Dinner

After our long talk and a couple of burgers, fries, and Cokes, Mr. Daimon and I shook hands, and he said to keep everything we’ve talked about to myself, even with my family. But then, how would he find out if I didn’t? And then I thought it over again and reconsidered. I thought he’d be able to find out if I did or didn’t somehow.

But then I thought, why should I keep it to myself?

I thought it through: if the authorities did get wind of what the Aristotle Endowment really was, and what Delos High School, and the other schools, were about, if they believed it, they’d probably think it was crazy and they’d shut down the schools. I’ve seen enough Marvel and DC superhero movies to understand this, so I gave my solemn promise that I wouldn’t breathe a word of it to anyone.

I walked out of his office, and then out of the school. It was already getting dark. I looked at my watch and was surprised to find out that it was already close to ten. The school parking lot was already mostly empty – my old second-hand five-year-old Jeep Renegade was one of the few cars left in the lot. I got in and drove home.

When I arrived home, Mom and Dad were just sitting down to dinner. They evidently waited up for me.

“Hey, champ,” Dad said. And Ma stood up and gave me a kiss and a hug.

“We’re just about to start,” she said. “How about a bite?”

“Hey, Ma,” I said. “I just ate. Mr. Daimon, the vice-principal, and I ate in his office.”

“Everything okay?” Dad asked. “The school called and said you were with the vice principal. What was that about?”

I shrugged. “It was nothing.”

“If you’re not eating, sit down at least, and tell us what happened.”

“I’ll get you some dessert, at least,” Ma said and went to the kitchen counter to fetch it.

I wracked my brain to invent something to tell and sat down.

“Really, Dad, it was nothing,” I said. “Mr. Daimon just wanted to ask me how my SAT practice exams were going and what colleges I was contemplating.”

“Ahhh. For a moment, Mom and I were worried.”

Ma came back with a generous slice of jello. An aside here – jello was my all-time favorite dessert, and, in our house, jello was a regular fixture. My favorite flavor was Strawberry Jell-O. Ma’s favorite flavor was “green.” Lol. What Ma brought, though, was mango jello with chunks of pineapple.

I took a big spoonful of the jello in my mouth and gave Ma a kiss of appreciation and thanks.

“So, what did you tell him,” Dad asked.

“Well, I said I aced the first couple of SAT practice exams that Ms. Minerva, our school counselor, scheduled for our class, and I’m scheduled for another one next month.” I shrugged. “The teachers are really concerned about keeping the school’s SAT averages up.”

“It’s great that you aced your practice SATs, son.”

“As for college – well, I don’t have any ideas yet. I guess it would depend on what I’d be majoring in. But I haven’t decided that yet.”

And it was an easy kind of dinner – the usual kind. Maybe it would sound a bit boring for some. For me, I grew up with it, and I guess I like it. My folks and I were very interested in each other’s goings-on, even mundane stuff, and I liked that a lot. I guess, for me, it just meant that we were really invested in each other and that we loved each other.

I know, right? Pretty boring. Lol.

Thank god the dinner conversation moved on – I was running out of lies. Dad told us all about his day – he was a lawyer for a small but upcoming law firm (that was how he described the law firm he worked for – “small-but-upcoming”) and Ma told us about her day as the day-shift floor manager at her bank.

Scholarship

Their jobs were fairly new: because Ma’s bank was willing to move her to the Chicago branch while Dad got wind of a job also in Chicago, and it was getting increasingly awkward for me at my school in DC, the family decided that I should accept the scholarship at Delos, and we, as a family, would relocate from DC to Chicago. And if this gave me a shot at a full college scholarship, then it would all be worth it.

We moved into a nice suburban house Dad found. It was in a small, gated community several miles from my new school. This justified my folks getting me my own car, which was totally fine by me, lol, and with Ma’s help, I was able to find my five-year-old Jeep Renegade. Ma then started setting up house, but it was slow going because my folks were busy settling into their new jobs, and I was settling into my new school. Nevertheless, within a month, we had started feeling at home.

The three of us were missing our old lives and friends in DC, but as we got used to things, it slowly became better. And by now, we were doing okay, except for me – my old troubles from back home seemed to be starting up again – I don’t know why. But I wouldn’t be telling Ma and Dad this. Nevertheless, I was finding some good friends, particularly Carla – a simply gorgeous Filipino-American girl who seemed to have decided to make me her project, and Michael - a big six-foot-six jock that we found hanging around Carla and me all the time.

