I'm still not quite dead. It's good to see all of you again. Welcome back to the book. It's good to be back. I wanna preface this and the other parts of the series by saying:
I do not own anything in the Percy Jackson series, character or otherwise. I only hold the rights to my original character and his actions. Please do not copyright strike me again.
I'm going to "cast" the gods. Mostly so you can visualize when you read these. Also I'll do that with certain important characters like Chiron. None of the mc's though because they've already got established book appearances.
And Y/N. Well, he's you. Aside from a couple teeny tiny little details. Anyway! I'm getting off track. Let's get back!
With that being said, I hope you all enjoy it! And:
[Percy's POV]
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now.
Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life. Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.
If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.
But if you recognize yourself in these pages. If you feel something stirring inside stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they'll come for you.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
My name is Percy Jackson.
I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.
Am I a troubled kid?
Yeah. You could say that.
I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan. Twenty-eight mental case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.
I know it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.
But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes. Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee.
(Robin Williams as Chiron)
You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.
I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get in trouble.
Boy, was I wrong.
See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway.
And before that, at my fourth grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that...
Well, you get the idea.
This trip, I was determined to be good.
All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter and ketchup sandwich.
Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled.
He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria.
Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything back to her because I was already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death by in school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip.
"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled. Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter."
He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.
"That's it." I started to get up, but my only other friend at this school, Y/N, put his hand on my shoulder.
He was sitting in a seat the row across from us. Aside from him looking slightly older than you average 12 year old, he was a normal looking kid. (H/C) hair, (S/C) skin, and (E/C) eyes. A bit taller than me. A lot more athletic looking. Though I could've sworn one day his eyes weren't (E/C). He thinks I'm crazy because of that. Maybe I am. Who knows?
He showed up about halfway through the year. The school put us in the same room and then we were friends. It seemed too easy but I wasn't exactly complaining about having another friend.
He and Grover got along great, and it just so happens that they knew each other from a previous school.
He held me down in my seat.
"Percy, you're already on thin ice," he chided me, as he always did when I got in trouble.
Honestly, he probably keeps me out of half the fights I could get into. "You know you're going to be blamed if something happens. So calm down. Alright?"
"How have you not kicked her teeth in yet? Are you not tired of her?"
"Trust me Percy. I am. But I don't want any of us to get expelled. And you have the best chance of it." he said, sighing.
Looking back on it, I wish I'd shook his arm off, and decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there. In-school suspension would've been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get myself into.
Mr. Brunner led the museum tour.
He rode up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble. statues and glass cases full of really old black and orange pottery.
It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.
He gathered us around a thirteen foot tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a stele, for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was kind of interesting, but everybody around me was talking, and every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would give me the evil eye.
Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year, when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown.
Anyway, from her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit and figured I was devil spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey," real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.
One time, after she'd made me erase answers out of old math workbooks until midnight, I told Grover I didn't think Mrs. Dodds was human. He looked at me, real serious, and said, "You're absolutely right." Y/N followed it by punching Grover on the arm and telling him to stop it. Not sure what that was about.
Mr. Brunner was talking about Greek funeral art.
Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turned around and said, "Will you shut up?"
It came out louder than I meant it to.
The whole group laughed. Mr. Brunner stopped his story.
"Mr. Jackson," he said, "did you have a comment?" My face was totally red. I said, "No, sir." Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?"
I looked at the carving, and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized it. "That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"
"Yes," Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because ..."
"Well..." I racked my brain to remember. "Kronos was the king god, and-"
"God?" Mr. Brunner asked.
"Titan," I said. "King Titan. Sorry. And... he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife hid baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters-"
"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me.
"-and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans," I continued, "and the gods won."
Some snickers came from the group.
Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbled to a friend, "Like we're going to use this in real life. Like it's going to say on our job applications, 'Please explain why Kronos ate his kids.'"
"And why, Mr. Jackson," Brunner said, "to paraphrase Miss Bobofit's excellent question, does this matter in real life?"
"Busted," Grover muttered.
"Shut up," Nancy hissed, her face even brighter red than her hair. Y/N gave him a pat on the back and a glare to Nancy's freckled face.
At least Nancy got packed, too. Mr. Brunner was the only one who ever caught her saying anything wrong. It felt like he had radar ears.
I thought about his question, and shrugged. "I don't know, sir."
