I became possibly one of the last people on earth to hear of the concept of a 'shovel talk' ("be nice to x or else..") recently and then I wrote this. It is dumb but hopefully in a good sort of way.
Paul knew long before their first date that Sally had a son. She mentioned him fondly in one of their writing seminars, and when they'd met up a couple of times for coffee she told him a little more.
The boy's name was Percy, whose father Sally met almost a decade and a half ago, before he vanished into the ether. He had a heart of gold, was whip-smart but not particularly academic due to his ADHD and dyslexia, spent most of his summers at a camp in Long Island, and…
"My husband wasn't a nice man, Paul," she warned him. "And Percy…"
It clicked all too soon. Most of Paul's pupils were pretty fortunate with their parents, but they couldn't all be model families. "He might not be pleased to see me… with you?" he asked.
She took his hand. "He knows you exist, and he knows you make me happy, and on the whole that's good enough, but try not to take it personally if he's a little wary around you at first."
Paul didn't think it was such a big deal. His entire job was trying to make kids feel at ease around him so that he could communicate properly with them, and even in the short time he'd known her he was sure a boy with Sally Jackson as his mother couldn't have turned out all that badly. He resisted the temptation to make a joke out of it, though, knowing that this was serious for her, and nodded. "I can do that."
"Just be as gentle as you can," she said, and he squeezed her hands in understanding.
"He'll barely know I'm here," he promised.
Percy walked into the flat and looked straight at Paul, the one thing different from the last time he was there. It's not a nice look, and there's no small part of Paul's animal brain telling him that he should be running for cover right about now.
"Hi," said Paul, offering a hand to shake and trying to form an impression of the boy beyond the possibly-a-little-biased offerings he'd got from Sally and the strangely strong impulse to go and hide in a corner.
Percy hesitated before taking it, like he was trying to come up with an excuse not to shake the hand. In some ways he reminded Paul of the outcasts that he taught, the children who sat alone, slouching in on themselves and avoiding eye contact. Weirdly, though, from Percy it seemed a little too careful, a little too confident for Paul's liking, like he was doing it deliberately. It didn't make sense, particularly.
But Percy shook the hand, and for all that Paul tried not to be the kind of person who judges others based on their handshakes he still noticed that the boy had a strong, firm grip. "Nice to meet you," said Percy quietly.
"And you," said Paul. "Nice to finally meet the infamous Percy Jackson."
"Huh," said Percy. "Infamous." He glanced at Sally, who had a slight smile playing on her lips. "So you've been told how many schools I got kicked out of?"
"Percy, there's a stack of dishes in the sink that need doing if you wouldn't mind?" asked Sally. The boy smirked and headed to the kitchen before Paul could ask what the comment about expulsion meant. "He doesn't mean anything by it," she told Paul, which wasn't quite the same as it being a joke.
Percy emerged from the kitchen a minute later, before he could possibly have had time to do the dishes, but Sally seemed unconcerned, and Paul figured it wasn't really his place to chase the kid about his chores. The three of them sat on the couch and chatted with game shows on TV. Paul asked Percy about school, about his favourite subjects, about how he found English with his dyslexia, and got uniformly guarded answers that were, presumably, honest, but didn't invite further discussion, didn't offer any more than was asked of him. The boy wasn't rude – he was even pretty charming about it – but Paul didn't really feel like he was getting to know him any better, until suddenly he was diverted by the host of the quiz on TV: "You get three bonus questions on brutalist architecture."
Paul wouldn't have been able to say afterwards what the questions actually were, as Percy interrupted to provide all three answers without letting the host finish (Goldfinger, 1950, and Ralph Rapson respectively) before settling back into the sofa – "Sorry," the boy said. "I wanted to see if I'd know those."
"You're keen on architecture then?" asked Paul. "Or just brutalism?"
Percy gave a slightly embarassed grin. "I don't really care about either of them," he said. "But I know someone who is."
"And they've rubbed off on you at least a little," Paul fills in. "School friend?"
"No," says Percy, "she goes to my summer camp. She's going to be an architect."
Paul thought briefly about reasons why a teenage boy might spend long enough listening to a teenage girl talk about architecture to learn about Ralph Rapson, and reached a conclusion of his own about Percy's relationship with his 'friend' from his summer camp.
"Going to be?" he asked, rather than poke into Percy's love life. This was as animated and open as Paul had seen the boy, and he didn't want to make him clam up again by being nosey. "That's a long way to have planned into the future."
"Yeah," said Percy, "she's a planner. Her plans tend to work, too, so I wouldn't bet against her making it."
"How about you? Any big plans for the future?"
"Not really," said Percy. The boy was silent for a long time after that and Paul wasn't expecting him to expand on that answer, when he said "I'm just going to try to make it to sixteen, and see what happens."
Paul lets the TV host finish asking about first pages of famous novels before asking "Why sixteen?"
