Chapter Text
When Grace was 10 years old she knew she was different. She didn’t know why yet she just knew she was. She didn’t fit in at school and no matter how hard she tried she could never get the words on the page to stop jumping around. Later, when she was 12, she would come to find out she had ADHD.
But by any means she knew she was different. She just didn't know how much.
So now, here she is, on her 14th birthday alone in the woods, fairly certain she is going insane. You see, Grace always had trouble with–what her mom liked to call–“hallucinations.” But they always felt real to Grace. She knew it was crazy that when she was six she thought she saw a guy with a bottom half that looked like a horse. But she just couldn’t explain it. It felt so real. She saw the creature she knew she had. But still her mom just chalked it up to being six and having imaginary friends.
But, anyways, this brings us back to how Grace was fairly sure there were 3 really big guys chasing her with what seemed to be flaming dodgeballs?????
Grace knew she had bad luck but never this bad. She knew that sometimes crazy things happened to her with seemingly no explanation but it was different this time. The strange creatures Grace saw had never been chasing her before. She had only ever seen them walking on the streets or climbing tall buildings.
But Grace couldn’t dwell on this now. Not when there were three scary dudes–who kinda stank–trying to kill her. Grace had no idea where she was going, only that she couldn’t stay where she was. She didn’t know how she knew but she did. She didn’t know how she knew how to trick the scary dudes into getting temporarily crushed by scaffolding. But she did.
It was weird. It was if Grace was trained to do these things. As if she was born to do this. Which was strange because she wasn’t. She grew up in Queens with her mom, living paycheck to paycheck–well, at least until she died when she was 11.
She knew how to kick the front door just right so it wouldn’t come off its hinges again. She knew how to stretch a tiny amount of groceries into lasting a whole week. She knew these things because her mom had taught her.
She never taught her how to fight scary dodgeball guys, that's for sure. Yet, Grace found herself in that exact situation now.
She had to get somewhere safe. Except, Grace didn’t know anywhere safe. She bounced from foster homes to foster homes for the past three years after her mom died. They certainly weren’t a safe place.
But, she maybe knew one place. Grace hadn’t been there in years. Not since her mom took her there years ago, when she was 7. Grace didn’t even know if it was still open, but she had no other options and her mom always said if she was ever in trouble to go there.
So, that is how Grace found herself on her 14th birthday, on the way to a place she hadn’t been to in 7 years, a place called Camp Half Blood.