For most kids, the hardest moment of childhood is realizing that: A- No, your "destiny" does not include being a crime fighting superhero, and B- Yes; you may end up spending your life working in an office cubicle. For me it was different, in fact it was the opposite.

I was 5 when I first started to notice the strange happenings in my family, at first they were small things, they only happened about once a year and I didn't notice much. It might have been that I noticed the way cutlery would start to gravitate towards my Aunt Hazel, or I would've sworn I saw Leo stick his hands into burning fire. But for a long time I ignored them, passed them by as illusion in my mind. Then, when I was seven, I noticed a woman following my mother and me down the street as we were going to my gymnastics lesson; she was abnormally tall with a hood pulled over her face and an umbrella at her side, though there was not a cloud in sight. She had been following us for over 30 minutes. Maybe If I had ignored her, kept on walking and not thought about it again, I would have continued my obliviousness to the world. But instead I pointed her out to my mother. The thing is, my mother is the most headstrong person I have ever known, and nothing fazes her. But even I, at only 7 saw the fear in her eyes, and felt the tightening of her hand on mine. She quietly asked me to get some water from a nearby fountain, and when I came back the woman was gone. For the first time in my life, I had seen my mom scared. We skipped gymnastics that day; mom had my dad come pick us up and that night we ate in silence.

After that day I started noticing more and more the vents around me, more people started following me, and my parents grew more anxious by the hour. I noticed the way my Dad would keep a random blue ballpoint pen in his pocket but never use it, or the fact that my mom never allowed me into our basement. There were times as I got to be nine or ten where I would gather the courage to ask but they gave away nothing. They would exchange a worried glance and I would be asked to leave the room. Afterwards I would here snippets of their conversation…

"Annabeth, maybe we should just tell her, I mean…"

"No Percy, I'm not dragging my daughter into what I had to go through!"

"But"

"Not until she's 13, then we'll explain"

"I've been thinking wise-girl; maybe we shouldn't do it ourselves,"

"What! Percy no, I want to do it ourselves"

"Please, I think she would rather hear about it from someone else, she could come meet us at camp…"

"NO"

"Oh fine, let's just give it a rest, we've got 3 years anyway…"

At that point I would go to bed, the conversation having ended. And so I ended up waiting impatiently for my 13th my birthday, as the years past, the anticipation became unbearable and so were the waves of fear flowing off my parents. Finally the week before my birthday came to be, and my mom, Dad and I headed out to Aunt Piper and Uncle Jason's lodge in a small valley on Long Island for a family reunion.