“Steer clear of them,” Nicole warns. “The Zeus set. Power, privilege, and partying. They make Paris Hilton look like a Vestal Virgin.”

The Zeus set? I guess I can see how being related to the ruler of all the gods would come with extreme popularity. Who would dare to cross them when you might wind up with a thunderbolt in the back?

One of the boys shifts, opening my view to the other side of the group. Stella stares back at me, willing one of those thunderbolts to hit me, I’m sure.

“Stella’s one of them?” I ask, looking away before those gray eyes turn me to stone or something.

“Not exactly.” Nicole flicks a sneering glance at the group. “She’s one of Hera’s.”

“So then why—” I begin. Then I remember Hera’s role on Olympus—Zeus’s consort.

“There are alliances,” Nicole explains. “Zeus-Hera is the strongest.”

Figures. Not only is Stella a colossal evil, but she’s got the popularity and the genes to back it up. I am more than thankful her powers are grounded right now. Otherwise Nicole would be carrying me to class in a baggie.

Looking around for something other than the evil stepsister to talk about, I ask, “What about them?”

Another group of students, all with sun-bleached hair, is gathered around a water fountain. They look like they washed up in the last wave. A lot of pooka shell necklaces and flip-flops. The guys are wearing brightly colored boardshorts and Hawaiian print shirts.

Some of the girls are in sundresses, some in camisoles and breezy skirts. One of the girls looks just like a picture I saw once of Cameron Diaz surfing.

“That,” Nicole says, pointing at the surfer crowd, “is Poseidon’s posse. Most of their brain cells have burned off from too much time in the sun.”

At the center of the circle I notice a guy with white-blond hair that looks a little like Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale.

“Forget it,” Nicole warns when she sees me looking. “Deacon’s dumb as a box of rocks.” She tilts her head, as if considering him for a second. “Actually, that’s an insult to rocks.”

From the other end of the hall I hear a boy squeal, “I got it! I hacked into the Olympic mainframe!”

He’s obviously a geek—complete with thick black-framed glasses and high-waisted pants. He’s clutching a calculator-sized PDA in his hand, jumping up and down and revealing a total lack of coordination as he practically trips over his own feet and falls into the rest of his group.

“Geeks?” I ask.

“Hephaestus,” she replies with a sigh. “I think he’s embarrassed by them. I know I would be. Not one of them has a chance of scoring an Aphrodite like he did, but I bet one day they make Bill Gates look poor.”

I always thought it was romantic how the deformed god of fire married the beautiful goddess of love. Kind of like a mythological Beauty and the Beast. Looking at his descendants, however, I’m thinking more along the lines of Weird Science—but these guys don’t look coordinated enough to build the perfect woman.

Seeing all the cliques grouped according to ancestral god makes me wonder about Nicole. Seems like she doesn’t hang out with anyone but herself—and now me. But she’s part immortal, too.

“So, which god are you—”

She suddenly jerks me across the hall toward an open door, almost sending me sprawling on the floor.

“What the—”

“The Hades harem,” she explains. “You do not want to mess with them.”

And, peeking back out the doorway, boy can I see why.

The group just rounding the corner look like your average Goths—black hair, black clothes, black eyeliner—but with an edge. Pretty fitting for the god of the underworld’s descendants.

Shoulder-to-shoulder, they stride down the hall, daring anyone to get in their way. The Zeus set stares them down, but most of the other students in the hall scamper out of their path. As they pass the doorway, a tall, thin girl with pale skin, shoulder-length black hair, and piercing pale blue eyes, stares at me with intimidating intensity. I know I must be a novelty and all, but she really doesn’t need to look like she wants to melt me with her eyes.

“Who is that?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.

“That,” she says, grabbing my shoulder and dragging me into the classroom, “is Kassandra. Trouble on a cosmic scale.”

I don’t need her warning to know that.

“This is Cornball’s class,” she says, flopping into a desk in the last row. “Make it through this and it’s all downhill until lunch.”

“Great,” I say, dragging my fascinated thoughts back from Kassandra and the Hades harem and following her to the back of the room.

I can do this. With Nicole’s help I’ll be in sync with the social patterns in no time, and all I have to do is get my Bs. No prob—

“I assume you all practiced the quadratic formula over the summer holiday,” the big, beefy teacher at the front of the class says. “Take out a sheet of paper, solve for x and graph the solution.”

He turns to the board and writes a list of ten equations, each one longer than a long distance phone number. Crap. Maybe USC will accept a solid C average.

Maybe I should have sat in the front row.

“How has your day been thus far, Phoebe?”

I look up at the sound of Damian’s voice. What a question. It’s a miracle I’ve made it to lunch, and the last thing I need is his interference in my half-hour of education-free time. My brain seriously needs to decompress.