him. His lips were soft.

Percy nodded as if to himself and then backed away slowly. "I don't think this is a very good time for that," he said.

"Oh."

"No offense," he said. "But right now you're upset, and we've been talking about your sister. I don't want to make out with you for that reason."

"I didn't kiss you because I'm upset, Percy," shesaid. "I didn't kiss you because of Rachel."

"We were just talking about her," he said.

"I know that. I was here, remember?"

"Yeah." Percy paused. "I'm just saying it felt inappropriate."

Annabeth stood up; her chair collapsed on the ground behind her. "Do you want me to sign a contract before I kiss you? Do you have a list of reasons why kissing is appropriate?"

He didn't say anything, watching her curiously. His intense gaze made her squirm. He did that sometimes—looked at her like she was the only thing in the world, like he would die if he so much as glanced away. Sometimes, it made her blush. Now, it only made her uncomfortable. She didn't like people looking that closely. She didn't like giving them the opportunity to tear her apart from the inside out.

She walked toward the gate, then turned around. Percy was still sitting by the fire. "You always ask me about Rachel," she said. "You're the one who told me about Goode. And you told me to find out about the drugs. You told me to watch her."

"I didn't say you should watch her."

She wanted to push him into the fire. "You said I shouldn't put my life on hold. But now you're letting Rachel put it on hold. You're letting her take something away from me."

"Nobody's taking me," Percy said, his blue-green irises sad, but sympathetic. "I'll be right here."

…

That night, Annabeth dreamt she found a box. She picked it up and heard something shuffling and knocking inside it. She knew it was Rachel, even though the box was much too small. She lifted it and carefully turned the box over but it was seamless and smooth; there was no opening.

She sat up in bed, her heart thumping away inside her chest.

When she was little and woke up from a nightmare, she used to hurry down the hall to Rachel's room. Her feet knew the path even in complete darkness: five steps from her bed to the door, and then she could hold out both hands to touch the bumps in the wallpaper and in eight more steps arrive at the safety of her sister's room.

Now that she was older, it was only six steps.

"Rachel?" She climbed onto the mattress and lay down next to her. "Are you awake?" She leaned her head against her sister's bony arm.

"Nn," she said. A half-reply.

Annabeth wondered what she was dreaming about, if she was dreaming.

Downstairs, she could hear her parents in the kitchen. But they didn't seem to be arguing this time. It was harder to hear them from Rachel's room.

"Remember when we used to build forts in Mom and Dad's bedroom?" Annabeth asked. "We'd use all the blankets and all the pillows, and we'd crawl around on the floor and pretend to get lost?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"That was fun," Annabeth said.

"Uh-huh."

"We used to do a lot of that stuff." Annabeth wondered if she had fallen back to sleep. "I tried to kiss Percy today," she said.

"Ew?" Rachel turned over so she was facing Annabeth. In the dark, she looked different. Her face had changed; it was full of shadows. "What do you mean, 'tried to'?"

"I don't know. He didn't want to do it," she said. "He wouldn't kiss me back. I think I probably did it wrong."

"Maybe you should practice," Rachel said. "I used to practice on my hand. Like this." She made a fist and held it toward Annabeth in the dark. "My hand used to like it," she said. "No complaints, anyway." She lifted her head off the pillow. "Do you need me to kick Percy's ass for you?"

"No," she said. "Thanks."

"Because I'm willing to," Rachel said. "I would do it for you."

Annabeth could hear their parents coming upstairs. "I wish you had told me when it started, Rachel."

She lay back down.

Annabeth pulled a strand of Rachel's hair from her mouth. Their faces were inches apart on the pillow. "You used to tell me things," Annabeth said. "We used to talk. I wish you had told me." She picked up Rachel's skinny arm and draped it over her shoulder.

"Everything's going to be okay," Annabeth said. "We can still trust each other."

Rachel's feet were as cold as ice. The bed was too small for two people, but she didn't tell her to leave and go back to her room.

...

"How's your sister doing?" Percy asked again on the bus.

This time, Annabeth strayed from the norm. "What do you think?" Her voice wasn't acidic, but it was certainly chillier than normal.

He blinked, caught off guard. "I'm not her sister."

Annabeth swallowed, suddenly feeling guilty. "Right."

His eyebrows furrowed together. "How are you doing?" Usually, he asked this second, and usually she never answered, but he asked again and again relentlessly every day as per usual. Today, there was more stress on the second question. She stared out the window, her shoulders feeling awfully heavy.

From that day on, he asked about her first and then her sister. Annabeth regretted ruining the original routine. This was only proof that routines were superior. She rarely answered the question about herself.