"I see." Mr. Brunner looked disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson. Zeus did indeed feed Kronos, the "king titan" so to speak, a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan's stomach. The gods defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it's time for lunch. Mrs. Dodds, would you lead us back outside?"
With that, the class drifted off, the girls holding their stomachs, the guys pushing each other around and acting like doofuses.
Grover, Y/N, and I were about to follow when Mr. Brunner said, "Mr. Jackson."
I knew that was coming
I told the two to keep going. They shrugged and left. Then I turned toward Mr. Brunner. "Sir?"
Mr. Brunner had this look that wouldn't let you go. intense brown eyes that could've been a thousand years old and had seen everything.
"You must learn the answer to my question," Mr. Brunner told me.
"About the Titans?"
"About real life. And how your studies apply to it."
"Oh."
"What you learn from me," he said, "is vitally important. I expect you to treat it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson." I wanted to get angry, this guy pushed me so hard.
I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a suit of Roman armor and shouted: "What ho!'" and challenged us, at sword point, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshiped.
But Mr. Brunner expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact that I have dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and I had never made above a C- in my life. No he didn't expect me to be as good; he expected me to be better. And I just couldn't learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly.
I mumbled something about trying harder, while Mr. Brunner took one long sad look at the stele, like he'd been at this girl's funeral.
He told me to go outside and eat my lunch.
The class gathered on the front steps of the museum, where we could watch the foot traffic along Fifth Avenue.
Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I'd ever seen over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather all across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We'd had massive snow storms, flooding, and wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.
Nobody else seemed to notice. Some of the guys were pelting pigeons with Lunchables crackers. Nancy Bobofit was trying to pickpocket something from a lady's purse, and, of course, Mrs. Dodds wasn't seeing a thing.
Grover and I sat on the edge of the fountain, away from the others. We thought that maybe if we did that, everybody wouldn't know we were from that school. The school for loser freaks who couldn't make it elsewhere. Y/N had doubled back to talk with Mr. Brunner as he always seemed to do.
"Detention?" Grover asked.
"Nah," I said. "Not from Brunner. I just wish he'd lay off me sometimes. I mean- I'm not a genius."
Grover didn't say anything for a while. Then, when I thought he was going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, "Can I have your apple?"
I didn't have much of an appetite, so I let him take it.
I watched the stream of cabs going down Fifth Avenue, and thought about my mom's apartment, only a little ways uptown from where we sat. I hadn't seen her since Christmas.
I wanted so badly to jump in a taxi and head home. She'd hug me and be glad to see me, but she'd be disappointed, too. She'd send me right back to Yancy, reminding me that I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I was probably going to be kicked out again. I wouldn't be able to stand that sad look she'd give me.
Mr. Brunner parked his wheelchair at the base of the handicapped ramp. He ate celery while he read a paperback novel. A red umbrella stuck up from the back of his chair, making it look like a motorized cafe table.
As expected Y/N was trailing him, and having a seemingly heated conversation about something or other. With a shrug of his shoulders, he got up and started walking towards us.
I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of me with her ugly friends. I guess she'd gotten tired of stealing from the tourists and dumped her half-eaten lunch in Grover's lap.
"Oops." She grinned at me with her crooked teeth. Her freckles were orange, as if somebody had spray painted her face with liquid Cheetos.
I tried to stay cool. The school counselor had told me a million times, "Count to ten, get control of your temper." But I was so mad my mind went blank. A wave roared in my ears.
I don't remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, Nancy was sitting on her butt in the fountain, screaming, "Percy pushed me!"
Mrs. Dodds materialized next to us.
I sighed, figuring someone gave her the shove she so desperately needed. I didn't do it. And I know Grover would never. So I went with my best bet.
"Y/N, you didn't need to do that. Now you're-"
"Do what?" I looked to my left where he was walking over from about five yards away. He had his fist buried deep into a bag of potato chips. I started stammering.
I've seen him run, and he's pretty quick, but there's no way he could have gotten there and back so quickly. If he didn't push her, then who-
Some of the kids were whispering:
"Did you see-"
"-the water-"
"-like it grabbed her-"
I didn't know what they were talking about. All I knew was that I was in trouble again. Y/N finally got to me and Grover, as the crone tended to her little hatchling.
As soon as Mrs. Dodds was sure poor little Nancy was okay, promising to get her a new shirt at the museum gift shop, etc., etc., Mrs. Dodds turned on me. There was a triumphant fire in her eyes, as if I'd done something she'd been waiting for all semester. "Now, honey-"
"I know," I grumbled. "A month erasing workbooks."
