Chapter Text
The thing you have to understand about me first is this: I have never, not once in my life, fit in anywhere. I was kicked out of five schools in six years. Sometimes it was my fault. Sometimes - most of the time - it wasn't. Things just happened around me. Strange things. And by the time the adults sorted out who to blame, I was always the one standing closest to the wreckage.
And then there was the other thing. The thing the other kids figured out by my second week at every new school, no matter how careful I was.
I talked to animals.
Not at them. Not like how you baby-talk a dog or tell a cat to get off the counter. I talked with them. Back and forth. Conversations.
I had been having a good morning, all things considered. The sun was out. Recess had another six minutes left. I was sitting on a bench at the edge of the recess yard, having a fairly involved discussion with this gray squirrel that I had been on speaking terms with since September.
"-and I'm telling you," the squirrel was saying, in the chittering, jumpy way squirrels do, all of it landing in my head as words, "this hawk has been circling the maple by the gym for three days. Three days! That's not normal hunting behavior. That's a vendetta. I think it's personal."
"Maybe it just likes that tree," I said.
"It does not just like that tree. I like that tree. The hawk likes that I like that tree. There's a difference, and you'd understand it if you'd ever been hunted."
I'd been hunted more than the squirrel knew, but I didn't get to say so, because that was when Nancy Bobofit showed up.
Nancy was a freckly redhead kleptomaniac with two friends who followed her around like she was somebody worth following. She'd been making my life difficult since the first day of school.
"Hey, Doolittle," she said, drawing it out the way she liked to. "Talking to your little friends again?"
Here's the thing about that nickname. Every school I've ever gone to, somebody eventually starts calling me Doolittle - like the doctor in the old movies who could talk to animals. It always happens. It's like the universe can't help itself. But Nancy was the one who'd come up with it at Yancy, all on her own, the first week, and she was proud of it. She used it more than anybody ever had.
The squirrel looked up at her. "Tell her she smells like the inside of a vending machine."
I laughed before I could stop myself.
Nancy's face went the color of her hair. "What's so funny, freak?"
"Nothing," I said.
She shoved me. Both hands, hard, in the shoulders. I went sideways off the bench and my elbow scraped the brick of the planter.
I shouldn't have. I know I shouldn't have. But I'd had about six years of being shoved, and something in me was tired, so I shoved her back.
Not hard, by any stretch of the word. But by Nancy's accounting, she had been assaulted. She stumbled into her two friends, and all three of them started shrieking like I'd set them on fire, and a teacher came over, and somehow - somehow - out of the four kids involved, the only one who got detention that night was me.
The squirrel watched the whole thing from the bench.
"Worth it," he said.
It really wasn't. But I appreciated the support.
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That afternoon at lunch, Mr. Brunner reminded us about the field trip.
Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket that always smelled faintly of coffee. You wouldn't look at him twice on the street. But when he talked about ancient Rome, about the gods and the heroes and the wars, his eyes would get this look like he wasn't telling the stories so much as remembering them.
He was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep. He was the only teacher who didn't seem to have written me off in pencil on day one. He'd lend me books. He'd stay after class to help me sound out the Latin, never making me feel stupid when the letters did their swimming-rearranging trick on the page.
"Tomorrow," he announced, wheeling to the front of the cafeteria, "the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We will be examining the Greek and Roman collection. I expect you to behave like the proper scholars I know you are."
A few kids groaned. I didn't.
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My roommate at Yancy was a kid named Grover Underwood.
Grover was - and I mean this with all the affection in the world - the most pathetic-looking kid in the whole school. He was scrawny. He cried when he got excited. He walked with a limp and had a doctor's note that said he had a muscular disease in his legs, which got him out of PE for life. He had a wispy little excuse for a beard that he was weirdly proud of, and big brown eyes that always looked like he was about to apologize for something.
Other kids picked on him constantly. He was an easy target. The only reason they didn't pick on him more was that I'd made it known early that anybody who messed with Grover was going to have a bad time.
I never asked Grover too many questions - like why a kid with a muscular disease could move so fast when he thought no one was watching, or why he sometimes sniffed the air like a dog catching a scent.
And Grover never asked me too many questions either. He never asked about the animals. He didn't ask why the dandelions in the cracks of the sidewalk all leaned a little toward me when I walked past, or why I could name every weed at Yancy without ever having opened a botany book.
That was the deal between us. We didn't ask. As far as I was concerned, it was the best friendship I had ever had.
That night, lying in my bunk listening to Grover snore, I fell asleep and dreamed.
I dreamed of a forest.
Not a park. Not the scrubby little woods behind Yancy. A real forest - enormous and old and quiet, trees so tall I couldn't see their tops, moss so thick it muffled the sound of my footsteps, air green and wet and alive enough that breathing it felt like drinking. It went on forever in every direction, all the way to a horizon that had never heard of a road. There was no city anywhere. Not a building. Not a wire. Just trees, and the deep slow attention of trees, and the certainty in me that this place knew my name.
In the dream, I was crying, and I didn't know why, except that it felt like coming home to a house I'd never lived in.
I woke up with my face wet and my chest aching, and outside the dorm window the orange sodium glow of the nearest town smudged the sky and drowned the stars, and I hated my life.