…

Rachel's friends Thalia and Reyna sat down next to her in the cafeteria. "We came to talk to you," Thalia said. "To the little sister." She sipped from a plastic water bottle.

"Maybe it's nothing," Reyna said. "But did Rachel get in trouble last weekend?"

"For what?" Annabeth asked.

Thalia took another swig of her water. "She said she was grounded."

"She wasn't grounded." Annabeth threw the rest of her lunch away. "She was with you guys." She looked at Thalia. "She was at your house on Saturday."

Thalia twisted the lid back onto her bottle of water. "I don't know whose house she was at," she said. "But it wasn't mine."

…

On her way back to class, Annabeth left a sticky note on Rachel's locker. Fqkpi mi? Doing ok?

On her own locker, an hour later, she found her answer: Uvqr uyrafgle og. Stop watching me.

…

"You're particularly quiet today," the Grandma Therapist said.

Annabeth sagged down in her chair. She liked her chair; there were all different ways a person could sit in it.

"Are you getting enough sleep?"

She didn't answer.

"We'll need to talk about that," she said. "But what have you been thinking about and feeling this past week?" She waited. She seemed to have the ability to wait forever. Wasn't she concerned that Annabeth's parents were paying for these empty minutes?

Annabeth thought about the different things she could tell her: that she had tried to kiss Percy, that her parents barely noticed her anymore, that their lives at home revolved around making sure Rachel took her pills and went to school, and that they gauged her mood almost every minute of every day.

"I like your office," she said.

"Thank you." The Grandma Therapist nodded. "What else are you thinking?"

"I'm not sure yet." She felt a few invisible doors begin to open, as if someone were tugging at her skin.

"Sometimes I wonder," she said.

"What do you wonder?"

The room was so quiet she could hear the ticking of the clock. "Sometimes when I think about Rachel I wonder, you know—" She felt her pulse beating in her throat. "I wonder what I'm supposed to do with it." She looked around her office—the lamp, the rug, the bookshelf, the table with the box of tissues and the jar of stones—and she felt as if she were waiting for the end of a story, for the moment when the crisis passed and the characters wisely understood what had happened to them and someone shut the book with a satisfying snap. But what if the story didn't end, and the book stayed open?

"You wonder what you're supposed to do with what?" the Grandma Therapist asked.

"This." She couldn't look at her. She tried to gesture but ended up just turning her hands palm up in her lap. This thing, she wanted to say to her. This giant shape always pressing and bruising and taking up every single particle of air between us.

The Grandma Therapist leaned toward her. "Are you talking about sadness?"

Annabeth could barely speak above a whisper. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it," she said. "What do other people do with it? Where do they put it?"

She didn't answer right away. "Sometimes they carry it with them," she said. "Because they aren't sure what else to do."

Annabeth nodded.

"But sometimes they open it up like a package in the presence of a person they can talk to," she said. "Someone they can trust." She held out her hands. "Any person who is carrying a lot of sadness," she said, "needs to be able to rest sometimes, and to put it down."

…

"So I wasn't sure you'd want to see me," Percy said when she answered the door and found him standing on the porch. "But I figured you'd be home, and I got inspired, so I brought you this." He held out a plastic food container and took off the lid.

"That's kind of a weird-looking snack," Annabeth said.

"Actually, it's incredible." Percy came into the house and followed her to the study. Rachel and her mother were out somewhere, so they were alone. "It's basically chickpeas and feta cheese and mint," he said. "This stuff is nutritious. It's got protein, and something else. I forget what. Dairy or something. If you ever decide to be a vegetarian, you could practically live on it."

"I'm not a vegetarian."

"Why don't you get us some bowls and some spoons?" Percy sat down.

When Annabeth came back, she found him engrossed in a commercial for tampons. She had to wave the spoons in front of him. "Percy?"

"What? Sorry. I don't usually watch TV," he said. "You know the average kid watches a thousand hours during the school year?" He dished out the salad. "So how's she doing?"

Annabeth ate a couple of chickpeas, meticulously dragging the chunks of feta to the edge of the bowl.

"She's doing okay."

"She doesn't look it," Percy said. "If you want my opinion."

"I don't want your opinion. And I don't want to argue about it," she said.

"Who's arguing? Actually, I came over because I wanted to talk to you."

"Surprise," Annabeth said. "We're already talking."

"Yeah. Here's what I'm thinking, though," Percy said. "I'm thinking that maybe this situation is getting beyond you."

"Just leave it alone, Percy," Annabeth said.