That wasn't the right thing to say.
"Come with me," Mrs. Dodds said.
"Wait!" Grover yelped. "It was me. I pushed her."
I stared at him, stunned. I couldn't believe he was trying to cover for me. Mrs. Dodds scared Grover to death.
She glared at him so hard his whiskery chin trembled.
"I don't think so, Mr. Underwood," she said.
"But-"
"You. Will. Stay. Here."
Grover looked at me desperately. Y/N cut himself in between them.
"It was me- Mrs. Dodds. I did it- I pushed Nancy."
His chest was heaving as he struggled to intake all the chips he was half-done chewing.
Mrs. Dodds simply shook her head and tightened her stare back on me.
"It's okay, guys," I told him. "Thanks for trying."
"Honey," Mrs. Dodds barked at me. "Now."
Nancy Bobofit smirked.
I gave her my deluxe "I'll kill you later stare." Then I turned to face Mrs. Dodds, but she wasn't there. She was standing at the museum entrance, way at the top of the steps, gesturing impatiently at me to come on.
How'd she get there so fast?
I have moments like that a lot, when my brain falls asleep or something, and the next thing I know I've missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it. The school counselor told me this was part of the ADHD, my brain misinterpreting things.
I wasn't so sure.
I went after Mrs. Dodds.
Halfway up the steps, I glanced back at my friends. Grover was looking pale, cutting his eyes between me and Mr. Brunner, like he wanted Mr. Brunner to notice what was going on, but Mr. Brunner was absorbed in his novel. Y/N was race-walking toward him, with more urgency than I'd ever seen him have.
I looked back up. Mrs. Dodds had disappeared again. She was now inside the building, at the end of the entrance hall.
Okay, I thought. She's going to make me buy a new shirt for Nancy at the gift shop. But apparently that wasn't the plan.
I followed her deeper into the museum. When I finally caught up to her, we were back in the Greek and Roman section.
Except for us, the gallery was empty.
Mrs. Dodds stood with her arms crossed in front of a big marble frieze of the Greek gods. She was making this weird noise in her throat, like growling.
Even without the noise, I would've been nervous. It's weird being alone with a teacher, especially Mrs. Dodds. Something about the way she looked at the frieze, as if she wanted to pulverize it...
"You've been giving us problems, honey," she said.
I did the safe thing. I said, "Yes, ma'am."
She tugged on the cuffs of her leather jacket. "Did you really think you would get away with it?"
The look in her eyes was beyond mad. It was evil.
She's a teacher, I thought nervously. It's not like she's going to hurt me.
I said, "I'll-I'll try harder, ma'am."
Thunder shook the building.
"We are not fools, Percy Jackson," Mrs. Dodds said. "It was only a matter of time before we found you out. Confess, and you will suffer less pain."
I didn't know what she was talking about.
All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorm room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.
"Well?" she demanded.
"Ma'am, I don't..."
"Your time is up," she hissed.
Then the weirdest thing happened. Her eyes began to glow like barbecue coals. Her fingers stretched, turning into talons. Her jacket melted into large, leathery wings. She wasn't human. She was a shriveled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons.
Then things got even stranger.
The doors behind me burst open. Y/N ran in. He was out in front of the museum not even a minute before.
Y/N was holding a pen in his hand. Why? I didn't know.
"Percy! Heads up!" he shouted, and he hurled the pen in my general direction.
A pen. I was about to die and he threw me a pen. What luck. Mrs. Dodds lunged at me.
With a yelp, I dodged to the side and felt razor sharp talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn't a pen anymore. It was a sword-
Mr. Brunner's bronze sword, which he always used on tournament day. I've never been so confused. And that's saying something. Pre Algebra made no sense to me.
Mrs. Dodds spun toward me with a murderous look in her eyes.
My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword.
She snarled, "Die, honey!"
And she flew straight at me.
I barely heard Y/N yell "Percy!" as absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I swung the sword.
The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed clean through her body as if she were made of water.
It hissed!
Mrs. Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me.
All of a sudden, I was alone.
There was a ballpoint pen in my hand.
Mrs. Dodds had dissipated. Y/N was gone. Nobody was there but me.
My hands were still trembling. My lunch must've been contaminated with magic mushrooms or something.
Had I imagined the whole thing?
I went back outside.
