So the beginning of this covers the last of freshman year and then goes on to the beginning of sophomore year – which would be post-The Last Olympian and just before The Lost Hero. Narrator says some offensive things – don't take 'em to heart.

The second-to-last day of freshmen year, I stayed after school so I could empty out the contents of my locker in a garbage bag. Most people didn't use their lockers all that much – they just carried around backpacks stuffed with all their books. But I took biology, so I needed gloves and goggles for the lab days, and some other classes that had a lot of heavy textbooks. I didn't want to stay late on the last day of school to haul home several tons of useless shit, so today was the only day. What's that saying? Carpe diem, except this was sort of the opposite. Whatever.

As I dumped an assortment of dull pencils, broken pens, and worksheets into the heavy-duty Glad bag, I realized I wasn't the only one left in the hallway. The little fucker was here as well, strolling down with his hands in his pockets – Percy Jackson. My seat in English had been moved a few months ago, so I really hadn't been looking at him as much lately. But that didn't mean I loosed any interest. I still hadn't even come close to cracking the mystery that was personified in the form of the black-haired boy.

"Oh, hey," he said, pausing his walk to look at me, "You sat next to me in English."

"Yeah, I did," I sheepishly replied, putting my hand to the back of my neck, "you helped me when we started talking about the mythological unit and stuff. I think you quizzed me on the different Olympians and the monsters. All of those names really sound alike." I paused, for a second. "You were really good at it." I reminded him. Fuck. I didn't need to remind him about something he clearly knew.

"Oh, yeah." He looked wistful, "All of that reminds me of my own family," Percy Jackson brushed off the topic and gave gracefully practiced tug of the lips, "So what're you doing the day before our last day, huh?"

"Just empting out my locker," I made a loose gesture to the trash bag, which I set on the floor.

"Throwing it all out?"

"Oh, no," I shook my head, "Just bringing it home. What're you still doing here?"

"Just waiting for Paul – er, Mister Blofis – to finish up some work. He drives me home and stuff." There was a moment of silence. "So are you doing anything cool this summer?"

"Not really. Just staying home."

"No camp or anything like that?"

I shook my head. "I've never really been to one." I gave a minute of thought "My family's going on a small trip to the beach in July, I guess."

"What beach?" Percy Jackson immediately seemed intrigued by that.

"Just Main Beach up in the Hamptons." I shrugged it off. Some kids would love that, going to the beach and all. They'd love making plans with friends who also happened to be in the Hamptons and mixing tequila and vodka – a terrible mix, I'd never recommend it. But I? I hate it. It's my mom and dad and me, and we get a little two-bedroom motel room with thin walls. They always go out for dinner and drink a lot and leave me back at the rental or whatever, to just flip through the channels on the TV. My mom says if I have friends, I could meet up with them – presumptuous of her to assume I actually want to spend my free time socializing. And she knows I don't have friends, and while she's out with my dad drinking that dumbly expensive wine, I'm back under those thin sheets on the bed that feels like cardboard, scrolling through my iPod. Exactly what I do when I'm not at the beach. It's basically just a trip for them with me tagging a long. I liked it better when my brother wasn't dead, because then we'd actually do stuff I liked, and we would go out and get ice cream and the entire thing was just better.

Percy Jackson snapped me back to reality. "Hampton is the mix of ham – that means home – and tun – which means town. Hometown."

"What language is that?"

"Old English," Percy hummed, "they don't really know where those words came from, but it's pretty much from Latin."

"That's really nice." I stared at him wistfully. "I mean, how you know Latin."

Percy looked like he was in deep thought for a second. "I don't really know it. Not very well, at least," he finally responded. "I've just learned it over the past few summers and stuff." A pause. "My camp does a lot of Latin stuff, I guess. But one of my friends there has made it her personal job to teach me until I'm perfect at it, though. She's a perfectionist. She's always pestering me, telling me I can get better and stuff." That made him frown.

I really didn't like that. How when he mentioned her – literally, just a three-letter pronoun – he got this ghost of a smile and a light in his eyes. You could tell that whoever this was, he really liked her. I knew that maybe I shouldn't have been so judgmental or whatever, but it made me repulsed. Disgusted. Her. He seemed to value "her" and her opinions a lot. And it seemed that all she really did was tell him he wasn't good enough. I could relate to that, at least.