He ate a spoonful of salad. "You don't know what she might be involved in."

"She's not 'involved in' anything." Annabeth picked up the remote and changed the channel. "Last time you criticized me for always talking about Rachel. And now here you are, talking about her again."

"Here I am," Percy agreed.

They stared at the TV for a while. "You know what I've noticed about you?" Annabeth asked. "You never say you're sorry about my sister. That's what other people say. Either they pretend they don't know anything or they say, 'I'm sorry to hear about your sister.' But you never say that."

"Do you want me to say it?"

"No." She frowned.

Percy put the lid on his plastic container. "I'm going upstairs."

"What for?" She got up and followed him.

He didn't answer. He took the steps two at a time. Her parents' bedroom door was open; Percy walked in. The room was neat. The bed was made and each of the dressers had only a few simple things on its surface: a wooden tray for her father, and for her mother, a jewelry box, a jar of lotion, and a brush and comb. Percy picked up a stack of books on the bedside table. Your Depressed Adolescent. A Guide to Psychiatric Drugs. Your Difficult Teen.

"Good reading," he said, and Annabeth wasn't even sure if he was being sarcastic anymore. It was always hard to tell with him. He tested the mattress with his hand. "Firm. That's good for your back. My mom was telling me about it the other day. Which one is your room?"

"I don't want you in my bedroom, Percy."

He paused at the laundry chute, opened it, and peered inside. "Then where do you want me?"

She blinked.

He grinned, and it was lopsided. "Just kidding." He walked down the hall, paused briefly at the doorway of her room, and kept on walking. "This is Rachel's room, right?"

"Where are you going?" She followed him into her sister's room. About a year earlier, Rachel had painted the walls a deep purple, right over all her beautiful murals; even with the light on, the room was gloomy. "We're not allowed to have guys upstairs, Percy."

"Does she keep a diary?" he asked.

Rachel's desk was about fourteen inches deep in paper. "I wouldn't read it if she did," Annabeth said, distastefully picking her palm off the white wood. There was something glittery and sticky spilled across the surface, now clinging to her skin.

Percy carded his slim fingers through his floppy hair. The room was crowded with stuff, the bed and the floor piled deep with clothes. Over the bed, Rachel had hung her favorite poster—a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, frayed at the bottom from being touched. On the other walls were a row of beaded purses she had collected from various thrift stores; a clock in the shape of a cat, the eyes moving back and forth in time with its rhinestone tail; a Tinker Bell mirror on which Tinker Bell's clothes had all been painted black with indelible marker; and a lamp with a dented shade on which Rachel had written in blue nail polish RACHEL ROCKS.

Percy waded through the piles of clothes to the dresser, then picked up the metal, beaded box where Rachel kept her jewelry.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

He looked in the box, closed it, and put it back down. He took the plug out of Rachel's piggy bank and stuck his finger inside, then opened a plastic container full of makeup, spilling half of it onto the floor. He opened her sock drawer and rifled through it, then opened the drawer where she kept her brightly colored bras.

"Percy, stop."

He ignored her, combing through the rest of Rachel's drawers; he opened her closet and poked through her bookshelf. He picked her shoes up and shook them, and lifted the pillows on her bed.

"You're being a jerk, Percy," Annabeth said, her fists balling up by her sides. She was slow to anger, but in rummaging through her sister's room, he was disrupting it more than it already was. "It's like you want me to hate you."

He saw her glance at the clock with the cat's tail ticking away underneath it. With a tenderness she had never seen in him before, he gently lifted the clock from the wall and turned it over. Taped to the inside was a plastic bag.

"What is that?" Annabeth asked.

Percy held the bag open: inside it were about a hundred little white pills.

Annabeth held out her hand, even though she didn't want to touch what he was holding. Her hand began trembling with heavy realization, and she felt queasy all of a sudden.

"I'm sorry about your sister," Percy said.

…

Rachel laughed so hard at the dining table Annabeth thought she'd be sick.

"Look, snow," her father said, pointing out the window with his spatula. "The first snow of the year. It almost never snows this early. Now, that's something."

Annabeth wished Percy could see them. For a beautiful moment, it almost felt normal, their mother chastising them all for being too rowdy, their father making terrible dad jokes and talking about university, and Annabeth, sitting quietly and listening to the happiness, absorbing it, letting it surround her like a warm cocoon.

After they ate, her parents went for a walk and left them to do the dishes.

"So. What's going on with you?" Rachel asked. It was a relatively harmless question, but it made Annabeth's stomach twist into tight, little knots.

