Chapter Text
My nightmare started with a storm in a deserted street in some little beach town, and featured my best friend being chased by a monster to some wedding dresses.
Afterwards, I sat bolt upright, shivering in my bed.
There was no storm. No monster.
Morning sunlight filtered through mine and my cousin's bedroom window—well, I said mine and my cousin's, but it'd be mine alone until August when she'd get leave from the legions and be back home for a bit.
I thought I saw a shadow flicker across the glass—a humanlike shape. But then there was a knock on my bedroom door—my mom called, "Andie, you're going to be late"—and the shadow at the window disappeared.
It must've been my imagination. A sixth-storey window with a rickety old fire escape... there couldn't have been anyone out there.
"Come on, dear,” my mother called again. "Last day of school. You should be excited! You've almost made it!"
"Coming,” I managed.
I felt under my pillow. My fingers closed reassuringly around the ballpoint pen I always slept with. I brought it out, studied the Ancient Greek writing engraved on the side: Anaklusmos. Riptide.
I thought about uncapping it, but something held me back. Getting in sparring practice every second weekend had meant a lot of lectures on when to actually use weapons…
Plus, no one was allowed to use deadly weapons in the apartment anymore after I tried to demonstrate a move for an eager Hazel and somewhat less eager Tyson, and accidentally took out mom's china cabinet. I put Anaklusmos on my nightstand and dragged myself out of bed.
I got dressed as quickly as I could. I tried not to think about my nightmare or monsters or the shadow at my window.
Have to get away. Have to warn them!
What had Grover meant?
I made a three-fingered claw over my heart and pushed outwards—an ancient gesture Grover had once taught me for warding off evil.
I desperately hoped the dream wasn't real.
Besides—last day of school. Mom was right, I should have been excited. For the first time in my life, I'd almost made it an entire year without getting expelled. No weird accidents, and the only fights in classrooms had been against Matt Sloan. No teachers had turned into monsters and tried to kill me with poisoned cafeteria food or exploding homework. Tomorrow, I'd be on my way back once again to my favourite place in the world—Camp Half-Blood. And not just for the weekend, the way I'd commuted during the year, but for several weeks. Best of all, Annabeth would be there, too.
Only one more day to go. Surely even I couldn't mess that up.
As usual, I didn't have a clue how wrong I was.
My mom made blue waffles and blue eggs for breakfast. She's funny that way, celebrating special occasions with blue food. I think it's her way of saying anything is possible. Andie and Tyson can pass seventh grade. Waffles can be blue. Little miracles like that.
Tyson and I ate at the kitchen table while my mom washed the dishes, dressed for work already. She'd gotten a job at a local aquarium, recently, and she seemed to enjoy it a lot. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
The waffles tasted great, but I guess I wasn't digging in like I usually did—definitely not as much as Tyson. My mom looked over and frowned.
"Andie, are you all right?"
But she could always tell when something was bothering me. She dried her hands and sat down on her usual chair—one of five around the kitchen table: there was mine, there was Tyson's, there was my mom's, there was a designated guest chair, and then there was Hazel's. "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.
"Your goat friend? The sa-, sa-" Tyson asked. He frowned. "Sator?"
"Satyr, yes."
Mom, meanwhile, pursed her lips. Even if our entire family, mom included, was somehow caught up in this world of gods and monsters, we still avoided talking about it.
"That... doesn't sound good. I didn't want to worry you before school, but... Chiron sent me a message last night. Since your visit last month, apparently, something made camp much less safe. He suggested postponing your arrival at camp."
"What in the world could make camp less safe in the month I wasn't there?" I'd missed my last every-two-weekends trip to camp to prepare for exams and school ending.
"Chiron didn't give me details, unfortunately. We—well, we'll have to talk this afternoon. And you and Tyson should try to not run late on your last day."
Mostly for Tyson's sake: he always needed some extra time to brave the subway, because while we'd both grown up faced with monsters regularly, unlike me, he could smell how many of them there were, down there. Of course, I was also safer travelling with him, even while giving off what to most monsters appeared to be the smell of a reduced All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet. Not to my brother, though.
Reluctantly, Tyson and I told her goodbye, and I walked downstairs with my brother to catch the Number Two train.
I didn't know it at the time, but we 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.
Our 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 at regular schools even before they kicked me out: my best grade ever had, in fact, been my Latin grade, and thanks to Mom, I was fluent in Latin—unlike everyone else in class who'd barely begun learning the language. The only bad thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side of things, and overlooked that yes, kids could in fact be horrible people, too, and that this was something one should in fact take seriously.
This especially went for spoiled brats who'd never been told no, especially the current bane of my existence, Matt Sloan, who transcended being merely a bad thing at Meriwether to deserve a special category all of his own.
As an example both for the teacher's general everything and Matt Sloan in particular, take my first class today: Our final exam was re-enacting Lord of the Flies, after the whole middle school had read the book. Mom, who had strong opinions about literature, had ranted at me for half an hour how the closest to this situation in real life had actually ended up with all the kids working together, and that the behaviour depicted in the book was much more typical for British boarding school kids, read kids who are upper-class and have learnt their entire lives that it was normal to tread down on everyone who might be considered their lesser and who are also seriously traumatised by boarding school itself, where they are the lessers to their teachers, authority figures they can't escape or speak up against. That it was more of a commentary on war and prejudice and what the then-British colonial system does to the people in it who'll be tasked with inflicting it on others one day.