Well, I was about to tell him that the fact that he still knows a dead language is pretty damn weird and impressive, and ask him what kind of summer camp he even went to that the kids learned Latin for fun, but he cut me off, going back to the original topic. Damn.

"But anyway, the Hamptons are really cool. I like going up by there. My mom and I like to go to Montauk."

"Do you like to swim and stuff?"

"Yeah. The water up there is usually pretty great, too. Sometimes I just feel like I could spend my entire life there." He got a bit of a dreamy look in his eye. You know how most high school guys get that lustful kind of look in their eyes when they look at a cover of Sports Illustrated? That's the look that Percy Jackson seemed to get when he talked about the fucking beach.

I was going to ask Jackson something else – I wanted more information, really, like why does this dude seem to have a love affair with the ocean – but Mister Blofis walked into the hall, dressed in a tragic light beige fleece and a pair of khakis that screamed I'm a middle-aged teacher. He usually waved towards students – that's courtesy, you know – but he was holding a bunch of papers and his computer or whatever. "Ready to go, Percy?" He called out.

Percy gave a nod in Mister Blofis's direction, and turned back to me with a grin. "Well, I gotta go. Have a good last day, tomorrow." He headed down the hall towards his stepfather, and I watched as the two of them headed in the direction of the exit, leaving me alone under the florescent lighting and the dirty tiles and the sloppily cared for lockers.

I tried to go back to my locker-cleaning ordeal, but I swore I could see the ghost of Percy Jackson still standing in front of me, that characteristic lopsided smile slapped on his face with practiced ease, shifting his hands and feet the way he always does. He has ADHD, I know that – he's mentioned it to some other people; he's not ashamed of it or anything. But the way he moves, the way he moves isn't like a normal person with ADHD. It's more nervous, more of a tick than a nature, it's less erratic and more like he knows about it and it's almost like he's hiding something, like a tell. Or maybe I'm just confusing ADD and ADHD. I'm not really a psychologist or anything like that. I really don't know all that much about mental well being in general.

I stared at the empty space in front of me for a little bit longer. He really wasn't there. Maybe I'm going insane. I hope I'm not going insane or have a breakdown or anything like that. That would really suck. It really would, because then everyone would talk about me and my parents would be disappointed – when are they not? – and Percy Jackson would hear my name and scrunch his nose and get an uncharacteristic critical look in his eyes as he mutters, "Oh, him? That loser?"

I tried to get my mind off that.

I thought about my conversation with Percy Jackson. As I almost violently shoved a copy of The Crucible down, I thought. Who the fuck has a family like the goddamn Olympians? "Whorish" – that's how my mother would describe the Olympians. She hates infidelity; she hates the girls she deems "sluts" when she sees the issues of People magazinelined up on the shelves of the bookstore. If the Olympians were real, I swear to god, my mother would be their greatest enemy. (My father prefers the term "bastards" – that's how he would describe them all.)

That night when I got home, I threw the garbage bag in the bag of my closet – right next to the accumulating pile of dark clothes that were washed approximately once a year. I could still see his green eyes – really a lot like my brothers, but I swear that's not why I think of Percy Jackson all the time – if I pictured them hard enough. I was really glad I had already taken all of my finals, since I really wasn't able to focus that night. I had some homework – a couple of teachers had assigned short prompts or whatever and surveys about our progression during the school year. But what were they really gonna do? Flunk me out of a class because I didn't do the little last assignment? It's not like I had a good GPA to maintain, anyway.

God, that's the inconvenient thing about not being homeschooled. When I was at home, I didn't take my academics or anything seriously. It felt too casual – having a couch as my classroom and all. But now that I'm back at an actual school, I can't even think about my academics a lot because the people are so distracting. Fucking Percy Jackson. Just the way he moved his lips and everything kept ringing like distorted echoes in my head, like a record on repeat.

The next day, I was hoping to see Percy Jackson. I only really caught a glimpse of him in the hallway, smiling happily. I saw him again in English, too. Of course, Doctor Boring made us do work on the last day of school. He made us all fill out a sheet about how we're going to use what we learned this year in a real-life context, which wouldn't have been so bad, except it was graded. Graded! Can you believe the atrocity of that man?