They stood at the sink side by side, their hands dipping into the soapy water. She found herself wishing they were younger. She wished they were putting on their muddy boots by the back door and getting ready to go outside and play. Instead, they had to have a difficult conversation, and it wasn't fair because Annabeth and Rachel didn't have difficult conversations. They got along like two peas in a pod, only arguing over trivial matters.

"I found your pills," Annabeth said.

Rachel's hands paused for a few seconds, her bracelets making a quiet music. She had painted them herself three years before, each a different hue of the rainbow with different shapes of the respectively colored fruit. The lemons on the yellow one were peeling.

Annabeth swallowed hard. "The ones you hid behind the clock. I thought I should tell you."

Rachel turned to face her. "You must hate this so much."

"It's okay," Annabeth said.

"No, it isn't." She wiped some soap suds off Annabeth's wrist. "Did you look at the pills?"

She didn't answer.

"I don't want them back. I just want you to look at them before you flush them down the toilet. They're for cramps, Annie. You know how bad my cramps can get."

Annabeth rinsed off a handful of silverware, careful not to let the spoon shoot water back at her face.

"I bought a bottle at the drugstore," Rachel continued. "I knew Mom wouldn't let me have them, so I hid them away."

Through the kitchen window, Annabeth could see that the snow was still falling; the world was gradually turning white, devoid of color.

"I know what you're thinking," Rachel said. "But look: I'm standing here talking to you, right? And I don't want the pills. You can have them." She looked out the window. "If you tell Mom and Dad, they'll probably tell Dr. Kronos, and if there's an open bed at Goode—"

Annabeth held up her hand; she had to make her stop talking. "I need you to promise me something."

Rachel plunged a greasy platter into the sink. "I think you just aged about twenty years," she muttered sourly. "You sound like Mom."

"I mean it," Annabeth said. "I need you to promise that if you ever feel bad—I mean, as bad as you did when—"

Rachel whirled toward her, grinning, and slung a wet and soapy arm around her neck. She crooked her elbow to pull her close so they were knee to knee, rib cage to rib cage, forehead to forehead.

"Sweetheart," she said, in a perfect imitation of their mother's voice. "If there's ever anything you need to tell me, anything at all…"

"Rachel, I'm not kidding." Annabeth tried to push her away, but she held onto her tightly. Her eyeballs were about an inch away from hers. The soap from her hand was dripping down Annnabeth's shirt, leaving awkward, blotchy, dark patches on the grey cotton.

"You have to promise that you'll come and find me. Promise," Annabeth said. "If you feel really bad, you'll come and tell me. I need you to promise."

"Your breath smells like cheese," Rachel said.

But Annabeth wouldn't stop nagging until she promised.

…

On the bus on the way to school the next morning, Rachel insisted on sitting next to her. She told Annabeth a series of knock-knock jokes that weren't funny, but they laughed anyway.

In Mr. Chiron's class that afternoon (everyone was roaming from desk to desk, because the bell hadn't rung yet), Percy asked her what she'd done with the pills.

"Threw them out." She hadn't tried to find out what they were; she had gone out the night before and dumped them into a neighbor's trash can.

"What are those marks for?" he asked.

While they'd been talking, she had uncapped a marker and added to the long row of check marks on the inside of her backpack.

"It's just something I do." She counted the marks: forty-eight days since Rachel had been admitted to Goode.

He leaned over her shoulder. "Thanksgiving is only two weeks away, if you're counting something."

She had almost forgotten about Thanksgiving.

Percy obviously hadn't. He said his mother was going to let him make most of the meal. He was going to put oysters in the stuffing. He was going to make cranberry relish with apricots in it. He was going to invent a pecan pie the likes of which no one in the world had seen before. "You told your parents, right?" he asked. "About the pills?"

The bell rang. Mr. Chiron clapped his hands at the front of the room and started droning on about the American Revolution.

Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door—a student runner from the main office. "Oh, hey, sorry for the interruption and all that." The student had blond hair and looked like a surfer. Little freckles were speckled across the bridge of his nose, and he had bright blue eyes. She recognized from down the street—Will. He waved a slip of paper in Mr. Chiron's direction. "For Annabeth Chase. She's supposed to go to the main office. Right away, chop-chop."

Everybody started up with the usual comments about how she probably got caught selling drugs on the internet or setting fire to a police car.

Annabeth collected her books. Percy got halfway out of his chair and touched her elbow.

"What?" she asked.

He didn't say anything.

…

A bottle of pills, a tube of glue: she broke her promise.