"I… have a hard time imagining what might come after that," said Percy.
"You're not planning to stay in school until eighteen?" asked Paul.
"I'd like to," says Percy too quickly. "But… I can't see the future, you know? There's a lot that can happen between now and then."
"What might you do if you don't stay in school?" asked Paul. He was fairly sure that for most fourteen year-olds who wanted to stay in school, the margin of error did not include the possibility that they might not be able to – so sue him if the question was designed, just a little, to make Percy explain himself.
There was another hesitation, and then that part of Paul's brain that had made him uncomfortable when Percy first arrived – scared of a teenager, Blofis? another part of his mind interjected unhelpfully – kicked into overdrive again, like the question was about to start a fight. Then Percy laughed uneasily. "I hadn't really thought about it that hard, you know? It's a long time off."
"It's partly a matter of being in a school that can accommodate ADHD and dyslexic students, too," said Sally gently. Paul was fairly sure that this was a defence for Percy against his uncomfortable questions.
The boy shared a look with his mother that Paul couldn't decipher, but he seemed to get some kind of message in it from her. "Yeah," he said. "Something like that."
It felt like a deliberate end to the conversation, and Paul settled back to watch the rest of the quiz show, as one set of four nerdy Britons narrowly triumphed over another. Then Percy got up five minutes before the end, and only came back as the credits were rolling. "Hey, Mom, something's come up. I need to head out for a while."
At half-eight in the evening? Paul wanted to ask. What reason does a teenage boy have to be heading out at this time? Sally, though, seemed totally unfazed as she stood promptly. "Anything serious?" she asked.
Percy shook his head. "No," he said, "just something Annabeth wants a hand dealing with."
"I'll put a bag together for you."
"Mom, I don't need-"
"You never know when you'll need supplies, it's just a precaution."
Percy gave in quickly. "Sure. Thank you," he said as Sally disappeared round the corner.
Paul tried to piece together what was going on, and came up empty-handed. "Any idea how long you'll be?" he asked.
Percy shrugged. "Could be an hour or two, so you'll probably be gone by the time I'm back." It felt like there was an unspoken you'd better be in there, though Paul supposed he could have been imagining it. "Listen…" said Percy, glancing towards the door Sally had gone through. "Paul, you seem like a cool guy," he started.
"Is this where you tell me to treat your mother right, or else?" Paul asked. He'd aimed for light-hearted but was pretty sure he'd accidentally landed in patronising.
"So Mom told you about my stepdad?"
"A little. She mentioned that… he isn't particularly worth missing," Paul said, choosing his words carefully.
Percy visibly chewed on the inside of his cheek. "Yeah, well. Treat my mother right, or else."
He didn't quite speak lightly enough to convince Paul that he was joking, and the older man found himself squirming a little in his seat. The concept of a shovel talk delivered by a teenage son seemed pretty unusual to Paul, truth be told, and he'd never have imagined that one could make him this uncomfortable, even though he'd been half-expecting Percy to make a point like this sooner rather than later. "Sure," he said, as evenly as he could.
"My Mom deserves the world," elaborated Percy. "But what she got was me and Gabe. So it's pretty important to me that she never has to deal with something like that again, whether I'm here or not. He said it like a doctor had given him weeks to live, an idea that almost made sense to Paul – it would explain some of the uneasiness, the uncertainty about the future, and would reasonably be something Percy wouldn't want to go into with someone he didn't know well. In reality, though, Paul knew that this was probably just some average jitters over someone new potentially joining the family. Remarrying is complicated at the best of times, and messier still when there are offspring and awkward ex-partners kicking around.
"I don't have any evil schemes regarding your mother, Percy," he said, aiming for light-hearted again and getting it a little more accurately this time, "so hopefully you won't have to figure out what the 'or else' would be."
Percy's eyes dropped down, a little embarrassed. "That's good," he said. Then his eyes flicked back up. There's an enigmatic gleam in them, half friendly, half unfriendly, half like he's joking and half like he's confiding a secret. "But I've already thought the 'or else' through, and they'd never find the body," he said.
Paul swallowed. "Ha," he said, as Sally came back in and handed her son a backpack.
"See you around, Paul," said Percy. "Nice meeting you."
A few months later, Paul was beginning to feel like he was becoming a more-or-less permanent part of the Jackson's lives, or at least part of the furniture of their apartment. There was a lot that still struck him as a little strange about them, about Percy especially, but he liked them both, he knew that Sally liked him, and though the dynamic with Percy was odd, to say the least, he thought that he at least approved of Paul in general.