It had started to rain.
Y/N and Grover were sitting by the fountain, a museum map tented over their heads. Y/N was feeding a squirrel.
Nancy Bobofit was still standing there, soaked from her swim in the fountain, grumbling to her ugly friends.
When she saw me, she said, "I hope Mrs. Kerr whipped your butt."
I said, "Who?"
"Our teacher. Duh!"
I blinked. We had no teacher named Mrs. Kerr. I asked Nancy what she was talking about.
She just rolled her eyes and turned away.
I asked Grover where Mrs. Dodds was.
He said, "...Who?"
But he paused first, and he wouldn't look at me, so I thought he was messing with me.
"Not funny, man," I told him. "This is serious."
"Mrs. Dodds? I don't think I've ever heard of her. Maybe she was in a book you read." Y/N started to laugh nervously.
He clamped a hand over his mouth, as he seemed to remember that I had bad dyslexia. He wiped nonexistent sweat off of his forehead. He seemed very jittery.
"Hey why do you have Mr. Brunner's pen anyway?" There was a waver in his voice. Each word seemed less certain than the other.
I shook my head.
Thunder boomed in the sky above.
I saw Mr. Brunner sitting under his red umbrella, reading his book. Seemingly, he'd never moved.
I went over to him.
He looked up, a little distracted. "Ah, yes. That would be my pen. Please bring your own writing utensil in the future, Mr. Jackson."
I handed Mr. Brunner his "pen".
"Sir," I said, "where's Mrs. Dodds?"
He stared at me blankly. "Who?"
"The other chaperone. Mrs. Dodds. The pre algebra teacher."
He frowned and sat forward, looking mildly concerned. "Percy, there is no Mrs. Dodds on this trip. As far as I know, there has never been a Mrs. Dodds at Yancy Academy. Are you feeling alright?"
***
I was used to the occasional weird experience, but usually they were over quickly. This 24/7 hallucination was more than I could handle. For the rest of the school year, the entire campus seemed to be playing some kind of trick on me.
The students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs. Kerr, a perky blond woman whom I'd never seen in my life until she got on our bus at the end of the field trip, had been our pre-algebra teacher since Christmas.
Every so often I would spring a Mrs. Dodds reference on somebody, just to see if I could trip them up, but they would stare at me like I was psycho. Especially people like Mr. Brunner and Y/N. When he gave me that "Are you crazy" stare, it made me feel like I was.
It got so I almost believed them that Mrs. Dodds had never existed.
Almost.
But Grover couldn't fool me. When I mentioned the name Dodds to him, he would hesitate, then claim she didn't exist. But I knew he was lying.
Something was going on. Something had happened at the museum.
I didn't have much time to think about it during the days, but at night, visions of Mrs. Dodds with talons and leathery wings would wake me up in a cold sweat.
The freak weather continued, which didn't help my mood. One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room. A few days later, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy.
One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year.
I started feeling cranky and irritable most of the time. My grades slipped from Ds to Fs. I got into more fights with Nancy Bobofit and her friends. I was sent out into the hallway in almost every class.
Finally, when our English teacher, Mr. Nicoll, asked me for the millionth time why I was too lazy to study for spelling tests, I snapped. I called him an old sot. I wasn't even sure what it meant, but it sounded good.
The headmaster sent my mom a letter the following week, making it official: I would not be invited back next year to Yancy Academy.
Fine, I told myself. Just fine.
I was homesick.
I wanted to be with my mom in our little apartment on the Upper East Side, even if I had to go to public school and put up with my obnoxious stepfather and his stupid poker parties.
And yet... there were things I'd miss at Yancy. The view of the woods out my dorm window, the Hudson River in the distance, the smell of pine trees. I'd miss my friends. Grover, who'd been a good friend, even if he was a little strange. I worried how he'd survive next year without me. Though, if he didn't get kicked out soon, I was confident Y/N had his back.
I'd miss Latin class, too. Mr. Brunner's crazy tournament days and his faith that I could do well.
As exam week got closer, Latin was the only test I studied for. I hadn't forgotten what Mr. Brunner had told me about this subject being life and death for me. I wasn't sure why, but I'd started to believe him.
The evening before my final, I got so frustrated I threw the Cambridge Guide to Greek Mythology across my dorm room. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one eighties as if they were riding skateboards.
There was no way I was going to remember the difference between Chiron and Charon, or Polydectes and Polydeuces. And conjugating those Latin verbs? Forget it.