…

In a private waiting room at the hospital, her mother was shaking. Her hands, her arms, her whole body was shaking. "She walked right out of school and no one stopped her?" her mother asked. She put on her I-am-so-amazed face, like one of those masks you see in a theater. Annabeth and her father were her only audience. "Do they just let their students wander in and out of the building? How long had she been missing class? And no one called us? They just allowed my daughter to walk away?"

"Athena, stop," her father said. "This isn't helping."

"Don't touch me," her mother said. She turned fiercely, abruptly to Annabeth. "You knew she was cutting class, didn't you?"

She didn't need to give her an answer. She could tell by the look on her face that, in some corner of her mind, she might as well have given her sister the collection of pills and the tube of glue and then opened the front door of the school and ushered her out. Off you go, Rachel. Best of luck.

"But you didn't tell us," her mother said. "You decided to keep that information to yourself."

"Athena, please," her father said.

Her mother ignored him. She was still shaking. Her watch loosened itself from her wrist, the watch face sliding along her arm. "What else did you decide not to tell us?" She wants to hit me, Annabeth thought, but she's never done it before so she doesn't know how. She wished she would hit her. "You put your sister's life in danger. She might have died."

"Athena." Her father was crying. She had never seen her father cry.

"What did she tell you?" Her mother was shouting, but for some reason she could barely hear her. "What did she tell you? What did you know?"

…

Here is what Annabeth knew, or thought she knew:

(1) Rachel would never break a promise—at least, not a promise she had made to Annabeth.

(2) Her parents weren't interested in what Annabeth thought.

(3) Annabeth could learn how to open the black box; she could do it herself; it was up to her.

What would Annabeth have done if Rachel had confided in her? If she had found her in the hall between classes and slung her arm around Annabeth's neck so that they were eyeball to eyeball and said, Hey, Beth, instead of going to class next period I'm going to leave the building, and I am going to poison myself and sit under the overpass, and maybe you will never see me again?

Annabeth would have called their parents.

And they would have called Dr. Kronos.

Which is what happened anyway. Rachel was already back at Goode.

…

When Percy called later that night (her parents were fighting in the garage instead of the kitchen), Annabeth carried the phone into her room and shut the door. She lay down on the carpet and looked at the specks of dust that could only be seen from that angle.

"She's at Goode again," she said.

She could hear Percy breathing.

"She could have had brain damage," she told him. "From the glue and the pills. But they told us she doesn't."

"That's good," Percy said. "So how are you doing?"

She pulled a thread out of the carpet.

"I could just stay on the phone with you, if you want," Percy said. "If it would help."

She didn't answer.

"We don't have to talk or anything. I'll be right here and you can talk if you want to. Or not. You can just hold the phone."

She held onto the phone.

"I can talk or be quiet," Percy said. "Either one. Not talking is hard, but I'll do my best. I'll start right now. Ready?"

She fell asleep with Percy's silence, true to his word, held to her ear.

…

Annabeth didn't go to school the next day. She got up late and took a long bath, ate part of an ice cream bar for breakfast, and ended up taking a nap on a pile of clothes in Rachel's room.

She wanted so badly to ask her parents if they hated her, but she couldn't find it within her to do so. She was afraid they'd say yes. She was also afraid they'd say no. She wasn't sure which one she preferred either.

She trudged down the stairs, her feet feeling inexplicably heavy. "I tried to tell you," Annabeth told her father, who was watching the history channel so closely that she would've thought he was trying to memorize it. "I wanted so badly to tell you."

He reached for the remote. "What are you talking about?" Then something clicked in his eyes, like a puzzle piece. "Oh. I know, Beth." He brushed a few stray curls out of her face.

She felt even more weighed down by that. The back of her throat burned.

"You should really get some sleep," her father said.

She didn't say anything.

"You look exhausted."

She blinked. Her eyes stung. She knew she didn't look great. She didn't feel so great either.

"I know you tried. We weren't listening."

It was her first breath of fresh air in a long, long time.

…

"You look tired. Actually, you look like crap," Rachel said in the conference room while their parents filled out some paperwork at the nurses' station

"You look like crap too."

"Yeah, but I was better-looking to start with." She pulled her feet up onto her chair and hugged her legs. "You think I've ruined everything, don't you?"

"No. But I don't understand what happened," Annabeth said. "I thought—"

"The food here is even worse than last time," Rachel said. "It's incredible what they try to get us to eat." She put her head on her knees.

"When you get home this time," she said, "maybe we can sleep in the same room the way we used to. We can use my room for a place to hang out and listen to music, and—"

"I'm not going to come home," Rachel mumbled.

"What do you mean?"

She lifted her head and shook out her hair. "I'm too much of a risk. Does that sound familiar?"