Anyway. Our dinner conversation wasn’t anything spectacular, and though I was dying to tell them everything I was just told, I didn’t.

Nice, boring stories of middle-management life to go with my humdrum high school stories (I also didn’t tell them about my troubles. I didn’t want to worry them.)

After dinner, and washing and drying the dishes, Dad and I had at it on the Xbox. As usual, I beat the pants off my old man, but I usually did. Over the years, I had developed a sneaking suspicion that he always let me win given how often I did. Well, almost always. Lol.

I then went upstairs to my room, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and quickly finished up whatever homework I had. Nowadays, homework seemed to be pretty easy for some reason. I missed my afternoon classes, but I doubted I’d be in any kind of trouble if I missed doing any assignments for them. As I was finishing, Ma came up and knocked on my door with yet another helping of jello. She usually did that when she sensed something wrong. But that’s a mother’s prerogative, I guess.

After I spent several minutes assuring her that nothing was wrong, she mussed my hair, kissed me on the cheek, and wished me good night.

Googling

When she left, I went to my desk in the corner of my room, turned on my PC, and did some googling. And of all that Mr. Daimon said earlier – there wasn’t a trace of any of it over the internet, although there was a lot of material about the Aristotle Endowment, the scholarships, and the schools. I wonder who was behind the Endowment. Whoever they were, they were filthy rich. Imagine all the scholarships… I popped up the calculator on the screen and did some computations. Assume that the government spent fifteen thousand per year per high school student… And there were only twenty-five students per class, with two classes per year… and there were Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior years… and there were ten schools… And assume a yearly college scholarship grant of fifteen thousand per kid for a four-year undergraduate course, and assume ten percent of the kids from each graduating class availed of their scholarships, while the rest just took a fifteen thousand one-time grant… that was just a little less than forty million per year… wow… Make it fifty million in case some of the kids picked really expensive colleges.

Fifty million… It makes you wonder who would be willing to spend fifty million per year just to give kids scholarships. And I was sure I was underestimating it.

I shelved that for now and continued my research.

I googled the monasteries Mr. Daimon mentioned, and they turned out to be real places, and, yes, the monasteries – the old and the new - were also repositories for a lot of ancient Greek artifacts and relics. As for the Kodikos tablets and the Golden Theory plates, there were a few sketchy articles in some questionable sites. The sites used a lot of footage from the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, as well as a mishmash of clips from lots of Discovery Channel programs. … best to ignore these sources, then.

I then tried to find a story that matched the one on the Golden Theory plates. But I was either not too good with Google, or there was no such story.

I then googled Dr. Hephaestus from the Human Genome Project, and, per several newspaper articles cited by several news sites, there was such a person – who supposedly died in a tragic car accident. I read through his biodata, and it confirmed he was one of the senior people in the project. And before joining the project, he did indeed work with the NIH.

His name was unusual, to say the least – a name that harkened to Greek mythology. Maybe that was why he became an archeology buff, with a heavy interest in ancient Greek artifacts, history, and mythology.
The, quote, coincidence that the Golden Theory… fable, and the one who translated the Kodikos were both named “Hephaestus” – still sounded fishy to me. But I couldn’t unearth other facts about it (to be fair, I didn’t unearth much). So Mr. Daimon may be right that it was just a coincidence. Coincidence, my godlike powers! … heheheheh.

That I may be… godlike – wow! But Mr. Daimon said it wasn’t too big a thing. Just some general upgrades – not like in the comic books. But I’m glad I won’t have problems with viruses or diseases or cancer anymore… But he also said I scored 100. One hundred percent match. Does that mean I’m not just “like” a Greek god, but am an actual Greek god? It was both scary and… well, I don’t really know what to feel. Mr. Daimon said they didn’t know the implications of someone scoring 100 – a 100% match. A little scary that they didn’t know. The other kids only ever scored 50.

I did a bit more googling. IRL, the DNA of siblings had a 50 or so percent match. If I had known that fact earlier, I could have asked Mr. Daimon, does that make us like brothers and sisters of gods? Genetically, I mean, hehe. Maybe half-brothers and -sisters. I remembered the word “demigod”- would a score of 50 make them like demigods? Like Perseus or Hercules?

Anyway, everything I found on the internet, or didn’t find, dovetailed, and I found myself fully believing Mr. Daimon.

Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.

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