sneak peek: these are what we call hard feelings

they shared a womb but not a set of moral values

i wrote an entire hour of the chilliad this month, A C T U A L L Y, and that’s true!!! here’s proof: artemis and apollo’s relationship falling apart because they’re siblings who hate each other, which is my favorite thing about them. also, more of athena being an agent of chaos. every time i re-read the illiad i remember what a rotten bitch athena is. babygirl is gonna learn some hard lessons, i fear.

After Manny and Paris managed to slip through the fingers of the disciplinary committee, a sort of unofficial truce had settled across campus. Well, truce maybe too extreme a word; Athena didn’t think anyone had actually, like, thought about it. It was more of an unspoken rule: shared space was off-limits. No pranks in classrooms, or on the quad, or in any of the dining halls. This was really a practical, rather than ethical, consideration. What happened on Greek Row stayed on Greek Row but no one had control over what would get out if it happened outside. And nobody wanted to see Manny expelled.

People probably wanted to see Paris expelled, but out of loyalty to Hector, he got a pass. It wasn’t Hector’s fault his brother looked like if you put a worm in a fedora and asked it to play a neo-jazz set.

Athena considered this problem as she dropped into a seat in the dining hall between Emi and Polo who, despite the fact that they were sitting together, had left two chairs between them. Athena had always secretly wished she’d had a twin until she met a pair, and they were easily the most dysfunctional siblings she’d ever met, including Hector and Paris, which was really clearing an extraordinarily high bar.

“’Thena,” Emi greeted, unladylike through a mouth full of french fries. “Sup.”

“Swallow before you talk, Em, Jesus,” Polo scolded, making a face. In response, Emi opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out, half-chewed potato littered across it. Polo threw a napkin at her. “You’re disgusting.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize frat boys were kings of etiquette,” Emi sneered, and — as if on cue — Athena loved college — across the room, Manny opened a two-liter bottle of coke and Aggy began chanting for him to chug it. The rest of the guys were there, too: the two Jaxes, Odis and Penny, and Dio, whose presence in Greek life Athena had never understood. As far as she could suss it out the guy was fully a socialist.

“We were raised in the same house,” Polo said. “Like, what happened to you?”