DESTINY ↳ WILL SOLACE

2. Three Old Ladies Knit the Socks of Death

CHAPTER TWO

Three Old Ladies Knit the Socks of Death

I don't own the series. Rick Riordan does. As usual. Duh.

Percy wasn't sure if everybody was just playing a prank on her, or whether she had seriously hallucinated her teacher for almost an entire year, but the fact that everybody was claiming that the perky, blonde woman who got on the bus after the field trip was their real teacher, Mrs Kerrs, made her inclined to believe it was the latter, but Percy was also very sure that she had never seen her before. It was as if everybody had decided to band together to make her feel as insane as possible—as if even Mr Brunner and Grover had decided to jump into the wagon of "let's make Percy feel as freakish as we possibly can." Having ADHD did tend to make someone have the occasional hallucination, but this 24/7 illusion was seriously starting to drive her insane.

In the weeks following the trip, Percy did her best to trip up any of her classmates in an attempt to force them into admitting that they were all playing a prank on her, but every time she mentioned Mrs Dodds name, they would roll their eyes and mutter "here we go," as if preparing themselves to listen to her insanity. Then, upon seeing their reaction, Percy would deflate and completely forget what she was going to say, leading them to roll their eyes and practically run away, leaving her feeling rather humiliated and questioning her own sanity.

In fact, Percy herself was slowly beginning to believe them. It was either that she had actually hallucinated a math-teacher-demon-thing, or her classmates were all Oscar-worthy actors, and she knew, for a fact, that they weren't that good. But Grover couldn't fool her. Every time she brought up Mrs Dodds in front of him, he would pause first, and then claim she didn't exist. But the way he reacted, the way he paled... something had to have happened in the museum. Something about Mrs Dodds.

Percy, however, didn't have time to worry about that. She was beginning to get cranky, losing sleep, all because she almost always shot straight up in bed in the middle of the night in cold sweat, biting back a scream, sure there was an old, ugly hag at the foot of her bed, cackling, "Die, honey!" and trying to do exactly what it said. Her roommate, Elaine Sinclair, was nice, and she didn't complain about the few times Percy had woken her up, but Percy didn't know how to get the nightmares to stop. She very much doubted there were pills for dreamless sleep, and even if there were, she wouldn't have wanted to take them. From all her experiences with Gabe, she had learned, quite early, that alcohol and pills were not good.

The strange weather didn't help her mood either. One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in her dorm room—that was one of the few nights where both she and Elaine had woken up with a scream on their lips, and a teacher had to come running to see if they were dying, or something. A few days after, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy. One of the current events they studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year. It was like the sky was declaring war... but skies didn't just declare war, and Percy found herself wondering what was happening, for it was so strange that even her teachers didn't know why it was happening.

Put all of that together, and it was safe to say that Percy's life was beginning to go downhill faster than she had initially anticipated. Her lack of sleep resulted in a faster loss of temper, which meant that more often than not, she got into fights with Nancy Bobofit and her stupid friends. For almost every class and every day, she was sent out of the classroom, and of course, perfect little Nancy and her friends never got in trouble either. And all the times she got in trouble didn't improve her mood either—in fact, it just worsened it to a degree she hadn't even known was possible before, and her grades were suffering too.