Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates by Kristine Grayson Page B

famous people on various shelves and books everywhere, and plants blooming in the windows. The room even smells good, like vanilla with a hint of lavender, which I’m guessing is her perfume. She has posters all over the wall—mostly quotes from the writers she’s having us read—and they’re pretty inspirational, even for me.
    I sit in the back. In the other classes, I try to be in the back but near the door, so I can escape fast; but here I’m in the back near the window, by the violets, which are always blooming, it seems (which I guess is some kind of great feat because violets are hard to nurture—so says my friend Google. I’m beginning to think Google is magic all by itself).
    Mrs. Fiddler isn’t nicer to me than anyone else or meaner, and I don’t like her class the best. Just the room, which seems more like a room in a house or a library than one of the school rooms around here.
    Mrs. Fiddler is kinda flamboyant. She wears dresses when most teachers (women teachers) wear pants and she drapes scarves over everything. She used to be the drama coach, but I guess the school dropped drama a few years ago and assigned her English, and she’s making do.
    At least, that’s what she said on my first day.
    Then she ignored me like everybody else.
    Only today, when the bell rings signaling the start of class, she lasers right in on me (is that slang? Crap. I don’t know what sounds right and what doesn’t). She closes the door and follows her bright blue gaze with, “Tiffany, I hear you are an expert on Greek myths.”
    Great. That means Helen told her. Or someone. I feel that heat rising up in my cheeks.
    “Not really,” I mumble.
    “Now, don’t be modest,” Mrs. Fiddler says. “Most of my students don’t know the Greeks had myths, let alone the details of the first Olympic games. Is this something you studied in your European classrooms?"
    Everybody is looking at me. Some of Helen’s minions (I mean friends) sit up front and they’re so intense they look like they’re trying to film everything with their eyes. A couple of the boys blink like they’ve never noticed me before. And everyone else just stares with a little relief, probably glad they’re not on the spot.
    “I was homeschooled,” I mumble. By Athena half the time, I want to say, but don’t. If I can’t magick people to mess with them, I wish I could say stuff that’ll mess with their heads. But I can’t do that either.
    “Well, in your homeschool then,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “did you learn about myths there?”
    Mom warned me about the whole myth/truth thing—that what’s true and historical in my family is myth to everyone else, so I don’t slip this time.
    “I learned it from my mom, mostly,” I say. “She’s a professor of Greek Studies, you know.”
    “Hmm,” Mrs. Fiddler says, which I’m beginning to understand as mortal-adult-speak for “No, I didn’t know.”
    “She would tell me the myths when she came to visit me in Greece.”
    Everyone’s still staring. Imagine how they would look if I told them that Mom showed me the difference between the magical Mount Olympus (truly a place in the clouds) and the mountain the Greeks call Mount Olympus, which is spectacular, yes, but certainly not like home.
    “Well, then,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “you know who Zeus is, then.”
    I almost blurt, Yeah, he’s my dad , but I catch myself at the last minute. I’m getting irritated enough to drop some kind of bomb into the waters here, though. Maybe if I do mention my dad’s name, then people would leave me alone.
    Although I get the sense that there’s no real respect for the Greek gods here in America.
    “I know him,” I say.
    “Can you tell us who he is?”
    Mom prepared me for this too. I say, “It depends on who you read, Homer or the later works. He’s sort of an amalgam of all sorts of mythical figures, which is why he’s seen as promiscuous. My mom says that scholars believe that he’s like the great almighty,