'•' The Lightning Thief '•'

22 :: I make a Choice

Published: September 11, 2021
Edited: July 20, 2022
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We were the first heroes to return alive to Half-Blood Hill since Luke, so of course everybody treated us as if we'd won some reality-TV contest.

According to camp tradition, we wore laurel wreaths to a big feast prepared in our honor, then led a procession down to the bonfire, where we got to burn the burial shrouds our cabins had made for us in our absence.

Annabeth's shroud was so beautiful-gray silk with embroidered owls-Percy told her it seemed a shame not to bury her in it. She punched him and told him to shut up.

Percy and I had no cabinmates besides eachother, so the Ares cabin had volunteered to make our shrouds. They'd taken old bedsheets and painted smiley faces with X'ed-out eyes around the border, and the word LOSER painted really big in the middle. It was fun to burn.

Eva had made me a shroud too, it was just a twin sized bed sheet with blue waves and crudely painted owls but I couldn't bring myself to burn it. Right in the middle was a painting of a little girl with gray eyes holding hands with a taller girl with green eyes with a big red heart around it. I might have cried a little but you didn't hear that from me.

As Apollo's cabin led the sing-along and passed out s'mores, I was surrounded by Percy's old Hermes cabinmates, Annabeth and my friends from Athena, and Grover's satyr buddies, who were admiring the brand-new searcher's license he'd received from the Council of Cloven Elders. The council had called Grover's performance on the quest:

"Brave to the point of indigestion. Horns-and-whiskers above anything we have seen in the past."

The only ones not in a party mood were Clarisse and her cabinmates, whose poisonous looks told me they'd never forgive me and my brother for disgracing their dad.

That was okay with me.

Even Dionysus's welcome-home speech wasn't enough to dampen my spirits. "Yes, yes, so the little brats didn't get themselves killed and now they'll have even bigger heads. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday...."

I moved back into cabin three, but it didn't feel so lonely anymore. I had my friends to train with during the day. At night, I lay awake and listened to the sea, knowing my father was out there. Maybe he wasn't quite sure about me yet, maybe he hadn't even wanted us born, but he was watching. And so far, he was proud of what we'd done.

As for my mother, she had a chance at a new life. Her letter arrived a week after we got back to camp. She told us Gabe had left mysteriously- disappeared off the face of the planet, in fact. She'd reported him missing to the police, but she had a funny feeling they would never find him.

On a completely unrelated subject, she'd sold her first life-size concrete sculpture, entitled The Poker Player, to a collector, through an art gallery in Soho. She'd gotten so much money for it, she'd put a deposit down on a new apartment and made a payment on her first semester's tuition at NYU. The Soho gallery was clamoring for more of her work, which they called "a huge step forward in super-ugly neorealism."

But don't worry, our mom wrote. I'm done with sculpture. I've disposed of that box of tools you left me. It's time for me to turn to writing.

At the bottom, she wrote a P.S.:

Percy, I've found a good private school here in the city. I've put a deposit down to hold two spots, in case either of you want to enroll for seventh grade. You could live at home. But if you want to go year-round at Half-Blood Hill, I'll understand.

On the Fourth of July, the whole camp gathered at the beach for a fireworks display by cabin nine. Being Hephaestus's kids, they weren't going to settle for a few lame red-white-and-blue explosions. They'd anchored a barge off-shore and loaded it with rockets the size of Patriot missiles. The blasts would be sequenced so tightly they'd look like frames of animation across the sky. The finale was supposed to be a couple of hundred-foot-tall Spartan warriors who would crackle to life above the ocean, fight a battle, then explode into a million colors.