I paced the room, feeling like ants were crawling around inside my shirt.
I remembered Mr. Brunner's serious expression, his thousand year old eyes. 'I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson.'
I took a deep breath. I picked up the mythology book.
I'd never asked a teacher for help before. Maybe if I talked to Mr. Brunner, he could give me some pointers. At least I could apologize for the big fat F I was about to score on his exam. I didn't want to leave Yancy Academy with him thinking I hadn't tried.
I walked downstairs to the faculty offices. Most of them were dark and empty, but Mr. Brunner's door was ajar, light from his window stretching across the hallway floor.
I was three steps from the door handle when I heard voices inside the office. Mr. Brunner asked a question. A voice that was definitely Grover's said "...worried about Percy, sir."
I froze.
Another voice came from the room. Y/N's.
"...almost convinced, but I don't think it's certain."
I'm not usually an eavesdropper, but I dare you to try not listening if you hear your best friends talking about you to an adult.
I inched closer.
"... alone this summer," Grover was saying. "I mean, a Kindly One in the school! Now that we know for sure, and they know too-"
"We would only make matters worse by rushing him," Mr. Brunner said. "We need the boy to mature more."
"I'm not sure he has time." Y/N panicked. "They know he's here. What's to stop them from sending more? I mean, the summer solstice deadline-"
"Will have to be resolved without him, Y/N. We must let him enjoy his ignorance while he still can."
"Sir, he saw her..."
"His imagination, Grover" Mr. Brunner insisted. "The Mist over the students and staff will be enough to convince him of that."
"Sir, I... I can't fail in my duties again." Grover's voice was choked with emotion. "You know what that would mean."
I heard Y/N pat him on the back.
"Take deep breaths, man."
"You haven't failed, Grover," Mr. Brunner said kindly. "I should have seen her for what she was. Now let's just worry about keeping Percy alive until next fall-"
The mythology book dropped out of my hand and hit the floor with a thud.
The entire room went silent.
My heart hammering, I picked up the book and backed down the hall.
A shadow slid across the lighted glass of Brunner's office door, the shadow of something much taller than my wheelchair-bound teacher, holding something that looked suspiciously like an archer's bow.
I opened the nearest door and slipped inside.
A few seconds later I heard a slow clop clop clop, like muffled wood blocks, then a sound like an animal snuffling right outside my door. A large, dark shape paused in front of the glass, then moved on.
A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.
Somewhere in the hallway, Mr. Brunner spoke. "Nothing," he murmured. "My nerves haven't been right since the winter solstice."
"Mine neither," Grover said. "But I could have sworn..."
"No, I definitely heard something." Y/N murmured. "What if-"
"Go back to the dorm," Mr. Brunner told him. "You've got a long day of exams tomorrow."
"Don't remind me."
The lights went out in Mr. Brunner's office.
I waited in the dark for what seemed like forever.
Finally, I slipped out into the hallway and made my way back up to the dorm.
Grover was lying on his bed, studying his Latin exam notes like he'd been there all night. Y/N was standing next to his bed shuffling cards. He took one out of the deck and showed it to Grover, asking, "is this your card?" Grover shook his head and Y/N collapsed onto Grover's bed, groaning in disarray.
With Y/N, it was an odd situation, because the school had simply shoved him in here, despite not having enough room for a third person. Though, I wasn't sure I'd ever seen him sleep, so maybe it worked out for the best.
"Hey," he said, sitting up, with visible stress in his eyes. "Are you about ready for the exam, Perce?"
I didn't answer.
"You look awful." Grover frowned. "Is everything okay?"
"Just... tired."
I turned so they couldn't read my expression, and started getting ready for bed.
I didn't understand what I'd heard downstairs. I wanted to believe I'd imagined the whole thing. But one thing was clear: My best friends and Mr. Brunner were talking about me behind my back. They thought I was in some kind of danger.
I heard Grover make a joke at Y/N. He was writing a letter.
"Ooh you writing to your girlfriend?" Grover laughed. That got my attention. "You have a girlfriend?" I sat up and asked him.
He put down his pen and sighed. "I wish I had a girlfriend." He chuckled. "No. Just a friend that happens to be a girl."
I sort of believed him, but at the same time I was unsure after what I had just heard. "What's her name?" I joked, my focus off of that earlier overhearing.
