This chapter takes place around The Battle of the Labyrinth. For the sake of forewarning, this gets off to a pretty slow start, the narrator takes a while to get used to, and there's a little bit of vulgar language, but nothing super terrible.

The terrible thing about life is how bad it all seems. You're born, you go to a school infested with assholes or whatever, you get a boring job, and then die. There's some stuff in between – vacations, sickness, internships, retirement – but in the ultimate scheme of things, those are just little breaks. And that's pretty much it.

That might have been too blunt. Was that too blunt? Actually, don't answer that. I don't really care. I don't think I have a very graceful way of saying things. In fact, Mister Blofis offered to tutor me after school every week on Tuesdays, since I wasn't doing too well in English class. I wasn't doing well in English class because I was distracted by the curious boy sitting next to me. But I'm also just not very good at English – I really don't have a natural tendency to it.

I really tried the tutoring, but I just couldn't bring myself to like it. Maybe it's just something I'm meant to be bad at, you know? The way he talked was so boring and I really didn't understand what he was telling me about conjugates. I asked him about his stepson, but Mister Blofis got a little annoyed and asked me to stop getting distracted, and that we could talk about it afterwards. And then I spent the entire tutoring session thinking about Percy Jackson and how weird that kid is, and Mister Blofis kept telling me to get back on track. The arrangement really didn't seem to be working, and so I stopped the tutoring after only one session.

That made my mom kind of upset – she really yelled at me that night. She told me I should be a better child, like my brother. She told me I was always unhappy no matter what they did for me, always unsatisfied, always "filled with gross hatred" – her words, not mine. That didn't end well, really, but I don't wanna talk about it very much.

Later that night, my dad came into my room. My dad, I'll tell you, was the jock archetype from high school. He grew up in Kansas and loved to hunt as a kid – he has some guns locked away in the safe in his room (the code to the safe was my brother's birthday, of course) – and has greying hair and liked his face clean-shaven and has an expensive watch on his wrist. We're not all that much alike. "Why can't you just like high school, like I did?"

"It's not that easy," I told him, "It's just so boring that it's easy to get distracted."

"Why is it so boring? I remember high school was fun – watching the football games on Friday nights, classics class, that kind of stuff."

"We don't even have a football team – we're in the city, there's no room for a goddamn football field in the middle of Manhattan," he gave me a glare when I cursed, looking like he wanted to scold me, but I continued talking, "And everyone there is just the same. They're all boring."

"You don't like anyone in your entire school?"

I gave a slight nod. "Everyone's an exact carbon-copy of each other. Except for…" I trailed off. Except for Percy Jackson.

"Except for who?" My dad asked.

"It doesn't matter. Can you just, maybe, get out of my room?" I curled my fingers up, nails digging into the flesh of my palms, really not in the mood to talk anymore, "And close the door on the way out."

Percy Jackson was a different, kid, alright. I guess I should probably explain how I met him, because it'll just show you how strange that little prick is.

I had gone to a private school for most of elementary school. I hated the uniforms, the collared shirts bugged my neck, and sometimes I would sit in a bathroom stall until I succeeded in giving myself a bloody nose just so I could sit in the nurse's office for the rest of the school day. I was eventually told to leave that school because my "destructive behavior" was "distracting" and supposedly having a "negative" impact on my peers. It was not, by the way. I was punching myself in the nose, not giving nicotine to preteens. But whatever, I really couldn't care less what the administrative staff there thought of me.

My brother died, too, my last year of elementary school. He wasn't very old – only a year older than me. I really didn't realize how much I loved him – the lively green eyes and grin and blue sweatshirts he loved to wear – until I never really saw all that again. I didn't sleep for three nights after that. My parents considered putting me in a mental hospital, I swear to god. They wanted me gone – I reminded them too much of my older brother and I was driving myself crazy because it really wasn't easy for me. I mean, I barely even got to say goodbye to the kid, he just slipped from under my grasp. I… I regret that. I regret that a lot.

But they didn't, obviously – I mean, they didn't send me to an institution. After seeing my brother die, I think the last thing they wanted was to see me locked away like some psychotic freak in those upstate facilities – they take you in and don't let you out. Do they still even have those? They should really be illegal, I'm telling you. It's like we're still living in the damn 1950s.

Not insane enough for an asylum, not sane enough to be around other kids; too depressing to be in the typical school environment, too energetic to sleep all day. I really didn't leave my parents with many choices. That made them upset, really – they spent long summer nights trying to figure out what the hell to do with me during the approaching school year. Dad suggested military school out in Vermont or Maine or whatever, but mom quickly shut down that idea. Mom suggested I try a Montessori school – you know, one of those schools where they let the kids roam free and do no work. But dad sad that was useless and a waste of money – a waste of money! This was coming from the man who always told me, "Education is priceless." My ass!