Percy really seemed to be struggling to write. I'd overheard from some other students that he had dyslexia. I had a friend – well, friend is a strong word; more like a peer – in elementary school who had that. Seems to suck. But I always thought it was strange that he was able to basically know three languages – Greek, English, and Latin, even though he claims he's not good at the latter – despite that. He's like someone you'd find giving motivational talks about "overcoming the obstacles life gives you," except I really couldn't picture Percy Jackson ever doing that phony shit.

Before you could even snatch a pencil from my clenched hand, the school day was over. I do have a pretty relentless grip, though, so that analogy doesn't mean very much. I found myself a little sad – I'll barely even admit it – to leave Goode. I'd miss the terrible smells and the arrogant teachers and weird cheerleaders, and Percy Jackson. That boy didn't even know my name. But I'd miss him all summer long.

I really shouldn't have missed Goode, since I would return that fall. The last day of freshmen year is kind of fake, since it's really not a last day. Even though all of the kids in my grade celebrated their "last day", we'd still step into that school approximately 540 more times. That's just an estimate, obviously – for some of us, that number is way less. But the point stands; that really doesn't seem like a last day to me.

The summer was the same as every summer seems to be – a fevery dream of freedom and boredom. We went to the beach, alright. I made sure to stand in the drawings of the waves, the riptides as the waters pulled back into the ocean, and thought of Percy Jackson all the while. I felt kind of bad, since I don't like the beach – the sand feels gross on my feet, the heat makes me feel like I'm melting pudding, and the children that vacation up in the Hamptons in the summer are all bratty. I saw a girl throw her Louis Vuitton into the ocean because she asked her dad for Gucci instead, I swear. But Percy Jackson really would have loved it. It made me feel bad that he wasn't here in my place.

I usually don't feel very bad for people, I don't think. Other people often don't seem worthy of much empathy. Life sucks for all of us, I get it. But I don't know how, but Jackson would always find a way to crawl into my head like a little termite and make me think about him, and it made me realize that, in some weird way, I kind of love the guy. His grin is nice and all and he really likes the beach, and he seems smart in a sort of dim-witted way. It's just endearing, that's all.

I almost considered buying him a sweatshirt from the souvenir shop up on the beach. He likes wearing sweatshirts, I noticed. He wore them all of freshmen year, pretty much, and he liked the pockets, because he'd stick his hands in those. He really liked blue clothes, too. And orange shirts – I couldn't tell if he kept wearing the same orange shirt over and over, or circulated very, very similar-looking orange shirts every couple of days. I didn't end up buying him a sweatshirt since it might have seemed creepy, and he probably wouldn't like it anyway.

I didn't really do anything the rest of the summer. I got into some music. I found some good recommendations on some old web forums – "Pumped Up Kicks" and Aerosmith, though I wasn't as interested in the latter nearly as much. I tried to take some practice tests – sophomore year means we've gotta take the PSATs and the Pre-ACTs or whatever. I really didn't like the practice tests. I could never focus. I played more games, too. I tried to sort through some of my brother's stuff that had been scattered around my room.

As July came to a draw and the school year grew closer, I actually started shopping for school supplies. I got some rulers and a couple of nice mechanical pencils – not the cheap, dingy ones that are disposable – and a new thermos to bring to school. It was kind of sad. I missed school, and I really missed seeing Percy Jackson all summer, since that was kind of something I looked forward to everyday. But going back made the anxiety in my stomach crawl a little. That place was an infestation.

Around mid-August, the whole city started going wanky. It was like the band-room incident, but more widespread. Time seemed so flexible. There were days that flew by, that barely seemed to exist like a sleepy haze, and other times that felt so prolonged. The streets were a mess – cars scattered, alarms blaring, people caught up in the chaos. The reporters blamed it on a storm, a really bad storm, except there was no footage of the storm, no classic news reports, and I certainly had no recollection of strong winds tearing past my windows or flooding or anything like that.

I thought maybe I was going insane. Maybe it was because I wasn't taking the depression meds they gave me. I don't even have depression; I just have a dead brother. And so somehow, I conceived these little lies in my head that I was going insane.

But I really try not to think about the rest of that summer too much.

On the first day of sophomore year, I decided to tape a photo of my brother – one of his old school photos, the edges fraying – into one of my notebooks. Just as a reminder. Something told me this year was going to be rough – the shaky weather, the tumultuous state of the city lately – it all gave me a bad feeling. I was hoping that if I ever felt really down, really shitty, I'd remember to look at the photo. (Spoiler alert: that photo would continue, taped on the underside cover, in my forgotten notebook in my locker, until it would be seized with the rest of the evidence. But I'm getting ahead of myself).

