This chapter is LOOOOOOOOOOOONG. Actually, it really isn't, but it's longer than usual for this story, so I guess... a nice surprise for you? FUN FACT: I spelled 'receive' wrong every time I wrote it in this chapter, and I didn't even realize it until I ran it through the spell check... So! I was in band this morning, and there are a bunch of new kids in band who know NOTHING about anything. Today our director had to stop to teach one of the percussionists how to play the tambourine. SERIOUSLY, NEW KIDS?

I made a cover for this story! *points up excitedly* Look at it! Look at it! Isn't it pretty? It got kind of cut off on the sides, but that's okay.

*cries* Did you guys, like, drop off the face of the earth or something? There was one review last chapter. SO A HUGE THANK YOU TO SUNNY FOR BEING THE ONLY REVIEWER! I would give you cookies, but since I'm kind of a nerd you get pie instead. (Ahh... get it... pi? Hahahahahaha I crack myself up XD)


Jordan Harton walked into school on Tuesday morning, whistling a song he'd heard on the radio as he did so. He'd recently figured out how to whistle, and he was rather proud of his new achievement. Josh, one of the guys who had been mean to his new friend Percy, gave him a nasty glare, to which Jordan responded with a bright smile. Jordan knew Josh was just mad because he'd been outsmarted.

Speaking of Percy… where was that guy? Jordan hung up his backpack and sat down at his desk, practicing the cursive N, which he found incredibly easy, telling himself that Percy would show up later. Maybe he slept in.

But the morning passed quickly, and by lunch time Percy still hadn't shown himself. Okay, Jordan reasoned, so he was sick. That can't be helped. That day he ate lunch with some of his other friends, and for some reason he felt guilty about it. That was dumb, though. He wasn't betraying Percy by not eating lunch with him. If anything, Percy was betraying him, right? By not being there and all? Yeah, when Percy got back, Jordan would give him a hard time about it, but then everything would be cool by lunch. That was how their friendship worked.

So why did he still feel like something was wrong?


Percy didn't come to school the next day, either. Jordan made a mental note to call Percy later, and find out why his friend was missing so much school, but then he realized he didn't have Percy's phone number - Percy only had his. So unless Percy decided to call him, Jordan would have to stay in the dark.


When it had been a week, and Percy Jackson hadn't been to school once, Jordan started to worry. He'd never admit it, but he was a little hurt, too. He had thought that Percy would have gotten a hold of him by now. Their friendship was real, wasn't it? He didn't think Percy seemed like the type to take advantage or someone like that.

So he asked the teacher before school. What had happened to Percy?

She had looked at him strangely and said, "Jordan, there is no student in this class named Percy Jackson. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there's no one named Percy Jackson in this entire school."

It was like a scary movie that he wasn't supposed to watch but he did anyway when he snuck into his brother's room and searched through his DVDs. One of the scary movies where the main character knows someone really well, and then they disappear and later they find out they were friends with the spirit of a dead person or something.

For a while he went around like he was in a permanent daze. He'd turn around to say something to Percy, only to remember that he wasn't there. It was frustrating, like the answers were right there in front of him, but he was too stupid to see them for what they were.

Slowly, gradually, he realized that Percy was not coming back. Percy was gone. Why that was; Jordan didn't know. But he was gone. So Jordan made other friends, played with other kids, and did his best to shove Percy to the back of his mind.


By the time Jordan hit eighth grade, he had almost managed to forget the guy he'd been friends with for a week before he disappeared. Jordan Harton was athletic, popular, and sort of smart, as a plus. Also, he'd finally grown into his looks, and he noticed that Danielle Ericson had been actually paying attention to him for once.

Then the kid with horns came to his school.

Yeah. Horns.

His name was Will Evergreen, and he was a short, kind of chubby kid who was always limping around everywhere. He usually sat in the back of the room in class, never really raising his hand to answer questions, and he always wore a faded blue baseball cap over long curly hair. He was a weird one, to be sure. Jordan never paid attention to him, until the day he had to work with him on a science project.