"No," Annabeth said.

"Whatever. Don't worry about it. It'll be easier for you at school if I'm not around. That was a part of the decision."

"What decision?" Annabeth asked. Her parents seemed to be finishing up outside the window. Her father was clutching a thick batch of papers.

"You searched my room," Rachel said.

Out in the hall, someone started to cry.

"I didn't tell them, Rachel," Annabeth said. She lowered her voice. "I didn't tell Mom and Dad."

"Well, somebody told them." She sat back and looked at her, then nibbled the tangled ends of her hair. "Have you kissed him yet?"

The day seemed to be speeding up without her, leaving her behind. "You have to come home, Rachel," Annabeth said. "Where else would you go?"

"Ask Percy." She almost smiled. "Now you can start to forget all about me. Poof!" She waved her skinny arms in the air. "I'm already gone."

…

Annabeth barely spoke to her parents on the way home. And as soon as she walked in the door, she dialed Percy's number and told him she was coming over to talk to him.

"When?" he asked. "Beth? I was just getting ready to—"

"Now," she said. "I'm coming over right now."

…

"Wow, that was fast," Percy said when he opened the door.

She put her hands in her pockets—not because she was cold, but because she thought she might have to hit him. "You told my parents about the pills."

"I had to." He nodded. "I told my mom."

Annabeth felt as if she'd been robbed. As if someone had broken into her life and ignored all the things that a person should steal—her CD player and her wallet and the silver earrings her parents had given her—and took the only thing that mattered, the thing she didn't understand could be stolen.

Percy touched her arm. "Do you want to come in?"

"They're going to send her away," Annabeth said. Eighty-two percent water.

"Percy, is the door open?" a voice asked.

"Yeah, it's okay, Mom," Percy said. "I'll be right back." He came outside and shut the door behind him. The porch light above them turned his face yellow.

"They're going to send her to a treatment center. Does that sound familiar?" She took her hands out of her pockets and grabbed his wrists.

"You have to let it go," Percy said. Or maybe he said, "You have to let her go."

Annabeth wasn't letting anything go. "Am I hurting you?"

"Yes." Truthful as ever.

She had never hated it so much as she did now. She squeezed even harder. Her fingers ached, she was squeezing so hard.

Then, under her left middle finger, on Percy's wrist, she felt a line—a series of lines like small seams in his skin. She remembered him warning her about Rachel cutting herself.

Annabeth turned his arms over. "You don't have a brother," she said.

"I do."

"But he wasn't at Goode. You were at Goode." Annabeth pulled up his sleeve and saw the lines on his forearm; by the yellow light on the porch ceiling she saw dozens of scars crosshatching his skin from his wrist to his elbow.

"All this time." She let go of his arms. She was mildly aware that she was shaking. "That's how you knew about Goode. And about the doctors and the drugs. And you didn't tell me."

"I wanted to," Percy said. "I was—"

But she cut him off. "I told you everything about Rachel. And you've been making up a story about your brother. You lied to me, Percy."

He swallowed hard, a flash of remorse flickering across those beautiful irises. Now, she only wanted to stab them out. "Yeah," Percy said. "I guess I did."

…

Annabeth told her parents she didn't want to talk. There was no reason to sit down for a pointless discussion because everything was already finished and decided. There was nothing to say.

They told her that Goode wasn't suited to what Rachel needed. They told her she needed more time. She needed a change of scenery. They told her none of them wanted this to happen. They told her Sally Jackson had some good recommendations, and that they're found a place in New Hampshire—

"I have to clean my room. And I have homework," Annabeth said.

Her father pointed out that it was Saturday. "You never do homework on Saturdays."

"Big project," she said. Annabeth put on her earphones and went up to her room. Several hours later, her mother knocked at her door and said Percy was downstairs waiting to see her.

"Busy," she said.

So he left her a note. "I an apologiying." He'd tried to write it in code.

Even when she asked for her specifically, that night and also the next afternoon, Annabeth refused to talk to Rachel on the phone.

…

Eighty-eight percent water.

…

"So you're determined not to talk to her or see her before she leaves," the Grandma Therapist said. They were meeting on Monday instead of Tuesday. Her mother had taken her out of school for an "emergency appointment."

"Do you think you might regret that decision?"

Annabeth didn't answer. The Grandma Therapist was having to talk more than she usually did.

"Your parents aren't blaming you for what happened," she said. "But they feel you should have told them about your sister's behavior. And of course you should have, though it would have been difficult. Beth? Are you with me?"

Annabeth had a strange feeling inside her chest. She had to sit still and listen for it.

