Fifteen minutes later, still in a trance, I was back on the streets of Manhattan.
I caught a taxi to my mom’s apartment, rang the doorbell, and there she was—my beautiful mother, smelling of peppermint and licorice, the weariness and worry evaporating from her face as soon as she saw me.
“Percy! Oh, thank goodness. Oh, my baby.”
She crushed the air right out of me. We stood in the hallway as she cried and ran her hands through my hair.
I’ll admit it—my eyes were a little misty, too. I was shaking, I was so relieved to see her.
She told me she’d just appeared at the apartment that morning, scaring Gabe half out of his wits. She didn’t remember anything since the Minotaur, and couldn’t believe it when Gabe told her I was a wanted criminal, traveling across the country, blowing up national monuments. She’d been going out of her mind with worry all day because she hadn’t heard the news. Gabe had forced her to go into work, saying she had a month’s salary to make up and she’d better get started.
I swallowed back my anger and told her my own story. I tried to make it sound less scary than it had been, but that wasn’t easy. I was just getting to the fight with Ares when Gabe’s voice interrupted from the living room. “Hey, Sally! That meat loaf done yet or what?”
She closed her eyes. “He isn’t going to be happy to see you, Percy. The store got half a million phone calls today from Los Angeles…something about free appliances.”
“Oh, yeah. About that…”
She managed a weak smile. “Just don’t make him angrier, all right? Come on.”
In the month I’d been gone, the apartment had turned into Gabeland. Garbage was ankle deep on the carpet. The sofa had been reupholstered in beer cans. Dirty socks and underwear hung off the lampshades.
Gabe and three of his big goony friends were playing poker at the table.
When Gabe saw me, his cigar dropped out of his mouth. His face got redder than lava. “You got nerve coming here, you little punk. I thought the police—”
“He’s not a fugitive after all,” my mom interjected. “Isn’t that wonderful, Gabe?”
Gabe looked back and forth between us. He didn’t seem to think my homecoming was so wonderful.
“Bad enough I had to give back your life insurance money, Sally,” he growled. “Get me the phone. I’ll call the cops.”
“Gabe, no!”
He raised his eyebrows. “Did you just say ‘no’? You think I’m gonna put up with this punk again? I can still press charges against him for ruining my Camaro.”
“But—”
He raised his hand, and my mother flinched.
For the first time, I realized something. Gabe had hit my mother. I didn’t know when, or how much. But I was sure he’d done it. Maybe it had been going on for years, when I wasn’t around.
A balloon of anger started expanding in my chest. I came toward Gabe, instinctively taking my pen out of my pocket.
He just laughed. “What, punk? You gonna write on me? You touch me, and you are going to jail forever, you understand?”
“Hey, Gabe,” his friend Eddie interrupted. “He’s just a kid,”
Gabe looked at him resentfully and mimicked in a falsetto voice: “Just a kid.”
His other friends laughed like idiots.
“I’ll be nice to you, punk.” Gabe showed me his tobacco-stained teeth. “I’ll give you five minutes to get your stuff and clear out. After that, I call the police.”
“Gabe!” my mother pleaded.
“He ran away,” Gabe told her. “Let him stay gone.”
I was itching to uncap Riptide, but even if I did, the blade wouldn’t hurt humans. And Gabe, by the loosest definition, was human.
My mother took my arm. “Please, Percy. Come on. We’ll go to your room.”
I let her pull me away, my hands still trembling with rage.
My room had been completely filled with Gabe’s junk. There were stacks of used car batteries, a rotting bouquet of sympathy flowers with a card from somebody who’d seen his Barbara Walters interview.
“Gabe is just upset, honey,” my mother told me. “I’ll talk to him later. I’m sure it will work out.”
“Mom, it’ll never work out. Not as long as Gabe’s here.”
She wrung her hands nervously. “I can…I’ll take you to work with me for the rest of the summer. In the fall, maybe there’s another boarding school—”
“Mom.”
She lowered her eyes. “I’m trying, Percy. I just…I need some time.”
A package appeared on my bed. At least, I could’ve sworn it hadn’t been there a moment before.
It was a battered cardboard box about the right size to fit a basketball. The address on the mailing slip was in my own handwriting:
The Gods
Mount Olympus
600th Floor, Empire State Building
New York, NY
With best wishes,
PERCY JACKSON
Over the top in black marker, in a man’s clear, bold print, was the address of our apartment, and the words: RETURN TO SENDER.
Suddenly I understood what Poseidon had told me on Olympus.
A package. A decision.
Whatever else you do, know that you are mine. You are a true son of the Sea God.
I looked at my mother. “Mom, do you want Gabe gone?”
“Percy, it isn’t that simple. I—”
“Mom, just tell me. That jerk has been hitting you. Do you want him gone or not?”
She hesitated, then nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yes, Percy. I do. And I’m trying to get up my courage to tell him. But you can’t do this for me. You can’t solve my problems.”
I looked at the box.
I could solve her problem. I wanted to slice that package open, plop it on the poker table, and take out what was inside. I could start my very own statue garden, right there in the living room.