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The bus to the Met smelled like vinyl seats and somebody's peanut butter and ketchup sandwich. Nancy Bobofit spent the whole ride flicking bits of that sandwich at the back of Grover's head.
Grover sat there and took it. Every wad of bread that bounced off his neck, he just flinched and stared straight ahead, his big brown eyes getting wetter by the mile.
I started to get up.
"Don't," Grover whispered, grabbing my sleeve. "Percy, don't. You're on probation. If anything happens, they'll blame you. They always blame you."
He was right. It was the unbreakable mathematics of being Percy Jackson - it didn't matter who started anything, when the dust cleared the adults always looked around for a blame-shaped object, and I was always the most blame-shaped object in any given room.
So I sat back down. But I watched Nancy's reflection in the window, and I watched Grover flinch, and I felt that slow tired heat building behind my ribs, the one I'd felt the day before when I shoved her.
I made myself breathe. I made myself look out the window at the gray smear of the highway.
It didn't help much.
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At the museum, Mr. Brunner led us through the Greek and Roman wing, wheeling between the glass cases and the marble statues.
He stopped in front of a tall stone slab carved with figures - a grave marker, he said, a stele, for a girl about our age who'd died thousands of years ago. He talked about the carvings. Then he turned the chair, and his sharp eyes landed on me.
"Mr. Jackson," he said. "Tell us about the Titan Kronos. What did he do?"
The whole class turned to look at me. I felt my face go hot.
I looked at him, and felt a flush of relief, because I actually knew this one.
"Kronos was the king of the Titans," I said. "He was scared one of his kids was going to overthrow him, like he'd overthrown his own dad. So when his wife had babies, he ate them. Swallowed them whole."
"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me.
"But his wife hid the youngest one," I went on, "and gave Kronos a rock wrapped in a blanket instead, and he ate that. And the kid grew up - that was Zeus - and made Kronos throw up all his brothers and sisters."
Behind me, Nancy 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.
I didn't have an answer. I shrugged.
"I see." Mr. Brunner looked disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson. Zeus did indeed feed Kronos 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. Ms. Verani, would you lead us back outside?"
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Before I move on, I have to tell you about Ms. Verani, because every boy in my grade would never forgive me if I left her out.
Ms. Verani taught pre-algebra. She was maybe twenty-five, with dark hair she wore up in a clip and a way of leaning against the whiteboard that made thirty hormonal twelve-year-old boys sit unnaturally still in their chairs.
I had, briefly, been one of those boys. I am not proud of it. I quietly got over it around the third week of the unit on common denominators, when it became clear that staring at Ms. Verani was not going to get me to pass the unit.
I want the record to show, here, before anything else happens, that Ms. Verani was a perfectly ordinary human being. She was a young teacher who had taken what was probably her first job out of grad school at a boarding school full of difficult kids, and what she wanted from Percy Jackson - what she had wanted from me for nine months - was for me to do my homework.
The morning before the field trip, she had handed back the latest quiz. I had a C-plus on mine, in red pen, which for me was practically a Nobel Prize.
"You could do better than this, Percy," she said, pausing by my desk. "If you actually tried. I've seen you when something catches your interest. You're not slow. You give up before you start."
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
She moved on to the next desk.
And that's it. That's the whole story of Ms. Verani. She gave me a C-plus and some advice I didn't take.
I only mention her so you understand: not everyone in this story is hiding something.
Just most of them.
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We ate lunch on the museum steps, looking out over the avenue. The sky had gone ugly. There was a storm coming in off the water, I could smell it.
I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of me with her ugly friends and dumped her half-eaten lunch in Grover's lap.
"Oops," she said.
Grover didn't move. He just looked down at the food on his pants, and his lower lip started to tremble, and that was it.
That was the moment the tired heat behind my ribs came all the way up.
I don't fully remember deciding to do it. One second I was sitting down, and the next I was on my feet, and I had both hands flat on Nancy's shoulders, and I pushed.
She went backward off the step and into the big stone fountain at the bottom, and sat down in it with a splash, in about six inches of dirty water, screaming her head off.
Mr. Brunner got to me first. He wheeled up fast.
"Mr. Jackson," he said quietly. "We do not solve such problems as these by putting our hands on other people. No matter how richly they deserve it."
"She dumped her lunch on Grover," I said. "Again. And nobody ever-"
"I know what she did."
"Then why am I the one-"
"You are not the only one," he said.
That stopped me.
Mr. Brunner looked past me toward the fountain, where Nancy was still sitting in six inches of dirty water, shrieking like I'd thrown her into the Hudson. "Miss Bobofit," he called, without raising his voice much at all.
Her mouth snapped shut.
"You will also report for detention when we return," Mr. Brunner said. "Bullying a classmate is not acceptable."
Nancy stared at him like the universe had personally betrayed her.
Then Mr. Brunner turned back to me.
"But you," he said, and his voice went quiet again, "are the one I am speaking to. And I would rather you learn to master this now, while the stakes are small, than later, when they will not be."
He held my eyes.
"You have detention when we return. Do you understand me?"
I wanted to argue. But the way he said it - while the stakes are small - made a cold feeling come into my stomach. Like he knew something about my stakes that I didn't.
"Yes sir," I said.