"Last time you were here," the Grandma Therapist went on, "we talked about whether you were feeling sad. I wonder if we should leave that aside for a while because it occurs to me that you're angry too. Do you think you're angry?"

Annabeth put a hand on her rib cage. Maybe one of her lungs had deflated.

"You might feel angry at your friend and at his mother." She tilted her head. "And you might feel angry at your parents. And also at Rachel."

Ninety-one percent water.

"You might feel disappointed as well," the Grandma Therapist said. "Is it possible you're disappointed with yourself?"

…

"We want you to go with us," her mother said. "We feel very strongly that you should come. You'll only miss two days of school."

Annabeth said no. She said she'd missed half a day of school already. She said she didn't want to come.

Her mother lightly touched a finger to the bridge of her nose. "Beth," she said. Her eyes were bloodshot. "This is all very hard. And you probably think we've been ignoring you. And maybe we have. But you aren't the only one who's been suffering."

"I'm all right," Annabeth said. "You don't have a reason to worry about me."

Her father said he didn't want her to sleep at the house alone.

"I'll stay with the McLeans." The McLeans lived diagonally behind them; Rachel and her babysat their kids here and there.

"But Rachel wants to see you," her mother said.

She told her she'd already talked to Mrs. McLean. It was all set up. It was too late to cancel.

Her mother looked disappointed. "Then come to the hospital with us tonight. You can say goodbye to Rachel then."

She said she'd write her a note.

But Annabeth didn't write one. And she let her parents go to the hospital alone.

…

Her parents were supposed to pick Rachel up at the hospital on Tuesday morning after breakfast (her mother had packed Rachel's suitcase the night before) and start driving to New Hampshire by eleven o'clock.

But when she got off the bus after school at 3:15, she saw her father's car parked at the side of the road. Her father was in the driver's seat (he was leaning back as if asleep) with her mother beside him. Rachel was in back. She watched Annabeth walk toward her. Then she rolled down the window.

"Hey," she said.

She had washed her hair. That was the first thing Annabeth noticed. Her hair was so pretty.

"Why are you standing so far away over there?" she asked. "I've been waiting to see you."

Annabeth walked toward the car. She put her hands on the backseat window. Rachel had rolled it halfway down.

"I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye to you," she said.

Annabeth was gripping the window glass.

"Miss you already." She put both her hands on top of Annabeth's. "Don't borrow my stuff."

"I'm sorry, Rachel," she said, but her voice was so soft she probably didn't hear it.

"Don't stay mad at Percy," she said. "He did what was right. Kiss him if you want to. Practice on him instead of your hand."

Ninety-three percent water.

"I don't want to be here without you," Annabeth said.

Rachel opened the car door, nearly knocking her over. She stood up. Annabeth had looked into her face since the day she was born.

"Don't go," Annabeth said. "Please."

"I have to," Rachel said. "It's the first right thing."

And then she hugged Annabeth, and pressed a note into her hand, and left.

…

Love you, Rachel had written.

Cu zge cu rfc uma. As big as the sky.

…

Annabeth woke up late in the McLeans' house. She only had time to throw on her clothes, grab her backpack and her jacket, and race out the door. She cut through the McLeans' side yard, then ran up the street to her own front door, taking the key out of her pocket and walking in.

The house was quiet. She stood in the hall for a minute and listened. She thought about writing Rachel a letter but no one had given her Rachel's address.

The doorbell rang. She jumped: maybe the McLeans had driven by and noticed that she wasn't at the bus stop. She would have to tell them she had forgotten something. She had forgotten a book she needed at school. She went to the door and carefully pulled back the curtain: Percy.

"Go away," she said. She dropped the curtain.

He rang again.

Because she didn't want anyone seeing him and asking her questions, and because she knew he was capable of standing there for hours, she opened the door.

"You missed the bus," he said, pointing behind him toward the main road. "It just pulled away. And you're usually so good about getting to school. Prompt, and all that. So I came by to see if you were sick."

Annabeth straightened the curtain. "You don't need to be here. We don't need to talk or anything."

"Huh," Percy said.

"Anyway, I'm not allowed to have guys in the house when my parents are gone, so you'll have to leave."

"Yeah. No guys in the house is a good rule. Responsible parenting and all that." He didn't leave. "The thing is, I bet you didn't eat much this morning, and I didn't either, so I'm going to need to make us some breakfast." He was stamping his feet because of the cold. "And your house is the easiest place to do that since we're both here already."

They stared at each other for a minute.

"Also the no boys rule never bothered you before," Percy said.

"That's because you weren't an ass before."