No school seemed like the right fit for a boy like me. So then I was homeschooled. My mom was my teacher, and my living room was the classroom. Most days, I would sit on the couch, cushioned by the abundance of pillows I would shove behind me, filling out worksheets and doing online quizzes – it was real easy to just look up the answers. I would have leftover pizza in the fridge for lunch and a scoop of ice cream as I clicked through an online presentation about art history or whatever. Sometimes, my mom would take me on "fieldtrips" to the grocery store, where she'd let me pick out different foods and shove the cart down the crowded aisles. Twice a month, she would take me to the museums downtown and I'd be able to look at the statues and paintings and whatever without being ushered along by a docent, without being scolded by a teacher or wearing one of those stupid matching t-shirts that all of the kids on fieldtrips wear so they don't get lost. I liked it, because I could wake up late and learn in my pajamas, and then get a $1 hotdog piled with too much ketchup from to the vendor on the corner several blocks away, still in my sweatpants.

Of course, it wasn't all sunshine and butterflies. My mom got on my nerves. She would hassle me about work and I didn't like being corrected because she was stern and patronizing, trying to mock the tone of a teacher, and then she would tell me that if I were my brother, I would be a better kid. That my brother was better this, my brother that. It's all about the dead kid, of course. It would make me so irritated I would threaten to grab the scissors and cut off all of my hair. I still had work, too. It was mandated by the state. And it was just as pointless as normal schoolwork, and doing it made me frustrated. I would do it all wrong so my mom would correct my work for me. Then she would tell me that my brother would do it right, and if he was fucking alive, he would do it better. That made me feel like shit, it really did, since that's not a good thing to tell a kid who is really just trying their best. Tears would start protruding from my tear ducts as I would try to scream at the top of my lunges, and then my mom would take away my dinner or whatever, and I would end up sobbing and crying, and then my dad would come home, and I'd have to wipe away my tears, but I'd hold it in all night.

Sometimes, I think of my anger as a material object. Like, I have all of this collected anger just piled up in me and I've never really had any good release for it. I'm scared that one day it will all explode and it'll be terrible, and then I'll hate myself even more and my mom will yell at me and my dad will be disappointed. Whatever. Fuck it.

What were we talking about? Oh, the cons of being homeschooled. Another thing that sucked about it – though not as much as all of the other shit I just went through – was the stereotypes. Sometimes, when I was bored in the waiting room at the doctor's office, or waiting in the airport for hours for a delayed flight, or whatever, I'd talk to other kids. I would tell them I was homeschooled, and their eyes would light up curiosity and pile me with at least half-a-dozen questions. Most commonly, they'd ask me "Isn't being homeschooled lonely?"

It wasn't very much. I didn't need other people. In case of you haven't really caught on, other people are shit. I'm not desperate, I'm not clingy, and I didn't need middle-school friends that will ditch me the next time they see fit. I would tell that to people, and they'd give me a weird look, a little disturbed, and tell me that "everyone needs friends." I thought that was shit. I didn't need friends, I didn't need anything.

"It's fun," I would insist. Sure, I got yelled at and cried a lot. But while other kids did group projects and "gained valuable tools for socializing" – real bull, I'll tell you – I was playing Call of Duty in my room. I really liked that – I had good aim, and every time I shot something, I felt a little skip of adrenaline brush over my heart like an egg wash being glazed onto bread. (I'm really telling you, I'm not very good with English. My metaphors could use some help.)

As fun as gaming was, the spats with my mother continued. In fact, they only got worse. By around the time I was 14, my mom realized she couldn't handle all of my "personality" – that's how she phrased it – and the process of applying to college was too much to handle on her own, and so my parents did what seemed to be the only choice: shove me back into the American school system. Absolutely terrific.

We shopped around for a while, looking at all of the different schools. New York certainly doesn't have a shortage of schools. New York does, however, have a shortage of good schools that I liked. I had some ground rules; my new school would have absolutely no uniforms, it couldn't be more than thirty minutes from our house, and there wouldn't be a lot of homework.

Most of the high schools were very preppy – they had those white button-ups and polished oxford shoes with crisp socks, several hours of homework. The others we looked at took an hour to get to in the morning traffic – something I was not a fan of. When my dad suggested boarding school again, I accused him of trying to get me away from the family. That argument didn't end well. We all – me, my mom, and dad – screamed at each other around the dinner table until we were all too tired to even comprehend what any of us were saying. The next day, we looked at another school – fairly large, an average of two hours of homework a night, and a good reputation among colleges. Three matriculations to Harvard in the past two years, the tour guide told us.

