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Ninety-eight percent of the time, dragging Apollo out of his beach shack and showing him the world is a fun time. Grace introduces him to fruity cocktails with the little umbrellas, to skeeball in the mall’s arcade, to art museums that she cons her way into with an old student ID. She helps him find new shirts. She watches him eat cotton candy for the first time in years and kisses the sweetness from his mouth.
Ninety-eight percent of the time, it’s the happiest Grace has ever been.
Two percent of the time, Grace regrets ever broaching the subject. Because as it turns out, being a god’s barely-qualified tour guide to all of the mortal world can get...pretty embarrassing.
“Um, Grace?” Apollo says, tilting his head like a confused puppy over his basket of fries. His eyes flicker toward the ice-cream stall. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
Grace is, unfortunately, seeing what Apollo is seeing. “Yep.”
“Does that man—have my face on his shirt?”
“He sure does.”
The young man in front of them smiles, takes his ice-cream, and turns, giving them a clear view of Apollo’s face printed in chipping ink on his T-shirt. Or, rather, a fan artist rendering of Apollo’s face; Grace has a sudden, horrifying mental image of all the other art that must be floating around on the Internet and frantically shoves it back before she has to unpack all of that.
Intellectually, she knows she’s not responsible for all the weird habits and contradictions and insanities of the mortal world. But as the Idol closest to it, she can’t help but feel that these are her people. Like if her brothers had decided to print her boyfriend’s face on their shirts. (Grace shoves that thought back, too, because Liam absolutely would.)
“How did he even get that?” asks Apollo. His voice drips with a mix of incredulousness, fascination, and disgust.
“Probably online?” Grace replies weakly. She really does not want to have to explain the weirder sides of celebrity culture in the middle of the boardwalk at 11 A.M. “There are stores for that kind of thing.”
“The proportions are off,” Apollo complains, and despite everything, Grace feels a huff of laughter shake the knot loose from her chest.
“That’s what you’re focusing on?”
Apollo sniffs and looks away from the shirt for a moment, smiling down at her. It unravels the rest of the knot, as rare as the perfect sunny day above them. “I am the god of the arts, Grace. Although I suppose I did share that role with Athena—anyway.”
They both turn back to the young man, like being drawn toward a particularly fascinating train wreck. Okay, maybe that’s not fair: the man seems perfectly nice, the frosted tips of his hair glinting in the sunlight, as he smiles and hands a cone to a darker-haired man on a bench. And Grace doesn’t even see what’s wrong with the proportions of the artwork. It looks pretty much like a cartoon version of Apollo, brooding expression and all.
“I think it looks—fine,” she blurts. As soon as the words leave her mouth, her ears redden.
Hey, maybe the Oracle had the right idea after all. Never leave the beach shack!
But Apollo just smiles softly, rubbing the back of his neck. Looking down at their joined hands over the boards, the gentle rumble of the ocean below, he says, “I have to confess, I...don’t know why anyone would want that. My face on a shirt, I mean.” His smile fades. “Of all the Idols, I’ve done the least to warrant it.”
Grace rubs the back of his hand, considers cracking a grin and saying, You’re cute, of course they’d like your face! But then she notices the slight shake in Apollo’s hand; his mouth trembles, lips parted.
It’s not surprising. Even on bright days like this, they often manage to touch a true wound.
“You inspire them,” Grace says quietly. Setting aside her kneejerk mortification, she looks at the young man again: as blond as Apollo is, with bracelets adorning his wrists in bi colors and a backpack dotted with mythology pins. Camp Half-Blood, one reads, next to a little golden arrow, a glittering skull.
“Oh,” Apollo says, “those...Peter Johnson books. They have to know now that I’m nothing like the stories—those or the original myths.”
“That’s not—entirely what it’s about,” Grace hedges. Freddie would know how to put it into words, but Grace fumbles for them: that when she was younger, she wore band T-shirts plastered with the faces of her favorite singers, that she researched every queer band she could when Freddie let her borrow her computer, that she cheered when her favorite musician announced they’d recovered enough to release an album. It was sort of about who they were, but also about what she believed they could be. And then—what Grace could be.
“It’s not about being exactly like the stories,” she tries. “I mean, I don’t think we’re ever going to live up to the perfect idea of us that someone has in their heads. But—” Grace looks at the young man, throwing back his head in laughter, entwining his fingers with the other man’s, “—sometimes it’s enough that you exist. That you’re real. Because then they can be, too.”
Apollo’s brow furrows, and he frowns—well, more like an adorable pout. “I don’t understand,” he says. “It’s not like I’ve done much over the years to garner such...belief.” He gestures to his clothes—his go-to plain button-down and washed-out khakis—with a wry smile.
Grace knocks her hip against his; as sympathetic as she is, she can tell when the vulnerability is slipping into true sadsack territory. “Hey, it’s their choice to believe in you,” she says. “And it’s yours whether or not you try to be more like the person they believe in.”
Apollo hums, watching the boardwalk. The man and his partner have melted into the crowd by now, a multicolored swirl of chaos and mortality. A family squabbles over pictures by the railing; a child tries to dive in after a dolphin; someone is playing “Party in the U.S.A.” at the highest possible volume.
Grace grins: her world can be pretty cool, too.
“And you, Grace?” Apollo says after a long moment. His eyes twinkle. “Do you believe in me?”
Grace rolls her eyes, leans up on her tiptoes, and kisses him. “Dummy,” she murmurs, “of course.”
Then she promptly steals a fry out of his basket.