"So, um… we're supposed to make this plant grow," Jordan said awkwardly, once they had received their Styrofoam cups filled with dirt.

"Yeah," Will said quietly, like he wasn't really paying attention to what Jordan was saying.

"Hey!" Jordan snapped his fingers in front of Will's face. "Keep your head in the game, bro! I have to get an A on this," he admitted, "or else I have to quit football because my of my GPA dropping too low." He didn't know why he just volunteered that information. He was honestly pretty ashamed of it. But it was the truth, and this project was basically life-or-death for him.

Will nodded and started taking notes on how much sunlight the plant was getting, how much they watered it; his baseball cap covering his eyes.

Jordan just shook his head in slight confusion. Yeah, Will was a weird one.


Jordan and Will ended up getting a perfect score on the project. They also had the healthiest plant of the lot, which was nothing short of a miracle, in Jordan's opinion. He was sure he'd blown it when he'd been talking to Danielle Ericson and accidentally moved his elbow so it smashed the plant's stalk in two, but to his surprise, the next morning he'd found it just like it had never been crushed.

Will was also a flawless record keeper. A few times, Jordan had asked if he wanted to take a break from recording for a while, but each time Will had insisted on keeping his task. So in all honesty, it was thanks to Will that he had that A.

"Thanks, man," Jordan had said to Will when they had received their grades. "I really owe you."

So that was how Jordan found himself in a tough situation one Friday afternoon at the beginning of November. He was hanging out with a few of the other guys on the football team before practice. They were at the vending machines getting Dr Peppers, when one of them, a guy named Dylan said in an undertone, "Hey, guys. There's that Underwood kid. He's always skulking around the gym after school. Wanna go talk to him?"

Jordan had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach that he couldn't really describe. He was starting to wish he hadn't pigged out on Cool Ranch Doritos beforehand, but he still followed the other guys over to where Will was sitting on top of the folded-up bleachers, scribbling something into his History notebook. He anxiously jerked up and slammed the notebook shut when Dylan, Jordan, and the three other guys came up right in front of him.

"H-hey guys," Will said with a slight stutter. Jordan had noticed that in Will; he was normally quiet and cool, but when he was agitated he'd start to stutter a little, and he'd occasionally twitch, too.

"H-hey guys," Dylan mimicked in falsetto, making Will blush and Jordan shift uncomfortably on his feet. He was starting to clue in to where this might be going.

"What do y-you want?" Will asked, shoving his hands in his pockets and trying to stay cool.

"I dunno," Dylan replied with a casual shrug, then his eyes lit up with fake excitement. "Oh, I know! I've left something in the bathroom, could you help me go get it?"

"Why can't you get it yourself?" Evan, one of the football guys, asked, frowning. Evan had the mind of a gorilla. He kind of had the build of one, too.

"I want Will to help me!" Dylan said. Jordan wanted to roll his eyes. Even he knew what Dylan was going to do, and he wasn't one of the guys who was always involved in that kind of stuff! He silently willed Will - pun absolutely intended - to run, just run. Run far away.

"I think I'll pass," Will mumbled, hopping off the bleachers and starting to back away.

Dylan grabbed Will's arm and twisted it at an angle that looked painful. Jordan was squinting a little, fighting the urge to look away. Dylan said through gritted teeth, "C'mon."

Will submitted this time and followed Dylan to the bathroom. The football guys came too; Jordan didn't want to be there, but it was as if he was in a trance, with no other choice but to go along with them.

Once in the bathroom, Dylan knocked off Will's blue baseball cap and grabbed a fistful of curly, unkempt hair. He roughly shoved Will's head downward, right into the bowl. And he flushed.

Jordan wanted to be sick. He knew this wasn't a very cool thing to do, especially when this guy saved him from getting kicked off the football team, but he couldn't bring himself to do anything. After all, he was only a fourteen-year-old guy. What could he do? Dylan, Evan and the others were two years older and considerably stronger. This wasn't third grade anymore, where he could just pull a nasty prank on them to get them to quit bugging people. The toilet flushed again. The other idiots' laughing seemed to echo in the small space.

