Chapter Twenty:
A New Summer Awaited Him.
— Hot and fast and angry as she
can be; I walk my days on a wire !
The day had started normally.
Or, well, as normal you can get after having a nightmare about your best friend (going wedding dress shopping??) the night before, and then having to attend Meriwether College Prep. It's some "progressive" school in downtown Manhattan, which means the students sit on bean bag chairs instead of desks, there aren't any grades, and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert t-shirts to work. That was all pretty cool to Percy Jackson. Could you blame him? He had both ADHD and dyslexia, like most other Half-Bloods, so he'd never really done that great in regular schools before they kicked him out. The only bad thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side, and the kids weren't always ... well, bright.
Take his first class that day: English. The whole middle school had read a book called The Lord of the Flies, where a bunch of kids got marooned on an island and went insane. So for the final exam, the teachers sent the students 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 at all, but he always acted like he was. He had eyes like a pit bull, shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive hit sloppy clothes, like he wanted everyone to see how little 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 ran into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.
Anyway, Sloan was giving everybody wedgies, as per usual, until he made the mistake of trying it on Percy's friend Tyson.
Tyson was the only homeless kid that attended Meriwether College Prep. As near as Sally Jackson and Percy could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so ... different from an average kid. He was tall, 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. Percy couldn't tell you what color Tyson's eyes were because he could never make himself look higher than Tyson's crooked teeth. Tyson's voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid — Percy guessed it was because he'd never gone to school before going 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 was where he lived, in a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd street.
Meriwether Prep had adopted him as a community service project so all the students could feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, most of them couldn't stand Tyson. Once they discovered he was a big softie, despite his massive strength and his scary looks, they made themselves feel good by picking on him. Percy was pretty much his only friend, which meant he was Percy's only friend.
Sally had complained to the school a million times that they weren't doing enough to help him. She'd called social services, but nothing ever seemed to happen. The social workers claimed Tyson didn't exist. They swore up and down that they'd visited the alley Sally described and couldn't find him, though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box, Percy didn't understand it anymore than his mom.
Anyway, Matt Sloan snuck up behind him and tried to give him a wedgie, and Tyson panicked. He accidentally swatted Sloan away a little too hard. Sloan flew fifteen feet and got tangled in the little kids' tire swing.