That’s what a Greek hero would do in the stories, I thought. That’s what Gabe deserves.
But a hero’s story always ended in tragedy. Poseidon had told me that.
I remembered the Underworld. I thought about Gabe’s spirit drifting forever in the Fields of Asphodel, or condemned to some hideous torture behind the barbed wire of the Fields of Punishment—an eternal poker game, sitting up to his waist in boiling oil listening to opera music. Did I have the right to send someone there? Even Gabe?
A month ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Now…
“I can do it,” I told my mom. “One look inside this box, and he’ll never bother you again.”
She glanced at the package, and seemed to understand immediately. “No, Percy,” she said, stepping away. “You can’t.”
“Poseidon called you a queen,” I told her. “He said he hadn’t met a woman like you in a thousand years.”
Her cheeks flushed. “Percy—”
“You deserve better than this, Mom. You should go to college, get your degree. You can write your novel, meet a nice guy maybe, live in a nice house. You don’t need to protect me anymore by staying with Gabe. Let me get rid of him.”
She wiped a tear off her cheek. “You sound so much like your father,” she said. “He offered to stop the tide for me once. He offered to build me a palace at the bottom of the sea. He thought he could solve all my problems with a wave of his hand.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Her multicolored eyes seemed to search inside me. “I think you know, Percy. I think you’re enough like me to understand. If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself. I can’t let a god take care of me…or my son. I have to…find the courage on my own. Your quest has reminded me of that.”
We listened to the sound of poker chips and swearing, ESPN from the living room television.
“I’ll leave the box,” I said. “If he threatens you…”
She looked pale, but she nodded. “Where will you go, Percy?
“Half-Blood Hill.”
“I guess that depends.”
We locked eyes, and I sensed that we had an agreement. We would see how things stood at the end of the summer.
She kissed my forehead. “You’ll be a hero, Percy. You’ll be the greatest of all.”
I took one last look around my bedroom. I had a feeling I’d never see it again. Then I walked with my mother to the front door.
“Leaving so soon, punk?” Gabe called after me. “Good riddance.”
I had one last twinge of doubt. How could I turn down the perfect chance to take revenge on him? I was leaving here without saving my mother.
“Hey, Sally,” he yelled. “What about that meat loaf, huh?”
A steely look of anger flared in my mother’s eyes, and I thought, just maybe, I was leaving her in good hands after all. Her own.
“The meat loaf is coming right up, dear,” she told Gabe. “Meat loaf surprise.”
She looked at me, and winked.
The last thing I saw as the door swung closed was my mother staring at Gabe, as if she were contemplating how he would look as a garden statue.
WE WERE THE FIRST HEROES TO return alive to Half-Blood Hill since Luke, so of course everybody treated us as if we’d won some reality-TV contest. According to camp tradition, we wore laurel wreaths to a big feast prepared in our honor, then led a procession down to the bonfire, where we got to burn the burial shrouds our cabins had made for us in our absence.
Annabeth’s shroud was so beautiful—gray silk with embroidered owls—I told her it seemed a shame not to bury her in it. She punched me and told me to shut up.
Being the son of Poseidon, I didn’t have any cabinmates, so the Ares cabin had volunteered to make my shroud. They’d taken an old bedsheet and painted smiley faces with X’ed-out eyes around the border, and the word LOSER painted really big in the middle.
It was fun to burn.
As Apollo’s cabin led the sing-along and passed out s’mores, I was surrounded by my old Hermes cabinmates, Annabeth’s friends from Athena, and Grover’s satyr buddies, who were admiring the brand-new searcher’s license he’d received from the Council of Cloven Elders. The council had called Grover’s performance on the quest “Brave to the point of indigestion. Horns-and-whiskers above anything we have seen in the past.”
The only ones not in a party mood were Clarisse and her cabinmates, whose poisonous looks told me they’d never forgive me for disgracing their dad.
That was okay with me.
Even Dionysus’s welcome-home speech wasn’t enough to dampen my spirits. “Yes, yes, so the little brat didn’t get himself killed and now he’ll have an even bigger head. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday….”
I moved back into cabin three, but it didn’t feel so lonely anymore. I had my friends to train with during the day. At night, I lay awake and listened to the sea, knowing my father was out there. Maybe he wasn’t quite sure about me yet, maybe he hadn’t even wanted me born, but he was watching. And so far, he was proud of what I’d done.
As for my mother, she had a chance at a new life. Her letter arrived a week after I got back to camp. She told me Gabe had left mysteriously—disappeared off the face of the planet, in fact. She’d reported him missing to the police, but she had a funny feeling they would never find him.
On a completely unrelated subject, she’d sold her first life-size concrete sculpture, entitled The Poker Player, to a collector, through an art gallery in Soho. She’d gotten so much money for it, she’d put a deposit down on a new apartment and made a payment on her first semester’s tuition at NYU. The Soho gallery was clamoring for more of her work, which they called “a huge step forward in super-ugly neorealism.”
But don’t worry, my mom wrote. I’m done with sculpture. I’ve disposed of that box of tools you left me. It’s time for me to turn to writing.
