PERCY
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Percy started his day with a nightmare about Grover shopping for wedding dresses.
He sat bolt upright in his bed. Morning light filtered through the window, illuminating the streets of Manhattan. Outside the window, he saw some sort of shadow ripple, but it was gone as quick as it came.
A knock at the door jarred Percy from his thoughts. "Percy, you're going to be late!"
It must've been his imagination. A fifth-story window with a rickety old fire escape... there couldn't have been anyone out there.
"Come on, dear." Sally called again. "Last day of school. You should be excited! You've almost made it!"
Percy fought for words, and came up with, "Coming."
He felt under the pillow. His fingers closed reassuringly around the ballpoint pen he always slept with. He brought it out, studied the Ancient Greek writing engraved on the side: Anaklusmos. Riptide.
He wanted so badly to uncap it. Just to swing, just to feel his strength...
But, of course, he had promised not to use weapons in the apartment anymore after he knocked over his mom's china cabinet with a javelin. He put the pen away and dragged himself out of bed.
He crossed over to his desk. Trashed, as was most of his room. ADHD kids weren't known for having the neatest of living places. But the desk wasn't trashed with old wrappers and dirty clothes like the rest of Percy's room was. The desk was trashed with dove feathers, random rocks, and nearly nine months' worth of letters. It was trashed, but in an organized way; Percy's favorite letters were taped up on the wall, the rocks were put in specific areas with similar rocks, and the feathers were being kept in a little cup. It wasn't his fault if a few came free.
He looked at his all-time favorite letter. It was the one right in the middle of the wall, written in blue pen. It was entirely in Latin, and it was the first letter in Latin that Percy had been able to fully understand. It was an exceedingly simple letter; Sen was just explaining a cool looking frog she saw with a nymph named Poppy and her dog, Rafael, but it was definitely Percy's favorite.
He was ridiculously excited. Last day of school loosely translates to one day left for camp. He got dressed as quickly as he could, eager to wrap up the day.
Only one more day to go. Surely even he couldn't mess that up.
BUT WAIT!
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After a breakfast of blue food and seeing a shadow across the street, Percy started his day at Meriweather College Prep- a "progressive" school in downtown, where the teachers wear jeans and rock t-shirts, the kids sit on yoga balls and beanbags instead of chairs and desks, and grades don't really exist.
Percy had to admit, it was kind of sick. Being dyslexic and having ADHD aren't very good recipes for academics. You either forget to do the assignment, forget how to do the assignment, forget the due date for the assignment, forget to turn in the assignment, or fuck up the spelling on the assignment so bad, you may as well have had a dog named Rafael do it.
![[1] 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐈𝐓 𝐅𝐀𝐓𝐄 , p. jackson by imkindaboredioi](https://img.wattpad.com/cover/278057676-80-k382491.jpg)
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 the 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 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, 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.
Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he tried it with Tyson.
Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriweather Prep. As far as Percy and his mom could figure, Tyson had been abandoned by his parents from youth, probably because he was so...
Different.
For starters, the kid was 6'3 and built like a yeti, 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. Unfortunately, Percy didn't know much about it beyond that since he did everything he could to not look at it- which was easy enough, since Percy was about a foot shorter (better than his previous height of five feet nothing). All he knew about Tyson's face was he had one messed up grill. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid. 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.
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 basically the poor kid's only friend, which meant Tyson was Percy's only friend.
He complained about it in a letter to Sen once. He sent it to the little pack of butterflies that had come to the window thirty minutes before. Sen's reply?
Get your shit together and stop being such a wang! In red pen. In a crumpled up paper. With several bad words at the bottom of the crumpled up pages.
She wasn't very helpful.
Percy's mom 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 she and Percy described and couldn't find him, though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box...
Matt Sloan snuck up behind Tyson and tried to give him a wedgie, and Tyson panicked. He swatted Sloan away a little too hard. Sloan flew fifteen feet and got tangled in the little kids' tire swing.
"You freak!" Sloan yelled. "Why don't you go back to your cardboard box!"
Tyson started sobbing. He sat down on the jungle gym so hard he bent the bar, and buried his head in his hands.