I saw Percy Jackson that morning, walking through the halls. Rachel Dare wasn't here this year – she had made a last-minute switch to some ladies prep school, if the rumors were true. But Jackson looked like he had already made other friends; he was chatting with some freshman, maybe giving them advice or some shit, as he shouldered his blue Jansport backpack.

I had chemistry with Jackson. I'd heard he was freakishly good at biology last year – I know, for someone who has no friends, I sure do still hear a lot of the chat going around the school. I heard that he got all of the marine questions right, that he knew cell division and osmosis like the back of his very hand. The teacher accused him of cheating, apparently, but he really wasn't. "Trouble always seems to come for that kid," I overheard some of the other teachers say. I wondered what that meant.

(I wonder if they said that about me.)

It only really made sense in my head that Percy Jackson would be good at chemistry. Biology and chemistry are both sciences, right? But apparently the property of transitivity (hey, Mister Donalds was right – I am using my geometry knowledge in real life) doesn't apply to Percy Jackson. We did some get-to-know the basics thing for chemistry and the teacher called on him three times and he was totally clueless.

The only other class that somewhat intrigued me was English. I had it with Mister Blofis. I know that I quit on him after one tutoring session, but I'm pretty sure he still likes me. I think. Today we just went over the syllabus and shit, but he did give me a smile. That counts for something, right?

I did talk to Percy Jackson for a few seconds. It was right after last period was dismissed, in the crowded hallways filled with shuffling shoes and floating bacteria. I saw him and stared right at me; he caught my eyes and gave me a friendly wave before making his way through the sea of bodies.

"How was your summer?" I could barely hear his voice as people bustled by. I tried to focus on just him.

"It was good. We went to the beach. I thought of you." I realized right after I said the goddamn second part that I sounded like some weird freak, and I almost said something to take it back, but Percy cut me off.

"That's cool! I'll catch up with you more later." He was almost oblivious to what I said. He disappeared just as fast as he came, swept away into the quick tide of kids eager to get home from their first day. I felt a smile tug at my lips as I watched him go away. High school sucks, sophomore year might be a major L, but Percy Jackson was one mystery that would stay.

The rest of the week was really what you'd expect – girls already worrying about their homecoming dresses ("ruffles or lace?"), the cheerleaders trying to increase school prep with hair tied up in high ponytails, the always-present "GOODE IS GOOD" sign remained hung above the lockers. I didn't get the chance to talk to Percy much more.

In fact, nothing really happened for the next few weeks. I could go on, explaining the absolute bores of Algebra II, the totally unnecessary Frankenstein pop quiz in English (Mister Blofis almost made a pained face as he passed the papers out, saying, "You know, I really hate doing this,"), or the fact that my new locker is located right next to the boys' bathroom, which smelled like piss and the school's probably-toxic, watered down cleaning spray or whatever. One girl – dark, silky hair down to her bust, a bit of a fat stature you'd see in the "before" pictures of dieting ads, a maroon sweater she liked to pair with silver studs and black leggings – tried to convince me to join all of this different clubs, but I really wasn't into that. I have a general rule about work in high school: generally try to avoid it. I've got the same rule for people, too.

(Percy Jackson is really the only exception.)

(I don't get lonely.)

hi!

in order from non-important to important-ish:

i did the math, and this story takes place around 2008 or so, but yes there are references to "pumped up kicks" which is released in 2010, but i ~really don't care and please don't tell me about it~ the integrity of this story is not based around its historical accuracy but the portrayal of emotions thank u very much.

that brings me to my next point which is that most "mortals looking in on demigods/percy's life" fics are pretty happy, a little fluffy sprinkled with teenage jealousy and stereotypical jocks and whatever. i wanted to do something darker, something that was kind of new, a mix of the high school clichés and the dark underbelly of obsession and diving deeper into the world of how brutally tragic some people can be. (also the narrator is offensive – i know, i know. it's an integral part of the character. his opinions do not reflect my own.)

that being said, if you're sensitive to violence or anything of that manner, you probably want to quit after the next chapter. i haven't really sat down to write it all out yet, but i can tell you that in chapter 4 or so, things get kinda dark.

that'll probably be out in a few weeks. maybe months – who knows? so look out for that! see ya on the flipside.