Chapter Twenty:
A New Summer Awaited Him.
— Hot and fast and angry as she
can be; I walk my days on a wire !
The day had started normally.
Or, well, as normal as you can get after having a nightmare about your best friend going wedding dress shopping the night, and then having to go to school. The previous year, Percy Jackson started his final four years at Goode High School. It was just another public school in New York, but after the incident with Mrs. Dodds, he genuinely never thought he'd be going back. But when he returned home the previous summer, his mother told him they'd received a letter, welcoming him for his sophomore year if he so wished. Apparently, someone had vouched for him. He had a sneaking suspicion it had been his mentor at his summer camp, but there wasn't a proper explanation as to who it'd been, so he left it alone. If he was being honest, he much preferred public school to those private institutions his mother had paid for when he was in middle school. Nobody was snooty and stuck up, everyone tended to be more understanding because they all had their own issues. ADHD and dyslexia were common, even if some kids didn't even know they had it just yet — lacking proper diagnoses.
He actually fit in.
Anyway, rewind to his first class of the day: English. The teacher decided since the year was slowly coming to close, they would do something a bit more ... fun. Their class was reading Lord of the Flies, where a bunch of kids got marooned on an island and went insane. As their final assignment, their teacher sent their class out into the courtyard to spend an hour with no adult supervision to see what would happen. What happened was utter chaos, all instigated by the school bully, Matt Sloan.
For a fifteen year old, Sloan wasn't big or strong at all, but he always acted like he was. He had the eyes of a pit bull, shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everyone to see how little he cared about his family's money. One of his front teeth was chipped from the time he'd taken his daddy's Porsche for a joyride and ran into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.
It was that same little shit that made the mistake of trying to tackle Tyson into the mosh pit he's somehow created.
Tyson was one of the many homeless kids that attended Goode High School. As near as Sally Jackson and Percy could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so ... different from an average kid. He was tall, six-foot-three, and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything — including his own reflection. His face was kind of misshapen and brutal-looking. Percy couldn't tell you what color Tyson's eyes were because he could never make himself look higher than Tyson's crooked teeth. Tyson's voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid — Percy guessed it was because he'd never gone to school before Goode High School. He wore tattered jeans, grimy size-twenty sneakers, and a blue plaid flannel shirt with holes in it. He smelled like a New York City alleyway because that was where he lived. In a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd street.
It was common for homeless students to attend public schools, which made it easy for Sally to enroll Tyson with Percy. Again, most high school students don't actually give a fuck about anyone else. The only person that really had a problem with Tyson was Matt Sloan, especially after discovering that — despite Tyson's bigger stature, massive strength, and scary looks — he was just a big softie. Matt Sloan after made himself feel better by picking on him.
Percy was pretty much Tyson's only friend, which meant he was Percy's only friend.
Sally had complained to the school a million times, asking if there was any assistance they could provide, but was denied. She'd gone as far as contacting social services, but nothing ever happened. The social workers claimed Tyson didn't exist. They swore up and down that they'd visited the alley Sally had described and couldn't find him. Though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box, Percy couldn't understand it anymore than his mom did.
