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system of trading weeks cooking for each other was all thrown out of whack, but that was okay with Helen. She wanted her father to be happy.
    Jerry repeated the line “you don’t have to be beautiful” four times in row, probably because he couldn’t remember any of the other words. Helen smiled and shook her head, thanking her lucky stars she had a father like Jerry to wake up to, even if he was a terrible singer. She had no idea why he could never get the words to songs right, but she suspected it had something to do with being a parent. Nobody’s parents were supposed to sing Prince well. It would be disturbing if they did.
    Throwing back her covers, Helen launched into cleaning mode. Two weeks ago, Claire had taken Helen to the mainland to get the special plastic sheets that moms use if they have a kid who wets the bed, making a thousand cracks about the Princess and the “Pee” along the way. Helen didn’t mind. The sheets were uncomfortable and super-embarrassing to buy, but a necessity since every night she came back from the Underworld either bleeding or covered in yuck.
    She stood up and started stripping her bed as fast as she could. In the laundry room, she took off her muddy boxer shorts and threw out her ripped T-shirt, putting everything that could be salvaged into the wash. She took a quick shower, and then retraced her path with a rag to clean up the dirty footprints she had tracked across the floor.
    A few days ago she had considered using her superfast Scion speed to get through this new and annoying morning cleaning ritual, but she decided that it would probably scare her dad to death if he ever caught her doing it. Instead, Helen had to either get up at the crack of dawn or run around frantically at normal human speed to cover her tracks, like she was doing that morning. Out of time, Helen wiggled into some jeans before she had completely dried off while trying to pull a sweater over her damp hair. It was so cold in her room that the tips of her ears were beginning to go numb.
    “Lennie! Your breakfast is getting cold!” Jerry shouted up the stairs.
    “Oh, for crying out . . . Crap!” Helen cussed as she stumbled over her book bag. Her sweater wasn’t all the way on yet, and it was still covering her face and pinning her arms over her head.
    After a moment of flailing around like a muppet, Helen regained her footing and paused to laugh at herself, wondering how a demigod could be such a damn klutz. She assumed it had to have something to do with the fact that she was so tired. Helen righted her clothing, grabbed her school things, and ran down the stairs before her dad could start singing “Kiss” again.
    Jerry had gone hog wild on breakfast. There were eggs, bacon, sausage, oatmeal with nuts and dried cherries, and of course, pumpkin pancakes. Pumpkin pancakes were a favorite of Jerry's and Helen’s, but around Halloween, which was only about a week and a half away, anything with pumpkin in it was on the menu. It was sort of a competition between the two of them. It started with roasted pumpkin seeds and went all the way to soups and gnocchi. Whoever found a way to sneak pumpkin into a dish without getting caught was the winner.
    The whole pumpkin thing had started when Helen was a little girl. One October she’d complained to her dad that pumpkins only got used as decoration, and although she loved jack-o’-lanterns, it was still a big waste of food. Jerry had agreed, and the two of them resolved to start eating pumpkins instead of just carving them up and then throwing them out.
    Unfortunately, they found that pumpkins on their own are so bland they’re practically inedible. If they hadn’t gotten creative with the cooking, they would have given up on their Save the Pumpkins crusade after the first year.
    There were a lot of nauseating creations, of which the pumpkin popsicles were by far the worst, but the pancakes stood out as the biggest success. They instantly became as large a