Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.
If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad or 'parents' told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.
Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.
If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great, read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.
But if you recognize yourself in these pages—if you feel something stirring inside— stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before they know it too, and they'll come for you
Don't say I didn't warn you
My name is Calypso Jackson. I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.
Am I a troubled kid?
Yeah. You could say that.
I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a trip to Manhattan— twenty-nine mental-case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff. I know— it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.
But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.
Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.
I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get in trouble.
Boy, was I wrong.
See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like in my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that… Well, you get the idea.
On this trip, I was determined to be good.
All the way into the city, me and Lila put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded kleptomaniac girl, hitting one of my best friends Grover in the back of the head with chunks of disgusting peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich.
Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must have been held back several grades because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was hurt. Bad. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria. Which was one of the few days I could actually eat at lunch.
Lila was almost the complete opposite. She had this kind of aura. Like if you got on the wrong side of her, she could mess you up. She didn't even look that scary, with her flower dresses and pink scrunches. But she had a real temper. And she cursed like a sailor. Which most of the teachers did not like.
Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything because me and Lila were both on probation. The headmaster had threatened us with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip.
"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled.
"Not if I do it first," Lila huffed.
Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter."
He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.
"That's it." I started to get up, but Lila and Grover pulled me back to my seat.
"You're already on probation," he reminded me. "You know who will get blamed if anything happens."
"Dude, I've got a temper worse than yours and I'm not beating her up. You gotta calm down man."
Looking back on it, I wish I'd decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there. In-school suspension would've been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get myself into.
Mr. Brunner led the museum tour.
He rode upfront in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery.
It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.
He gathered us around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a stele, for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it seemed interesting, but everyone around me was talking, which made it hard to tell what Mr. Brunner was saying. But every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would give me the evil eye.
Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right through your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown.
From her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit and figured we were devil spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey," real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.
One time, after she'd made me erase answers out of old math workbooks until midnight, I told Grover and Lila I didn't think Mrs. Dodds was human. Grover looked at me, real serious, and said, "You're absolutely right."
Mr. Brunner kept talking about Greek funeral art.
Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turned around and said, "Would you shut up?"
It came out way louder than I meant it to.
The whole group laughed. Mr. Brunner stopped his story.
"Miss Jackson," he said, "did you have a comment?"
I was super embarrassed. I said, "No, sir."
Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?"
I looked at the carving, and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized it. " That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"
"Yes," Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because…"
"Well..." I racked my brain to remember. "Kronos was the king god, and—"
"God?" Lila asked.
"Titan,'' I corrected myself, "And… he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife hid baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters—"
"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me.