My parents agreed this one would be good. I felt too tired to object. Out of all of the schools I'd seen, this one seemed the most okay. I spent the next few days with my mom filling out all of that damn paperwork – loads of it. We saved, probably, ten whole trees by doing most of it online. Then it was done. I was officially enrolled there, ready to start there this fall.

And that's how I ended up at Goode's orientation.

The moment I walked into the building, I decided I hated the smell – Frebreze mixed with some kind of Lysol, definitely the school's attempt to mask the depressing stench of sadness and tiredness for the orientation – and the goddamn tiling on the floors was obnoxious. I ignored the red "GOODE IS GOOD" sign strung up above the lockers, because I thought it was tacky. I ignored the people, too, because most of the boys smelled like hot, summery sweat and the girls turned their heads away from me. I sat on a lonely, cold bleacher seat. People sat next to me, but didn't talk to me, but I didn't feel lonely. I swear to god, I don't feel lonely.

The real orientation began, and there was a speech about learning and growth and whatever from the principal – a balding man with a ton of stomach chub and thick, rectangular glasses – and a dance routine from some of the cheerleaders. Everyone was a real fan when this blonde girl did a flip – nearly everyone applauded. I didn't, obviously. I just didn't think it was that good.

I was about to fall asleep from because it was just that terrible, but then I heard a chorus of soft whispers – "sorry" and "excuse me" – from behind. I craned my neck a little, to see a red head girl getting out of the bleachers, followed by a wimpy looking kid trying to get out of the bleachers. I considered going with them, to escape, but they looked like pretty obnoxious kids, so I decided against it.

I went back to my weird state between consciousness and slipping into a light sleep. There were more speeches from teachers that all sounded saccharinely saturated – "we're so excited for a new school year" – and a small performance from the marching band or whatever.

The good news is that the orientation did get a lot more interesting. The bad news is that I have no fucking clue what actually happened since it was all sort of a blur. But the next thing I remember is that the fire alarm went off, and as we were evacuating, we passed the band room. It was a smoky mess, I could almost taste the tangible flavor of the fire in my mouth, like a dry, ashy towel being rubbed against my tongue.

"Jeez, I think the band room is on fire!" Some dumbass kid said as we were shuffled by, ushered by teachers. No fuck, really? I personally just assumed that the smoke was from a very realistic smoke machine. I bit my tongue, though, because I knew that if I said something like that, some teacher would find a way to blame the entire thing on me.

I tried to peer more into the band room, since I'd never seen arson in the act before, but I didn't get a very good look. I did see triangles and trumpets scattered all around, thrown almost like they had been weapons. I overheard a man with pepper-and-salt looking hair – I would later learn his name to be Mister Blofis – talk about his girlfriend's son. Apparently, those two kids had run off to the band room, had a tumble with one of the cheerleaders, set her on fire, then jumped out of the window. Man, I wish I was there to witness that.

Mister Blofis was pretty adamantly defending his stepson or whatever, but the entire thing was really just a crazy flaming mess – and literally. The school was evacuated – because "we shouldn't stay in a building with a live fire," the teachers insisted – and orientation came to a pretty abrupt end.

I was pretty happy about that – I mean, what sane kid wouldn't be? But then it kind of sucked – I mean, it always sucks – because then all of the freshmen at orientation and all of the teachers had to stand out front of the building under the glaring hot summer sun. The staff did a lousy job of trying to take attendance, in a very lame attempt to make sure no kid got left behind in the blazing fire. They were calling out names and asking us all to call our parents and shit.

They really didn't have to make all that much of a fussy, annoying hassle. Would it really be that bad if one kid was left behind to burn in the fire?

But anyway, I borrowed a phone from a classmate – god, the word classmate is weird. I do have my own phone, but I left it at home, sitting on my mess of a desk. I called my mom, but she only picked up on the ninth ring, because her yoga class is much more important than her son almost burning to death. I told her to pick me up and she gave a loud sigh and told me she would be there in a few. I gave the kid – acne-covered face, beady brown eyes, and an uncharacteristic smile that looked like the edges of the grin was being held up with damn fishhooks – his phone back. I didn't ever really thank him, I just gave him a fake smile – clearly plastic – and jabbed his phone at his chest. I don't think that made him very happy.