At the bottom, she wrote a P.S.: Percy, I’ve found a good private school here in the city. I’ve put a deposit down to hold you a spot, in case you want to enroll for seventh grade. You could live at home. But if you want to go year-round at Half-Blood Hill, I’ll understand.
I folded the note carefully and set it on my bedside table. Every night before I went to sleep, I read it again, and I tried to decide how to answer her.
On the Fourth of July, the whole camp gathered at the beach for a fireworks display by cabin nine. Being Hephaestus’s kids, they weren’t going to settle for a few lame red-white-and-blue explosions. They’d anchored a barge offshore and loaded it with rockets the size of Patriot missiles. According to Annabeth, who’d seen the show before, the blasts would be sequenced so tightly they’d look like frames of animation across the sky. The finale was supposed to be a couple of hundred-foot-tall Spartan warriors who would crackle to life above the ocean, fight a battle, then explode into a million colors.
As Annabeth and I were spreading a picnic blanket, Grover showed up to tell us good-bye. He was dressed in his usual jeans and T-shirt and sneakers, but in the last few weeks he’d started to look older, almost high-school age. His goatee had gotten thicker. He’d put on weight. His horns had grown at least an inch, so he now had to wear his rasta cap all the time to pass as human.
“I’m off,” he said. “I just came to say…well, you know.”
I tried to feel happy for him. After all, it wasn’t every day a satyr got permission to go look for the great god Pan. But it was hard saying good-bye. I’d only known Grover a year, yet he was my oldest friend.
Annabeth gave him a hug. She told him to keep his fake feet on.
I asked him where he was going to search first.
“Kind of a secret,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I wish you could come with me, guys, but humans and Pan…”
“We understand,” Annabeth said. “You got enough tin cans for the trip?”
“Yeah.”
“And you remembered your reed pipes?”
“Jeez, Annabeth,” he grumbled. “You’re like an old mama goat.”
But he didn’t really sound annoyed.
He gripped his walking stick and slung a backpack over his shoulder. He looked like any hitchhiker you might see on an American highway—nothing like the little runty boy I used to defend from bullies at Yancy Academy.
“Well,” he said, “wish me luck.”
He gave Annabeth another hug. He clapped me on the shoulder, then headed back through the dunes.
Fireworks exploded to life overhead: Hercules killing the Nemean lion, Artemis chasing the boar, George Washington (who, by the way, was a son of Athena) crossing the Delaware.
“Hey, Grover,” I called.
He turned at the edge of the woods.
“Wherever you’re going—I hope they make good enchiladas.”
Grover grinned, and then he was gone, the trees closing around him.
“We’ll see him again,” Annabeth said.
I tried to believe it. The fact that no searcher had ever come back in two thousand years…well, I decided not to think about that. Grover would be the first. He had to be.
July passed.
I spent my days devising new strategies for capture the flag and making alliances with the other cabins to keep the banner out of Ares’s hands. I got to the top of the climbing wall for the first time without getting scorched by lava.
From time to time, I’d walk past the Big House, glance up at the attic windows, and think about the Oracle. I tried to convince myself that its prophecy had come to completion.
You shall go west, and face the god who has turned.
Been there, done that—even though the traitor god had turned out to be Ares rather than Hades.
You shall find what was stolen, and see it safely returned.
Check. One master bolt delivered. One helm of darkness back on Hades’s oily head.
You shall be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.
This line still both
ered me. Ares had pretended to be my friend, then betrayed me. That must be what the Oracle meant….
And you shall fail to save what matters most, in the end.
I had failed to save my mom, but only because I’d let her save herself, and I knew that was the right thing.
So why was I still uneasy?
The last night of the summer session came all too quickly.
The campers had one last meal together. We burned part of our dinner for the gods. At the bonfire, the senior counselors awarded the end-of-summer beads.
I got my own leather necklace, and when I saw the bead for my first summer, I was glad the firelight covered my blushing. The design was pitch black, with a sea-green trident shimmering in the center.
“The choice was unanimous,” Luke announced. “This bead commemorates the first Son of the Sea God at this camp, and the quest he undertook into the darkest part of the Underworld to stop a war!”
The entire camp got to their feet and cheered. Even Ares’s cabin felt obliged to stand. Athena’s cabin steered Annabeth to the front so she could share in the applause.
I’m not sure I’d ever felt as happy or sad as I did at that moment. I’d finally found a family, people who cared about me and thought I’d done something right. And in the morning, most of them would be leaving for the year.
The next morning, I found a form letter on my bedside table.
I knew Dionysus must’ve filled it out, because he stubbornly insisted on getting my name wrong:
Dear Peter Johnson ,
If you intend to stay at Camp Half-Blood year-round, you must inform the Big House by noon today. If you do not announce your intentions, we will assume you have vacated your cabin or died a horrible death. Cleaning harpies will begin work at sundown. They will be authorized to eat any unregistered campers. All personal articles left behind will be incinerated in the lava pit.
Have a nice day!
Mr. D (Dionysus)
The Lightning Thief Illustrated Edition Page 27
