The waffles tasted great, but I guess I wasn’t digging in like I usually did. My mom looked over and frowned. “Percy, are you all right?”
“Yeah … fine.”
But she could always tell when something was bothering me. She dried her hands and sat down across from me. “School, or …”
She didn’t need to finish. I knew what she was asking.
“I think Grover’s in trouble,” I said, and I told her about my dream.
She pursed her lips. We didn’t talk much about the other part of my life. We tried to live as normally as possible, but my mom knew all about Grover.
“I wouldn’t be too worried, dear,” she said. “Grover is a big satyr now. If there were a problem, I’m sure we would’ve heard from … from camp… .” Her shoulders tensed as she said the word camp.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll tell you what. This afternoon we’ll celebrate the end of school. I’ll take you and Tyson to Rockefeller Center—to that skateboard shop you like.”
Oh, man, that was tempting. We were always struggling with money. Between my mom’s night classes and my private school tuition, we could never afford to do special stuff like shop for a skateboard. But something in her voice bothered me.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought we were packing me up for camp tonight.”
She twisted her dishrag. “Ah, dear, about that … I got a message from Chiron last night.”
My heart sank. Chiron was the activities director at Camp Half-Blood. He wouldn’t contact us unless something serious was going on. “What did he say?”
“He thinks … it might not be safe for you to come to camp just yet. We might have to postpone.”
“Postpone? Mom, how could it not be safe? I’m a half-blood! It’s like the only safe place on earth for me!”
“Usually, dear. But with the problems they’re having—”
”What problems?”
“Percy … I’m very, very sorry. I was hoping to talk to you about it this afternoon. I can’t explain it all now. I’m not even sure Chiron can. Everything happened so suddenly.”
My mind was reeling. How could I not go to camp? I wanted to ask a million questions, but just then the kitchen clock chimed the half-hour.
My mom looked almost relieved. “Seven-thirty, dear. You should go. Tyson will be waiting.”
“But—”
“Percy, we’ll talk this afternoon. Go on to school.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do, but my mom had this fragile look in her eyes—a kind of warning, like if I pushed her too hard she’d start to cry. Besides, she was right about my friend Tyson. I had to meet him at the subway station on time or he’d get upset. He was scared of traveling underground alone.
I gathered up my stuff, but I stopped in the doorway. “Mom, this problem at camp. Does it…could it have anything to do with my dream about Grover?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “We’ll talk this afternoon, dear. I’ll explain … as much as I can.”
Reluctantly, I told her good-bye. I jogged downstairs to catch the Number Two train.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my mom and I would never get to have our afternoon talk.
In fact, I wouldn’t be seeing home for a long, long time.
As I stepped outside, I glanced at the brownstone building across the street. Just for a second I saw a dark shape in the morning sunlight—a human silhouette against the brick wall, a shadow that belonged to no one.
Then it rippled and vanished.
Chapter Two: I Play Dodgeball With Cannibals
My day started normal. Or as normal as it ever gets at Meriwether College Prep.
See, it’s this “progressive” school in downtown Manhattan, which means we sit on beanbag chairs instead of at desks, and we don’t get grades, and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert T-shirts to work.
That’s all cool with me. I mean, I’m ADHD and dyslexic, like most half-bloods, so I’d never done that great in regular schools even before they kicked me out. The only bad thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side of things, and the kids weren’t always … well, bright.
Take my first class today: English. The whole middle school had read this book called Lord of the Flies, where all these kids get marooned on an island and go psycho. So for our final exam, our teachers sent us into the break yard to spend an hour with no adult supervision to see what would happen. What happened was a massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth graders, two pebble fights, and a full-tackle basketball game. The school bully, Matt Sloan, led most of those activities.
Sloan wasn’t big or strong, but he acted like he was. He had eyes like a pit bull, and shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everybody to see how little he cared about his family’s money. One of his front teeth was chipped from the time he’d taken his daddy’s Porsche for a joyride and run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.
Anyway, Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he made the mistake of trying it on my friend Tyson.
Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriwether College Prep. As near as my mom and I could figure, he’d been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so … different. He was six-foot-three and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything, including his own reflection. His face was kind of misshapen and brutal-looking. I couldn’t tell you what color his eyes were, because I could never make myself look higher than his crooked teeth. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid—I guess because he’d never gone to school before coming to Meriwether. He wore tattered jeans, grimy size-twenty sneakers, and a plaid flannel shirt with holes in it. He smelled like a New York City alleyway, because that’s where he lived, in a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd Street.