After about a billion and one years, my mom picked me up, and of course she had to drive her damn century-old Toyota Highlander. There were still a bunch of other kids standing around the building, and they all stared as I had to climb into the passenger seat of that crumby-ass car. Obviously – I'll keep on saying it a million times – I don't really care whatever the hell those kids think. But sometimes, no matter how much you don't care, things like that are still just embarrassing.

Besides that incident, my entire summer was kind of a boring flop. I played a lot of Call of Duty and went bowling and I actually managed to sneak into a bar – me, a 14 year old, holy fuck – but a bartender with grimy teeth and a stinker attitude kicked me out. He threatened to call the police on me. But that's really a different story.

I didn't think much about school for the rest of the summer, either. They sent out a couple of emails to the parents, trying to explain the incident that was orientation. I didn't get any of my classmates' numbers or anything, and I wasn't really interested in getting to know any of them. I didn't buy supplies –we kept on getting flyers tucked under the crack of our front door, advertising binders and graphing calculators. I ignored them. I don't need any preparation or anything for high school. It's just four years of conformity hell – fitting to what your classmates want, being the perfect student that your teachers want, being the goddamn kid that everyone wants you to be – and then it's over. I don't really know if I want to go to college.

But that's all irrelevant.

The next interesting part of this saga is actually the first day of school. I walked into Goode and was greeted with the abyss of fake-faces, the cheerleaders with their hair pulled into tight ponytails, uniforms already on because they'd be performing at the first-day-of-school assembly, crews of friends already gathering into cliques. I shouldered my backpack, readjusting the weight – it'd really been years since I carried an actual backpack.

I had a little dorky slip of paper my mom had printed out, with my locker and schedule and all. I headed to the number that was on the slip – there's not too many lockers in Goode, so it wasn't very hard to find. But on my way, I spotted two peculiarly familiar faces – bright orange, tight ringlets framing freckles and a skinny stature, dressed in a pink hoodie and a pair of paint-splattered jeans. And the boy – more lean than he'd been only a couple of weeks ago, black hair hanging wildly into his eyes like a poorly-styled toddler, bright green eyes that reminded me of my brother. I couldn't believe those two ruckless (it's a word I made myself, you see – a mix of reckless and ruckus) dolts hadn't been expelled. That gave me some hope for the new school year. If red-bobble-head and almost-emo-kid could explode the band room and not get in trouble, then I could definitelyfly under the radar.

I gave an uncharacteristic grin – I hate smiling, I feel like it stretches out my face –

shouldering my backpack as I headed off to homeroom. Except it wasn't called homeroom, because of course Goode has to be dumb and change all of the names for everything. It's called advisory, because we receive advising and guidance – which is absolute bullshit, I'll tell you. It was really just twenty high schoolers – a mix of lower and upperclassmen – lounging at the desks of a room, comparing schedules and catching up on what they did all summer as the teacher struggled to make sense of the new attendance sheet.

After that was the assembly. Percy Jackson – I had learned that was his name – really set the bar for entertainment very high at Goode. So I was very disappointed to find a completely normal assembly that was, unfortunately, not interrupted by the fire alarm or any reports of snare drums bursting into flames. I mostly picked at the cuticles on my nails and wished I was back in my bed. I didn't see Percy Jackson or redhead. I did see Blofis – the stepfather of Jackson – he looked nervous but excited. The way most teachers look on the first day of school. He seemed like a nice guy, so I was sort of sad to see I didn't have him for English this year.

I headed to biology – which was an absolute snore. All we did was go over the syllabus and talk about the rules or whatever. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, I get it, I get it. I don't need a whole year of that. I really don't plan on becoming a biologist – actually, I really don't know what I will become. The future scares me quite a little. Sometimes I just wish time would end so then I wouldn't have to be faced with the inevitable hard choices that come with living.

Next was English – I had Dr. Boring. That's his real name, I swear. And guess who sat next to me? Percy fucking Jackson. I had a feeling that this class would be anything but boring. I basically looked at Jackson the entire class. He had all of his stuff laying in front of him – an organized binder with everything written in girly handwriting, a pencil case, a folder, and one of those green Nature Valley granola bars that crumbles everywhere once you take a single bite. I wasn't interested in that, though. I was more interested in the guy himself. Jackson had really dark bags under his eyes, a strand of grey hair, his hands nervously tapped against the desk, his foot rhythmically patted the ground, and I could make out the shape of a pen sticking out from his pocket – it looked like it was uncomfortably placed. Why wouldn't someone just put a pen in their pencil case? Isn't that, like, the purpose of pencil cases?

