It seems incredibly unfair that I can't get a good night's sleep without some snoring, drooling, stinking unclaimed kid sticking his elbow in places that hurt when they are elbowed. I mean, why? Why not build an extension to this gods-forsaken cabin? Why not separate the unclaimed kids from the Hermes kids? Why? Why? Why?
My name is Chris Rodriguez, I'm thirteen years old and I need a break. My mother was wrong. This camp – Camp Half-Blood – isn't making me better. The kids here complain about their lives outside of camp: bullies, exams, therapists who just don't get it and how everything is better here. It's not the same for me. At least at home, I had my mom. I had friends who were good friends and friends I had made myself – not kids who I forced to live with and sleep with and eat with; they're not my family. At home, if I was in a bad mood, my mother would say "Ay, mi hijo, go to bed; it'll all be better in the morning," except here, I go to bed and wake up next to the same stinking pig and nothing is better.
The most ironic thing is that this was supposed to be my break. A break from the tiny ghetto classrooms where the teachers printed out their diplomas from the internet and taught us about Abe Lincoln, the first president of the USA; a break from chilli con carne that my mother made on the last Sunday of every month in a huge pot, then poured into empty ice-creams tubs to freeze, defrost and eat throughout the month; a break from Jacinto and Mark and their cigarettes that mom caught me with. This was supposed to be the better life. But tell me, what kind of better life leads you to waking up with a crick in your neck every morning from sleeping in a hammock and waiting forever to take a shower after these kids who aren't even your family?
Recently, the pain has been fresh, like a reopened wound. Last week we get some scrawny kid, Percy Jackson, who supposedly single-handedly fought off a Minotaur. Welcome to hell, kid, I'd thought, they're going to eat you alive. But no. He got claimed – by Poseidon no less! And now he's got his own bunk, his own bed, his own freaking table to eat at! And you tell me: is that fair? Is it fair that this kid, this white kid with his middle-class accent and sneakers more expensive than what I could ever have gets all this special treatment just because his dad is one of the Big Three? Is it fair that a kid like me who slept on the living room couch, listening to the lullaby of cop-car sirens, and who ate chilli for every day of his pathetic life get to stay in this cabin? How's that for cosmic justice?
Wow, Hermes, daddy, thanks a whole lot. Thanks for being there for me.
"Hey, Carl?" the smelly kid who has his elbow in my gut whispers.
"It's Chris."
"Hey, Chris? Do you think you could shift? You're hurting my elbow?"
That's it. I'm done with this place. I'm going to burn it to the ground.