You can do this, Aria, I tell myself, examining the blazing climbing wall.

Now, don't think I'm some girl who is trying her hand at climbing this death trap for the first time. I've done this every day during every summer for the past eight years – I even have eight camp beads to prove it. But after coming home to Camp Half-Blood after a long school year of normal and boring, you kind of forget how much fun it is to be constantly in danger, you know? And you have to throw yourself at the danger for you to remember why you love it so much, I've discovered.

The kid next to me, Bruce, stands up and trudges over to the wall, looking up towards the top the whole way. He gets his foot in the first slot available and starts going up, shaking a little and trying desperately not to fall or get burnt to a crisp – you choose which is the better option. His siblings, several people from the Athena cabin, cheer him on, and I occasionally clap a little. But I'm pretty distraught at the thought of suddenly become a dangerous teenager living on the edge after months of cautious actions.

This is going to be so easy, Aria. You've been doing this for years! There's no way you'll become tomorrow's lunch after being burnt into a fried Aria, a voice in my head tells me, and I perk up a little. I'm right. I can totally do this.

But then Bruce's arm is suddenly engulfed in flames, and he lets go of the wall in his panic, falling and receiving third-degree burns in the process.

Well, that couldn't be any more inconvenient if the Gods tried.

Some of my siblings, the Apollo kids, gather him up in a stretcher and take him away to the infirmary. "Goodie," I say, getting up to face what is my apparent doom.

Gods, am I paranoid.

I look over towards the line of my siblings standing nearby, waiting for another person to be injured. I find Will Solace in the crowd and say, "Please tell me that he was just clumsy and that I'm not going to fall off of the wall."

Will rolls his eyes. "Aria, you've kind of been here for eight years. He's been here for a week. I think you'll be fine."

I nervously twist one of the beads on my necklace. "Well, if I fall off, I'm blaming it on you!"

"First your bro, now your fall-guy?" Will asks. "Harsh."

I now roll my eyes. "Shut up, Will. I need to go fall off a wall, if you'll excuse me."

I stand in front of the towering wall, repeating the chorus to Big Girls Don't Cry in my head to give me the courage I can never seem to find when I really want to have it. I wipe my sweaty palms on the front of my jean shorts and step up to the wall, placing one hand carefully on it. When my hand is secure, I put the other one up higher. My feet go onto the footholds instinctively, and I can feel my memory of how to navigate this deathtrap coming back as I scale up. After a few minutes of dodging the spikes and the lava that never seems to stop flowing out of the wall, I reach the top and climb down with ease. I can hear my siblings cheering me on, and when I come out from behind the wall, Will sticks his tongue out at me. "Told you so," he says, triumphantly.

I punch his arm. "Lucky for you, I can't push you into the lava because then we'd have no counselor."

"There are some perks of being the second replacement in two years," he says.

I roll my eyes and leave the climbing wall, my adrenaline from the climb screaming in my ears. Hey, you. Yeah, you. You want strawberries right about now, my brain tells me, causing me to end up at the endless fields of the red fruit.

I sit in the one lucky row of my choice and quietly hum a tune that is one of my favorites – Welcome to the Black Parade. Other campers soon come by, some to do their next activity of the day, some escaping from the ones they have, and some just to have a free snack. Eventually all of my siblings gather in the fields, carrying wicker baskets and delicately picking the fruits. Will sees me and comes to my row.

"I see you got an early start," he says sarcastically, tossing a look at the ground where my basket should be.

"I've never been one for working on the first day of camp, and you know it." I stand from my spot and brush off any stray dirt, walking to his side to help him fill his basket.

"Hey! I want to be the only one who gets credit for this stupendous basket!" he says, laughing and pulling his basket away from me.

"'Stupendous'?" I quote. His word choice doesn't surprise me, since he is a fellow child of the God of poetry, but his basket is just average. Nothing stupendous about it.

He picks a strawberry off of a stem and shows it to me. It's bruised and moldy and obviously needs to be thrown away. "Because while you were gone, I learned how to do," he starts, closing his eyes and placing his cupped hand over the strawberry, "this!" He takes his hand off of the fruit and before my eyes the mold shrinks until it's gone. The berry gets bigger and the bruises shrink, creating a perfect strawberry, fit for the gods.

"Every basket I've turned in since March has been perfect, and I'm certainly not sharing the glory with you, Aria," he says, dropping it in the basket.

"Lucky for you, I don't like right next to a freaking huge strawberry field that I'm forced to harvest," I say, rolling my eyes at his desperate show of his powers.

We've been having this battle for years. We've been secretly finding one special thing that we can do and working on it all throughout the year, showing each other at the beginning of the summer. It was usually a back and forth type of winning situation. I won last year, Will the year before, myself the year before that. I'm pretty determined to beat him this year.

The one problem now is that I kind of haven't figured out what to do.

We pick some more strawberries, Will putting his in his basket and myself holding them up with the end of my Camp Half-Blood t-shirt. When we're done with the row, we head towards the gate to the camp, and I grab a random basket that was left in the middle of the field to store my berries in. We drop the baskets off with all the others and head off towards the mess hall for lunch.

Yay! I've been trying to find something that I can write about for PJO, and I've finally, finally figured it out! I'm seriously hoping I actually get something done with this story, or it's back to the drawing board. And if you want to read a Hunger Games story, you should totally read mine – just saying. Thank you all!