Clio called Apollo a shithead and a surprised laugh escaped Rosario, just a quiet huff of air, but it loosened something in her chest.
Everyone loved 'Archer' at school. Students, faculty, administration— he pulled them all inexorably into his orbit like a star pulled at the matter in a circumstellar disk. The only other person Rosario had ever heard say anything against 'Archer' was Avery, and the sorority girls had blacklisted him so hard they'd frozen out Lyra just for talking to him. And Erato yesterday? Lyra'd said she'd been gushing about Apollo. Wanted to know how excited Rosario was to have such a brilliant dad.
Rosario hadn't realised till Clio said it just how much she'd needed one other person – one person who wasn't her or Lyra or Avery – to say out loud that, yes, Apollo was a pain in the ass.
And maybe that tiny slackening in her chest had left behind room for some honesty, because it wasn't so hard at all to say. "He knew I was trying to find out about my dad. And that I thought he was my brother, because of the whole... Goldenhawk situation. Instead of talking to me like a sane person, he kept following me around and being... cryptic and lying and freaking me out. Because he wanted to get to know me." She was still holding back a lot of adjectives, and a lot of pent-up frustration (she was doing a slightly better job on the adjectives than the frustration, which tightened around her voice when she described the lies), but it was more than she'd told anybody except Lyra, and maybe Elaine.