The Sea // pjo

Chapter Two // Liar, Liar, Cannibals On Fire!

    Meriwether College Prep.

    What an...experience.

    It was a progressive school Percy, and I attended, meaning no structure, really, and all the teachers looked like fresh-outta-college people. They never graded us on anything. We didn't have desks, nothing.

    It wouldn't bother me, but the no-structure thing did.

    I didn't complain, though, because some days, my ADHD and dyslexia would get really bad, and I was overly thankful for the structureless day.

    But today was not that day.

    I was tired, and everything in me wanted to sit with someone and talk about a book or a movie but actually have something to talk about.

    And by book, I did not mean Lord of the Flies, which was what we were reading in English right now anyways.

    And anyways, the exam was...not an exam.

    It was really just a fun-bully fest for Matt Sloan, who was ironically the school bully.

    He looked like a pitbull with lousy fashion taste, long hair, and bad acne.

    And what made it worse, he had a crush on me.

    Or that's the vibe I got from him.

    I would always catch him watching me or glancing over to see if I saw him bully a sixth grader as if that would impress me.

    Idiot.

    And today, I almost killed that idiot.

    He was having a grand old time giving seventh-graders wedgies when he tried to do it to Tyson.

    Tyson, the only homeless kid at the school, was the Meriwether Prep's community service project. Like, apparently, he lived inside of a refrigerator box in an alley before the school "adopted" him.

    And as someone who has run away a handful of times and slept in alleys like that, I understood. More on this later.

    He was one of the tallest kids I have ever seen for our grade, standing at an incredible six-foot-three. He was broadly built, looking like a quarterback, but he talked in a deep voice with the speech of a kid much younger than us.

    He should have been frightening, but Tyson is the definition of a teddy-bear, cinnamon-roll person.

    He was just a big ol' softy.

    This was one of the things that drew me to him, then this led me to introduce him and Percy, and we became los tres amigos.

    And three of the targets for the bullying when the kids got bored of bullying the younger students.

    I just ignored them and chased them away with glares and sometimes small threats, but I never got into a fight.

    I did not need to get in trouble with another school.

    And anyways, Tyson just seemed to glue himself to Percy, and I's sides whenever we were with him.

    Meanwhile, Mrs. Jackson was fighting with the school and social services, trying to get the big guy some more help, even if they claimed he wasn't real.

    How do you miss a wall of muscle like Tyson?

    But back to Sloan being an idiot...