"Well... if you must know, her name is Annabeth. I knew her from... from the old school I went to. She was a good friend then and she's a good friend now. Just keeping her updated on some things." He said with finality.
I tried asking him more questions but he folded up the piece of paper and went out to mail it. I must've fallen asleep because I never saw him come back in.
The next afternoon, as I was leaving the three hour Latin exam, my eyes swimming with all the Greek and Roman names I'd misspelled, Mr. Brunner called me back inside.
For a moment, I was worried he'd found out about my eavesdropping the night before, but that didn't seem to be the problem.
"Percy," he said. "Don't be discouraged about leaving Yancy. It's... it's for the best."
His tone was kind, but the words still embarrassed me. Even though he was speaking quietly, the other kids finishing the test could hear. Nancy Bobofit smirked at me and made sarcastic little kissing motions with her lips.
I mumbled, "Okay, sir."
"I mean..." Mr. Brunner wheeled his chair back and forth, like he wasn't sure what to say. "This isn't the right place for you. It was only a matter of time."
My eyes stung.
Here was my favorite teacher, in front of the class, telling me I couldn't handle it. After saying he believed in me all year, now he was telling me I was destined to get kicked out.
"Right," I said, trembling.
"No, no," Mr. Brunner said. "Oh, confound it all. What I'm trying to say... you're not normal, Percy. That's nothing to be-"
"Thanks," I blurted. "Thanks a lot, sir, for reminding me
"Percy-"
But I was already gone.
On the last day of the term, I shoved my clothes into my suitcase.
The other guys were joking around, talking about their vacation plans. One of them was going on a hiking trip to Switzerland. Another was cruising the Caribbean for a month. They were juvenile delinquents, like me, but they were rich juvenile delinquents.
Their daddies were executives, or ambassadors, or celebrities. I was a nobody, from a family of nobodies.
They asked me what I'd be doing this summer and I told them I was going back to the city. What I didn't tell them was that I'd have to get a summer job walking dogs or selling magazine subscriptions, and spend my free time worrying about where I'd go to school in the fall.
"Oh," one of the guys said. "That's cool."
They went back to their conversation as if I'd never existed.
The only people I dreaded saying goodbye to were Grover and Y/N, but as it turned out, I didn't have to. They both booked tickets to Manhattan on the same Greyhound as I had, so there we were, together again, heading into the city.
During the whole bus ride, Y/N had his hand on his chin. His foot was tapping and his eyes kept darting around. He was thinking. I'd seen him do that before. What really worried me was that Grover kept glancing nervously down the aisle, watching the other passengers.
It occurred to me that he'd always acted nervous and fidgety when we left Yancy, as if he expected something bad to happen. Before, I'd always assumed he was worried about getting teased.
But there was nobody to tease him on the Greyhound.
Finally I couldn't stand it anymore.
I said, "Looking for Kindly Ones?"
Y/N's neck audibly snapped over to look at me. He stared at me wide-eyed, like I had said something outrageous.
Grover nearly jumped out of his seat. "Wha- what do you mean?"
I confessed about eavesdropping on them and Mr. Brunner the night before the exam.
Grover's eye twitched. "How much did you hear?"
"Oh... not much. What's the summer solstice deadline?"
Y/N coughed. "It's just... Another phrase for the end of the school year." He didn't sound convinced of himself.
Grover had a manic look about him.
"Look, Percy... We're worried about you, all I mean... hallucinating about demon math teachers-"
"Grover-"
"And I was telling Mr. Brunner that maybe you were overstressed or something, because there was no such person as Mrs. Dodds, and..."
"Grover, you're a really, really bad liar."
His ears turned pink.
From his shirt pocket, he fished out a grubby business card. "Just take this, okay? In case you need me this summer.
The card was in fancy script, which was murder on my dyslexic eyes, but I finally made out something like:
Grover Underwood
Keeper
Half-Blood Hill
Long Island, New York
(800) 009-0009
"What's Half-"
Y/N gently placed his hand over my mouth. He shushed me. He was really starting to freak me out.
"Don't say that out loud Percy. It's just... our summer home? We stay there with my Uncle Rick."
My heart sank. He and Grover had a summer home. I'd never considered that their families might be as rich as the others at Yancy. Now I felt even more outcasted.
"Okay," I said glumly. "So, like, if I want to come visit your mansion."
Grover nodded. "Or... if you need me."
"Why would I need you?"
It came out harsher than I meant it to.
