Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter one. ☄︎. *. ⋆
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
IF YOU HAD TOLD ME YESTERDAY that I would be battling my taxi driver in the middle of upstate New York because he turned into a bunch of man-eating birds and tried to kill me, the funny thing is, I would have totally believed you.
That's the thing about being a half-blood; you never know who's friend and who's foe. After a while, you just start to assume everyone is trying to kill you—and chances are, they actually are.
I'm assuming you already know what a demigod is. You've already read Percy's point of view, so you're ready for mine? Yeah, sounds about right. You'll find that my own perspective is an upgrade from his himbo-esque persona. But, even so, I guess you might need some backstory for this particular scene.
I live with my aunt, Carrie, in a two-bedroom apartment in mid-Manhattan. No, my mother's not dead—'But, Theo,' you might be asking yourself, 'if your mother is still alive, why aren't you living with her?' And the answer to that question, my friend, is: My mom was declared 'unfit to raise a child' by a judge of familial law, or whatever that job is called. She lives in some small town outside of the city in a shabby cottage with other people the judge decided were too crazy to live normal lives. I think there's a court-mandated caretaker living there.
I'm pretty sure my mom's still alive—I like to think I would have gotten an email by now if she wasn't.
By now, you might be asking yourself why I'm not living with my father, and (avoiding the fact that I'm beginning to think you're nosy) the answer to that question is: My dad, in my aunt's words, is a "dirty scumbag" and it's his fault my mom isn't allowed to raise me.
Aunt Carrie loves my mom—sisterly bond, or whatever the psychiatrist said—and will never pass up the opportunity to talk down on my dad. She hates him.
So, by extension, she hates me. Don't ask me how that logic works.
I think she's jealous that she's forty-something and doesn't have a husband or kids of her own, so she decides to take that resentment out on me, as if it's my fault that my mother had a good opportunity to have a happy family and it was ripped away from her.
I mean, she could also hate me because of how much trouble I get into at school, but I doubt that's it. She doesn't seem to give much of a damn about my high school career.
So, yeah. Mom's in assisted living, aunt hates me, and Dad's nowhere to be seen. I thought, for a long time, that the entire world was against me.
And then, my Greek and Roman history teacher turned into a centaur, and my world fucking flipped, because that was when I found out why my dad had left.