I tried to look at Dr. Boring for most of class, but I just couldn't resist some of the urge to just stare at Jackson. He radiated an aura of… differentness. In this damn school where everything seemed to be the same, boring thing – all of the students and teachers practically cardboard cutouts of each other, down to the school's typical slogan – Percy Jackson immediately seemed different. He seemed nervous and tense and his smile was rare but special – a lopsided grin with sincerity untamable by most teens. He was odd, real odd.

I have to admit – it disturbed me, it really did. How weird and different he seemed to be. I wanted to be able to know what was different about him because it ticked me off so much that I just began to have an insatiable desire to know. But I also sort of liked in. In what was shaping out to be the most boring four years of my life, Percy Jackson was a source of amusement, a mystery. I felt like that dude from Scooby Doo – Shaggy or whatever. (Except I would like to think I have a nice-shaped chin and I'm not that irritatingly annoying.)

And that's how it began.

I started not doing well in English, because I would get so distracted. I thought, what does Percy Jackson do when he gets home? What does he think about? And I swear, I'm not gay, I'm really not, but it's just this state of mind that I let myself self into, where I'm so distracted by this anomaly in the shape of a teenager. Instead of close-reading Lord of the Flies, I wanted to analyze Jackson. For most people, when they experience something this intensely exciting, it fades off after a while. They stop wondering as the mystery recedes into reality. But the longer I fucked with the idea of Percy Jackson, the weirder it seemed to get. He would leave class at strange times, make references to Pagan-like gods, and despite the fact that the guy was kind of hot, his only friend was the redhead. Her name was Rachel Dare, and she was in my World History class – she had a very cautious aura to her. She never let anyone sit closer than a foot and a half away from her; she talked with her nose up – but not in a snobbish manner. She was well guarded and well mannered, yet the paint-stains splattered across her jeans and her hippie shirts told me that she also had a relaxed, active side to her. Her and Jackson seemed like two peas in a pod. They were always whispering and laughing and eating lunch together and they seemed to understand one another in a way that no one else could.

That made my heart ache a little.

With my English grades slipping by, Dr. Boring suggested I get a tutor. That's how I ended up with Mr. Paul Blofis offering to tutor me. I visited him during lunch a few times, to help me fix up an essay. He's a nice teacher – he always took time out of lunch to help students, even students that weren't his. And he gave me some pretty good advice. Then he offered to tutor me. I went once. I thought maybe it would be cool – he is the stepfather of Percy Jackson, I was sure I would learn something. But I went, and all we did was talk about my essay, and that was boring. I'm sure you already know about this.

But for the rest of the year, I would watch from afar. I would watch Percy Jackson and Rachel Elizabeth Dare – Jackson had nicknamed her "RED" – tease each other at lunch. I watched as Percy Jackson distantly stared outside the window of our English classroom, almost like he was looking for something, like he was expecting a disaster or some other batshit crazy crap. I don't know what it was – I really couldn't place it – but I swear, there was something special about that boy. The world, the air seemed to shift around him. Once or twice, he would abruptly leave class – "I need to throw up" he'd say, before dashing out. Once I asked him if he had an extra pen or pencil – he said no. But I knew that damn pen was in his back pocket, it always was.

I really don't know exactly what I was looking for, but I knew I wasn't insane. Well, I was pretty sure I wasn't insane. I jut knew there was something absolutely strange, something so terrifyingly, exhilaratingly unique about Percy Jackson. And as much as I watched – observed, some might even say – him the entirety of my freshmen year, I only grew more and more confused by his habits, by the way he talked, by the way he knew Latin – a dead language – so well. Whenever there was a word with a Latin root in class, the teacher would always call on Percy Jackson, and he always knew the word, like it was a second nature. Who the hell knows Latin? Well, apparently the same boy who cursed by saying "gods" – as in plural – and whenever it would rain, he would roll his eyes and murmur something about his uncle. What the fuck, you know?

That's why, when we had our meetings with counselors mid-freshmen year to discuss our "goals," I had one goal for high school. It wasn't good grades, or friends, or a GPA. I wanted to figure out what the fuck was up with Percy Jackson, that fucking weirdo.

(I didn't tell that to my counselor, obviously.)

chapter one is officially done.

the storyline really hasn't picked up, yet. there's a lot of exposition. (but i have a reason for it, don't worry.) i've planned the plot of this and everything all out and stuff – which means this is going to be my first actual multi-chapter story! – and i'm so excited, because isn't that sort of cool? so anyway, expect that in the foreseeable future.

lastly, if you liked this so far – it's gonna get better, i swear, but also – check out some of my other stories! & please, please feel free to review.