Grover blushed right down to his Adam's apple. "Look, Percy, the truth is, I- We kind of have to protect you."
I stared at him.
All year long, I'd gotten in fights, keeping bullies away from him. I'd lost sleep worrying that he'd get beaten up next year without me. And here he was acting like he was the one who defended me. Now, Y/N. I could believe that, but Grover? He got picked on more than an old scab.
"Grover," I said, "what exactly are you protecting me from?"
There was a huge grinding noise under our feet. Black smoke poured from the dashboard and the whole bus filled with a smell like rotten eggs. The driver cursed and limped the Greyhound over to the side of the highway.
After a few minutes clanking around in the engine compartment, the driver announced that we'd all have to get off. My friends and I filed outside with everybody else.
We were on a stretch of country road. No place you'd notice if you didn't break down there. On our side of the highway was nothing but maple trees and litter from passing cars. On the other side, across four lanes of asphalt shimmering with afternoon heat, was an old-fashioned fruit stand.
The stuff on sale looked really good: heaping boxes of blood red cherries and apples, walnuts and apricots, jugs of cider in a claw foot tub full of ice. There were no customers, just three old ladies sitting in rocking chairs in the shade of a maple tree, knitting the biggest pair of socks I'd ever seen.
I mean these socks were the size of sweaters, but they were clearly socks. The lady on the right knitted one of them. The lady on the left knitted the other. The lady in the middle held an enormous basket of electric-blue yarn.
All three women looked ancient, with pale faces wrinkled like fruit leather, silver hair tied back in white bandannas, bony arms sticking out of bleached cotton dresses.
The weirdest thing was, they seemed to be looking right at me.
I looked over at Y/N and Grover to say something about this and saw that the blood had drained from Grover's face, while Y/N was looking like he just witnessed a murder.
His eye was twitching.
"Y/N?" I said. "Are you-"
"Percy? Are they looking at you?"
"Yeah. Weird, huh? You think those socks would fit me?"
Grover choked down something that sounded like a nervous chuckle.
"No... No I don't think they would."
The old lady in the middle took out a huge pair of scissors. Gold and silver, long bladed, like shears. I heard Grover catch his breath.
"We're getting on the bus," he told me. "Come on."
"What?" I said. "It's a thousand degrees in there."
"Come on!'" He pried open the door and climbed inside, but I stayed back.
Across the road, the old ladies were still watching me. The middle one cut the yarn, and I swear I could hear that snip across four lanes of traffic. Her two friends balled up the electric-blue socks, leaving me wondering who they could possibly be for. Sasquatch or Godzilla, maybe?
At the rear of the bus, the driver wrenched a big chunk of smoking metal out of the engine compartment. The bus shuddered, and the engine roared back to life.
The passengers cheered.
"Darn right!" yelled the driver. He slapped the bus with his hat. "Everybody back on board!"
Once we got going, I started feeling feverish, as if I'd caught the flu.
Grover didn't look much better. He was shivering and his teeth were chattering. Y/N still looked horrified. He was still, and I swear he didn't blink once the whole rest of the way there.
"Grover?"
"Yeah?"
"What are you not telling me?"
He dabbed his forehead with his shirt sleeve. "Percy, what did you see back at the fruit stand?"
"You mean the old ladies? What is it about them, man? They're not like... Mrs. Dodds, are they?"
His expression was hard to read, but I got the feeling that the fruit stand ladies were something much, much worse than Mrs. Dodds. He said, "Just tell me what you saw."
"The middle one took out her scissors, and she cut the yarn."
He closed his eyes and made a gesture with his fingers that might've been crossing himself, but it wasn't.
It was something else, something almost older.
He said, "You saw her snip the cord."
"Yeah. So?" But even as I said it, I knew it was a big deal.
"This is not happening," Grover mumbled. He started chewing at his thumb. "I don't want this to be like the last time."
"What last time?"
"Always sixth grade. They never get past sixth."
Y/N gave him a firm shove on the shoulder and a glare.
"Grover," I said, because he was really starting to scare me. "What are you talking about?"
"Let me walk you home from the bus station. Promise me."
This seemed like a strange request to me, but I promised he could.
"Is this like a superstition or something?" I asked.
No answer.
"Grover. That snipping of the yarn. Does that mean somebody is going to die?"
He looked at me mournfully, like he was already picking the kind of flowers I'd like best on my coffin. Y/N had gone back to his earlier wide eyed terror.