❦UNEXPECTED | PJO X M!OC

ACT I-1.5

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🐟Goldfish Meets Leopard🐆

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PERCY

IT has been an hour since I had woken from my two day nap. In my lap was the shoe box Grover gave me, it took me a while but I remembered most of the night.

Flashes of memories played in my mind, from the car exploding, Patroclus appearing out of nowhere to save us —buying us time while he fought the Minotaur. Then him getting smacked into a tree, my mother ran to check him but ended up getting killed by the bull freak. After witnessing my mother's death....pen-sword? In hand and I fought...chopped a horn off and here I am....

I stared across the meadow. There were groves of trees, a winding stream, acres of strawberries spread out under the blue sky. The valley was surrounded by rolling hills, and the tallest one, directly in front of us, was the one with the huge pine tree on top. Even that looked beautiful in the sunlight.

My mom was gone. The whole world should be black and cold. Nothing should look beautiful.

"I'm sorry," Grover sniffled. "I'm a failure. I'm—I'm the worst satyr in the world."

He moaned, stomping his foot so hard it came off. I mean, the Converse hi-top came off. The inside was filled with Styrofoam, except for a hoof-shaped hole.

"Oh, Styx!" he mumbled.

As he struggled to get his hoof back in the fake foot, I thought, Well, that settles it.

Grover was a satyr. I was ready to bet that if I shaved his curly brown hair, I'd find tiny horns on his head. But I was too miserable to care that satyrs existed, or even minotaurs. All that meant was my mom really had been squeezed into nothingness, dissolved into yellow light while Patroclus is around here injured or unconscious.

Grover was still sniffling. The poor kid—poor goat, satyr, whatever—looked as if he expected to be hit.

I said, "It wasn't your fault neither is it Patroclus's....if it weren't for the two of you...I might have died way earlier."

"Yes, it was. I was supposed to protect you."

"Did my mom ask you to protect me?"

"No. But that's my job. I'm a keeper. At least... I was."

"But why ..." I suddenly felt dizzy, my vision swimming.

"Don't strain yourself," Grover said. "Here." He helped me hold my glass and put the straw to my lips.

I recoiled at the taste, because I was expecting apple juice. It wasn't that at all. It was chocolate-chip cookies. Liquid cookies. And not just any cookies—the taste was in between my mom's homemade blue chocolate-chip cookies and Patroclus's blue chocolate chip bites, buttery and hot, with the chips still melting, the outside crunchy while still chewy inside.

Drinking it, my whole body felt warm and good, full of energy. My grief didn't go away, but I felt as if my mom had just brushed her hand against my cheek, given me a cookie the way she used to when I was small, and told me everything was going to be okay. Then a fluttering feeling in my stomach, like the times Patroclus would praise me and place a hand on my head when I finally got an equation right.