Another flush-

"Guys! Come on," Jordan found himself saying. When the others looked at him weirdly, he said, "I mean, look at him. He's obviously learned his lesson." He motioned at Will, who still hadn't taken his head out of the bowl.

"You look awfully pale," Dylan remarked, slapping Jordan on the back. "Don't worry, we'll toughen you up. We better get to practice, coach'll be mad if we're late."

"I'll stay back, actually," Jordan said, adding hastily, "I need to empty my tank real quick."

"You better make it real quick," Dylan said, shaking his head. The guys left the bathroom, leaving just Jordan and Will. Jordan shot a glance at Will, who still had his head in the toilet.

"Dude, they're gone, you can take your head out of there," Jordan said quietly.

"Can I?" Will asked in his usual soft voice, but this time there was an undertone of sarcasm. It stung just a bit.

"Yeah. Besides, I didn't want them to do that to you anyway."

"Sure did a great job of showing it," Will replied. Jordan winced. That hit a little too close to home. He stomped over to Will and grabbed his shoulder, yanking him up. What he saw made his heart miss a couple beats. Will's normally bushy and unruly curls were now flattened down around his head, revealing a pair of small horns. Horns. They looked like goat horns. Goat horns, on a human boy. But was he really human?

Jordan stumbled back a few steps, unable to take his eyes off the horns. He could only sputter out a few unintelligible sounds before turning around and running away, leaving Will the horned boy standing in the bathroom, sopping wet.


The next day Will wasn't at school, and Jordan had a horrible case of Deja Vu, only this time instead of feeling worry, he only felt guilt. A tight knot of guilt eating away at his stomach.

Asking around, he found out that no one knew where Will went. In fact, no one had even heard of a quiet boy named Will Evergreen.

Jordan had a horrible feeling that whatever had happened to Will was the same thing that had happened to Percy five years ago.


One summer, when Jordan was fifteen years old, he had been laying on the couch watching TV. He'd switched the channels when the commercials came on, and happened to come across a news channel. The anchor had been blabbing on and on about a freak storm that was making its way across the country, and when they cut away to the live footage, Jordan had to do a double take. He could have sworn that in the middle of the storm was a huge person - a giant, you might say. He had blinked a few times, and every time it had looked just as clear as it did before.

Jordan managed to shrug that one off without too much thought, although from then on whenever someone told him there was going to be a storm, he had to wonder if there were any giants involved.


Even the most traumatic experiences can be dulled by time, which was the case with Jordan Harton and the Goat Boy. Jordan was in his sophomore year of college, and he was going for a degree in mechanics. He'd found out that he had a knack for that kind of thing when he started helping out in his dad's mechanic shop when he was sixteen.

He'd dated Danielle Ericson for a while at the end of junior year and most of senior year, but once they'd both graduated they agreed to go their separate ways, and surprisingly, that didn't bug Jordan too much. Yeah, she was pretty, and they were good friends, but he just couldn't see them going anywhere in the future. He didn't have any girlfriends after that, deciding he should survive school before worrying about that kind of thing.

Jordan also worked part-time in an Arby's. It was kind of a bummer job, yeah, but it was good enough. For now.

It was November. He had turned twenty a couple days ago, and was completely exhausted between school and work, so when he was working the counter at Arby's, of course he thought he was imagining things when he saw a guy with horns walk through the door.

The last time he'd seen a guy with horns was in eighth grade, and it hadn't exactly been a great situation. So, the logical side of his brain told him, he was tired, and his brain was trying to pull a fast one on him.

The horned guy looked to be a little older than he was, and he wasn't alone. There were two other people with him. One was a pretty girl with blonde hair and startling grey eyes that Jordan found himself unable to look into, and the other was a tall guy with dark windswept hair and green eyes that had an air of humor and light-heartedness about them.