Of course, the most common reading was one about human nature that would only get reinforced by the fact that most of the kids at Meriwether were rich brats who'd grown up with pretty much the same lessons as those British boarding school kids, getting shuffled from school to school while also told they were special. So what happened when the teachers, to prove that one seriously misunderstood book true, released us into the courtyard, was only behaviour that would prove the fucked up reading true once more: A massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth graders, two pebble fights and a full-tackle basketball game. And of course Matt Sloan, Local School Bully and Bane of My Existence Extraordinaire, led most of those activities.
Sloan wasn't big or strong or handsome, 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 both how little he cared about his family's money, but also how much he had. One of his front teeth was chipped from the time he'd taken his daddy's Porsche out for a joyride and run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.
He'd also asked me out for a total of 79 times this school year. At the beginning of the year, I'd foolishly bet Hazel that he definitely wouldn't ask me out 80 times, and I had a sinking feeling I was going to lose that bet.
In my defense, things had looked pretty alright until Hazel had transferred to Camp Jupiter (and its associated middle school), but unfortunately, he'd actually increased the rate he asked me out at slightly after she left and it was just Tyson and me.
Anyways, Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he made the mistake of trying it on my big little brother, Tyson.
At the beginning of the year, Tyson had been taken in as some sort of community service project, so everybody at Meriwether could feel good about letting in the poor little dumb homeless kid; Mom hadn't stood for that—well not the part where to continue feeling good about their generosity, no one was doing anything about the "homeless" part—and promptly invited him over to dinner with the full intention of eventually fostering him. Of course, then she'd realised that the two meter tall kid who talked like he was rather young was in fact rather young because he was a baby cyclops, and more importantly, my little brother. A scaredy-cat of a little brother, actually, because Tyson was scared of everything, including his own reflection, and he talked like he was even younger than he was—he'd grown up on the streets, and had never gone to school before Meriwether. It meant people didn't realise how smart he actually was, because he was tall, with brutal features, and talked slowly and had issues with words, but he'd kept up in Meriwether despite his complete lack of any education whatsoever.
And of course, once people at Meriwether had discovered he was a big softie, despite his massive strength and his scary looks, they made themselves feel good picking on him. Which of course then meant that I got into trouble, because he was my little brother and I wasn't going to let people get away with picking on him. Before Hazel had transferred, both of us had been protecting the big goof, but I'd been left alone to hold the fort. I was... maybe just a bit bitter about that, but also, the kids had been brutal to Hazel, too, calling her Amish rather frequently whenever she got confused at technology. And she seemed like she was making friends over at Camp Jupiter; she'd even met another cousin of ours. Plus, she had an important job over there, trying to make sure things got prepared so any meeting between the camps didn’t end violently.
Anyways, 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 five metres 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 bent the bar, and buried his head in his hands.
I immediately plopped down beside him. "Ignore Sloan, he doesn't know what he's talking about."
At that point in time, I still had every intention of taking my own advice.
"Why do you even bother with the freak, Andie? You're pretty, you could have friends instead. Or a boyfriend." He pointed at himself there, and I was not going to count this as attempt #80.
I balled my fists. "My little brother is not a freak, you -"
"Little? That guy?"
I tried to think of the right thing to say, but Sloan wasn't listening. He and his big ugly friends were too busy laughing. I wondered if it were my imagination, or if Sloan had more goons hanging around him than usual. I was used to seeing him with two or three, but today he had half a dozen more, and I was pretty sure I'd never seen any of them before.
"Y'know, you could just go on a date with me. I promise I won't insult the freak—ah, your little brother, if you do."
I took a deep breath, then said, as calmly as I could: "I'd literally rather fight monsters than go on a date with you of all people, Sloan. No matter what you do or say."
In fact, fighting Medusa had been a much better time than I could imagine a date with Sloan to be.
His eyes narrowed, but he didn't reply at all. I wasn't even sure whether he actually liked me like that—I hoped not—but at this point, it was probably more about his own pride than anything else.
Of course, when first period ended, our English teacher Mr de Milo announced we'd all passed for acting out Lord of the Flies: US Trust Fund Brat Edition—and assumed that this would now prevent us from growing up to be violent people, something he communicated in a much too enthusiastic speech. And of course, Matt Sloan of all people sagely nodded along.
Meanwhile, I desperately tried to cheer up Tyson, with my last recourse being to remind him that he could buy himself an extra peanut butter sandwich today from his allowance.
"I... I am a freak?" he asked me.
"No,” I promised, gritting my teeth. "Matt Sloan is the freak, if anyone."
Tyson sniffled. "You are a good sister. Miss you next year if..."
His voice trembled, and I realised he didn't know whether he'd still be able to attend Meriwether, now that he wasn't a suitable community service project anymore.
"Whatever happens, Mom will probably send us to the same school, anyways. And even if we don't end up at the same school, you're still my brother and we'll still see each other, okay?"
He gave another sniff. "Okay."
My little brother gave me an incredibly grateful look, and I gave him another hug, because he looked like he still needed one.
I couldn’t wait for exams to be over.