With Percy at camp, Paul was staying with Sally for the weekend, and was walking back from a last-minute dash to the grocery store to make sure they had food in the morning when he spotted two figures in a yard across the road, at least one of whom looked familiar. He squinted at the teenager, her blonde hair shining in the street lights. Yes, that was definitely – whatshername – Annabeth, Percy's friend, from camp. Paul had met her briefly, or more accurately just crossed paths, when she'd turned up unannounced for lunch a few weeks ago, and Percy had pictures of the two of them, often with another boy in a rasta cap or other friends from the camp, tacked up in various spots around the apartment. She and Percy had seemed to communicate in a silent language of their own, and gone around together as if attached at the hip, though no-one had ever uttered a word like 'girlfriend,' to satisfy Paul's inquisitiveness.
There was another figure with her now, a boy a few years younger dressed all in black, and holding a shovel, who he didn't recognise. It looked a little to him like they were digging a hole in a small, muddy yard in the middle of the night in the middle of New York, which was definitely not normal, and probably not legal, but Paul wasn't about to go out of his way to poke his nose into the business of his girlfriend's shifty son's even shiftier friends, so he was going to carry on and pretend that he hadn't seen anything, when Annabeth turned and caught his gaze.
Ah, yes. He'd forgotten that she had eyes which were a startling grey, like the last sight of an avalance victim.
"Mr Blofis!" she said, waving slightly.
"Seriously, Annabeth?" hissed the boy next to her. Paul knew he hand't really been supposed to hear it, but he couldn't help but agree.
"How are you?" she asked politely. Something about her manner made Paul feel like a frog on the dissection table. Though he knew she was roughly Percy's age, she came across more like an adult than a child.
"I'm well, thank you," he replied. And then, because she'd engaged him first, and it was only human to be curious, and he was cursed with the lack of a self-preservation instinct: "What are you kids up to?"
Annabeth's polite smile didn't move an inch. "We were just finding a spot to eat dinner in." The pale boy in black grimaced and raised a Happy Meal bag for Paul to see.
Paul looked at the shovel in the boy's other hand and at the freshly dug hole they were both standing in front of, and decided that it had been a long enough day as it was, and both of these things were invisible to him. "I see," he said. "Well, enjoy your food. I'd best be off."
"Just, before you go, Mr Blofis," said Annabeth. "You know, Percy's one of my best friends."
Uh oh. This was the kind of opening statement made with a conclusion already in mind, and Paul didn't particularly want to hang around to hear it.
"And his Mom's pretty much the best person I know."
"I'd agree with that," said Paul carefully.
"Obviously, they can look after themselves," said Annabeth. She considered this statement for a moment. "Well, Sally can," she amended fondly.
That's why I've been looking at engagement rings, he thought, but that was a secret he wasn't about to share with a teenage girl he'd met all of twice.
"But most of the time, they don't need to."
"That's good," he said. Hadn't he just said that? He wasn't sure.
"Yep," she said. "There are plenty of people watching out for the Jacksons."
From what Paul had seen, Sally lived a relatively solitary life – she'd told him that the writing seminar had been one of the first steps she'd taken back into the world after her husband left, and though she'd joined one or two other hobby groups, she hadn't yet made close friends in them. Her son, similarly – a loner at school, from what he could tell, and seemed to do most of his socialising at his summer camp, which couldn't have given him that wide a range of friends and acquaintances. He got the impression that pointing this out would not be welcome.
"I guess I don't need to say that I'm one of them," she said. Her eyes had been boring directly into Paul's own for the whole duration of their conversation, cold enough to freeze him on the spot. Shadows seemed to gather around her, and for a moment Paul would have sworn that he could see figures in the shadows in the corners of the yard.
"Annabeth," hissed the boy behind her, whom Paul had completely forgotten was there. "They're coming."
She drew a knife from her belt, and Paul stopped breathing. "Long story short," she said. "I was going to say this when I first met you, but there wasn't a moment when it would be polite. If you hurt Percy, you're dead. If you hurt Sally, you're dead. The only reason why I might not kill you is because there'll be a line. Is that clear?"
"Er," said Paul.
Her eyebrows rose like a guillotine.
"Very clear," he said.
She gave a nice polite smile that reminded him a little of his nicest, brightest pupils, the sort who would track him down at lunchtimes to ask thoughtful questions about set texts. The effect was only ruined a little by the bizarre setting. "Great," she said. "Have a nice night, Mr Blofis."
She turned away and Paul remembered to breathe again. "Goodnight," he said faintly. He looked at the yard. The boy with Annabeth jerked his head in a get out of here motion, and Paul took the hint, because he might not have understood most of what just passed, but he understood perfectly well that sticking around wasn't the wise thing. He turned robotically, and walked on.
"Nico, are you sure that one of these is Thomas Paine?" he heard her saying.
Paul has found in the course of his life, and particularly his relationship with Sally, that some things are best left unquestioned.
For slightly different reasons from normal, he's happy to consider this one of them.
I am not clear on the Paul/Sally timeline but I think I got away with it by being vague and stuff here. Anyway I had fun so who's the real winner, hmm? HMMM?