When the strange trio came up to the counter, Jordan asked them what they wanted to order, although he felt a little nervous about speaking to them for reasons that were way beyond him. Maybe it was the fact that he was hallucinating goat horns on a perfectly ordinary person's head. Eye contact was important, though, a fact that he'd been taught many times. It made you seem more professional or something.

They each asked for a regular roast beef and cheddar sandwich, and after taking their orders, Jordan blurted out, "Um, your name isn't Will, by any chance, is it?" He could have smacked himself into next Wednesday after saying that.

"No, my name isn't Will," the dark-haired guy said, looking confused.

"Mine isn't, either," the horned guy said.

"Do you really think I look like a Will?" the girl asked, rolling her eyes.

"I was talking to him, actually," Jordan said, leaning casually on the edge of the counter and pointing to the horned guy. "He just looked like a guy I used to know in junior high…" Jordan involuntarily took a short gasp of breath. If he was going to go for it, he might as well lay all his cards out on the table now. ". . .You know, with the horns and all."

You know the expression "It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop"? Well, that was how it felt at the moment.

"Have you ever heard of Camp Half-Blood?" the dark-haired guy asked.

"Percy!" the girl said, hitting him lightly on the arm, then turning to Jordan. "What he means to say is we'd like to talk to you later. When do you get off?"

Jordan quickly glanced at the clock. "Um, 4:30. So, in a couple hours."

"We'll be at the Starbucks across the street," the girl said decisively. Then she practically dragged the two guys out of the restaurant. Jordan didn't realize until later that they'd never gotten their sandwiches and curly fries.

For obvious reasons, Jordan couldn't concentrate for the rest of his shift. He was almost always glancing at the clock, and he'd screwed up a few orders, which was extremely cringe-worthy.

Jordan was sure they wouldn't be at the Starbucks, but he decided to stop by anyway, just out of curiosity. And sure enough, there they were, sitting in the corner booth and playing paper football with a folded-up napkin. Jordan cautiously approached them, and was greeted with a smile from the dark-haired guy.

"Hey, have a seat. There are a few things we're going to talk about, but first, what's your name?"

"Percy!" the girl said. She looked embarrassed. "Can you have just a little tact?"

"Sorry," the guy - Percy - apologized.

"It's cool," Jordan said. "You know, I used to know a guy named Percy." He didn't talk about the part where he'd mysteriously disappeared and everyone didn't know he ever existed.

"It's short for Perseus, actually," Percy said, making a face. "It's a gross name, I know." Then he quickly added, Don't tell my mom I said that."

"Well, I'm Jordan. Jordan Harton. I-" he trailed off at the look on Percy's face. "Sorry?"

"Your name is Jordan Harton, and you used to know a guy named Percy?" Percy asked, looking panic-stricken. "His last name, it wasn't Jackson, was it?"

Now it was Jordan's turn to have a little mini cardiac arrest. "P-Percy Jackson?" he managed to spit out.

Percy broke into a wide grin. "Jordan! Wow, it's been forever! Do you still remember third grade?"

"How could I forget?" Jordan replied, and he was almost mortified to say that his eyes were blurring with tears just a little.

"When we spent three hours putting toothpaste in Oreos so we could give them to the bullies?"

Jordan nodded. "And I got your ugly hat back for you. Man, that was an ugly hat."

"This is my girlfriend, Annabeth," Percy suddenly said, like he just remembered the others were there. "And my friend Grover. He's got horns because he's a satyr. Not many people can see them, because of this thing called the Mist, which you apparently can see through. It's pretty rare for a mortal. My mom can, and so can my friend Rachel, along with a few others. It's a gift… but it can also be a curse."

"Slow down," Annabeth mouthed.

"Well, yeah, I get that. I mean, I've seen some pretty crazy stuff," Jordan said. "But you call me a mortal - like you're not…"

"We might want to order another round of coffees," Percy decided. "We could be here for a while."


D'AWWWW SAPPY ENDING! Okay, so probably no more Jordan in this story. I'll be sad, because I really liked him. Anyway, his plot line has run its course, so in the next chapter we'll be back with nine year old Percy!