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“The tear?”

“No, dude, the importance of what you’re telling me. Look, I don’t know what happened with the strawberry potion. I don’t know if Hecate was setting you up to fail or what. But Idoknow that nothing on earth is worth losing my best friend. We’ll figure this out. Just please, no more grounding yourself. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I should have been thinking about how you felt rather than stressing about getting into college.”

He sniffled. “Well…youshouldstress about college a little.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Because I’ve seen your GPA.”

“Just come here.” I wrapped him in a hug. He smelled like dirt, dried leaves, and probably squirrels and an adopted rat named Eustis, but fortunately my nose wasn’t that good. “Promise me no more grounding.”

He nodded. “It…it was kinda cool, though, right?”

“Very impressive,” I said. “And terrifying.”

“Okay. Annabeth is going to kill me, isn’t she?”

We didn’t even discuss not telling her, because that was a recipe for disaster.

“She might kill you a little,” I agreed. “But in a loving, caring way. And she’ll tell you the same thing I did. Nothing is worth losing you. You are always going to be with us, even if we’re temporarily living on different coasts.”

His smile started to crumble. I was afraid I’d made him sad again, but then his eyes brightened like he’d realized something important.

“Different coasts!” he said. “The squirrels said something about the coast.…”

“Like, the squirrels are from California?”

“No. They said…It’s hard to translate. They said the polecat was last seen with four spirits from beyond the coast. Something like that.”

“You just remembered this?”

He frowned. I was glad to see him annoyed with me, because that was better than him being sad and wanting to dissolve into dirt. “No, Percy, but I’ve never grounded myself before. It’s a little hard to hear the voices of everything alive in Manhattan all at once. I’m surprised I could even pick out the ideaLafayette Street.”

“That’s fair. So, these four spirits…any ideas?”

“It—it doesn’t exactly make sense. Usually, to a squirrel, a spirit from beyond the coast would mean anaiad, a water spirit, but we’re not going anywhere near a natural body of water.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Well, my school’s not very close to the water, and I’ve got a Nereid from the deep sea as my guidance counselor. At least, Ididbefore she disappeared on me. If there are naiads involved, that’s good, right? Water is kind of my thing.”

“I mean, yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Come on, Cloven Elder. You may have just saved the day.”

As we started down Lafayette Street again, I was in a much better mood. My friend wasn’t turning into dirt. We had a solid lead on finding Gale. And Grover seemed to enjoy being called Cloven Elder. My thoughts started rambling, as they do. I wondered if I should call him CE for short. Did that mean before he became a Cloven Elder he was Grover BCE?

This is how my mind works. Welcome to the chaos.

We took our time, partly because Grover was still shaky from his communion with nature. Also, I was trying to stay alert for anything water-spirity in our vicinity. I got nothing except a vague sense that my bladder was full, which wasn’t helpful.

We crossed Houston Street. As we made our way through Nolita, I got the usual tingle of agitation I felt whenever I headed to this part of downtown. The buildings were too low, the sky too open, the streets no longer on a nice simple grid. I felt like the parts of Manhattan I knew best—Uptown, Midtown—had run away to hide like the citizens of some Wild West town right before the big gunfight at high noon.

On the corner of Jersey Street, we passed our first perfume shop. The smells wafting out made my eyes water, as if millions of flower bouquets were crying out in terror all at once. The next block had three more perfume shops. The pedestrians walking down the street even smelled perfumy, like they’d been browsing the stores and getting spritzed with free samples.

Grover sneezed.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “What’s with all the smelly stuff?”

“This area has the highest concentration of perfume shops in the world,” he said. “I try not to come down here because it kills my sinuses.”