"Ass?" He offered a crooked smile. "Fair enough."

They stared some more.

"Fine," Annabeth said, relenting. And she let him in.

…

Percy made eggs with red peppers and canned corn and cheese, and he stuffed the whole mess inside two pieces of pita bread smeared with mayonnaise. Then, even though her share of the mess looked disgusting, he told her to eat it. She did.

"I should have told you about Goode," he said while they ate. "I tried to tell you a couple of months ago, but you thought I was talking about my brother. Do you want more eggs?"

Annabeth shook her head.

"I was there for two months," Percy said. "I missed the end of ninth grade and most of the summer."

"I wouldn't have told anyone," she said.

"You probably wouldn't have," Percy agreed. "But I didn't know that. I mean, at first."

They finished eating. She cleared the dishes.

"You seem pretty calm," Percy said. "Are you doing okay?"

Annabeth nodded.

"It's good that you saw her before she left." He handed her the pan from the stove. "One day at a time is a good motto. People recover. You want to keep that in mind. Look how well adjusted I usually manage to seem."

Annabeth finished the dishes and went into the bathroom to comb her hair, and when she came back, Percy was hanging up the phone.

"I wanted to tell my mom where I was," he said. "In case the school calls. I didn't want her to worry."

"You told your mother you were cutting school and making breakfast at my house?"

"Yeah. What should I have told her?"

"I don't know," she said.

"She told me we should take the city bus to school." Percy ran a hand through his hair again. She had learned a long time ago that he did that when he was thinking. "We'll just miss the first hour. Do you have any change?"

Annabeth opened the junk drawer in the kitchen where her mother usually kept a roll of quarters. Right next to the quarters was a picture of Rachel and her.

Percy looked at it over her shoulder. "Cute," he said. "You should talk to your parents. They're worried about you. That's what I think."

She counted out some quarters and closed the drawer.

They left the house.

"I have a confession," Percy said as they walked down the street. "I also didn't tell you I was at Goode because I thought you might not want to hang out with me if you knew." The air was cold—about twenty degrees—and his breath was turning into frosted clouds above them.

"Do you have any other confessions?" Annabeth asked.

"Yeah."

She waited expectantly.

They turned the corner and headed for the main road.

"I feel bad I didn't kiss you," Percy said. "That day in my yard."

"Oh."

"And I'm kind of wondering if we could try it again."

She glanced at his bright eyes. "I'll think it over."

"Good." Percy nodded. "Great." He put his hand on her arm. "When?"

…

The city bus let them off at an intersection; they still had to walk about half a mile.

"I'll bet it's pretty up there in New Hampshire," Percy said. "Woods and mountains and snow and stuff. A lot of nature."

The school was a gray box in the distance.

"My mom had a treatment center picked out for me in Maine, but in the end, I didn't need it. Maine's probably a lot like New Hampshire except for the ocean."

Annabeth moved her backpack to her other shoulder.

"Are you getting tired?" Percy asked.

When they were little, Rachel had helped her attach playing cards to the spokes of her bike wheels. She had shown her how to slice bananas the long way. Annabeth had learned to walk by holding on to the back of her dress.

"I only ask because you're slowing down a lot. We could take a break, sit and wait a couple minutes."

Ninety-five percent water.

"The important thing," Percy said, "is that you always stood by her. You couldn't fix everything for her, and you couldn't see inside her head, but she knows you love her. Right? You're probably already writing her secret messages."

They crossed the road to the median strip, a grassy island in the middle of the four-lane. Annabeth stopped and adjusted her backpack again.

"The light's still green." Percy pointed. "Should we cross?"

Annabeth needed to be closer to the ground.

"Beth?"

Ninety-eight percent water.

She dropped to her knees. Cars drove past in both directions.

She thought about what the Grandma Therapist had told her. You learn to carry it with you. But sometimes, in the presence of a person you trust—

"I was supposed to save her, Percy," she said. Uncharacteristically, she felt her eyes burn with salty tears. "She asked me to save her."

The traffic streamed by on either side of them.

Ninety-nine percent water.

"I'm right here with you," Percy said. He took her backpack, her jacket, her scarf, and her gloves, and, kneeling beside her in the frozen grass, he helped her put them down.

A/N: Depression is treatable. If you or someone you know struggles with depression or suicidal thoughts, please ask for help. Treatment is much better now too, in case the inhumanity in this oneshot scared you.

It takes courage to speak out, but it's necessary. And if you just need to talk, my PMs are always open. Additionally, if you are ever in danger and need someone right away, you can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or 1-800-273-8255.