The Twins Of Poseidon

Finding My Home

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 (Percy told me about them and they seem fun).

Going along with 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. They are so cute together. 

Being the kids of Poseidon, Percy and I didn't have any cabin mates, so the Ares cabin had volunteered to make Percy's shroud while the Apollo cabin made mine. For Percy's they'd taken an old bedsheet and painted smiley faces with X'ed-out eyes around the border, and the word LOSER painted really big in the middle. Percy had fun burning it. While mine was a baby blue fabric, though I didn't exactly know which fabric, and it had shells sewn around it. I could tell the Apollo cabin put a lot of work into it and it was actually kind of sad to burn. 

As Apollo's cabin led the sing-along and passed out s'mores, Percy and I were surrounded by his old Hermes cabinmates, Annabeth's 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 or Percy for disgracing their dad. I was fine with that. 

Then there was dionysus's speech, which was actually kinder than I though it would be. "Yes, yes, so the little twin brats didn't get themselves killed and now they'll both have even bigger heads. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday...." 

Percy and I moved back into cabin three, but it didn't feel as lonely for me as when Percy had got claimed. We had our friends to train with during the day. At night, we both laid awake together and listened to the sea, knowing Poseidon was out there. Maybe he wasn't quite sure about either of us 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 our 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 both 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 you and Alex a spot, 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 like Alex has been doing for a while, I'll understand. 

Percy folded the note carefully and set it on his bedside table. Every night before either of us went to sleep, we read it again, and we tried to decide how to answer her. Well, Percy didn't know but, I already knew what I wanted to do. 

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 offshore and loaded it with rockets the size of Patriot missiles. Since I'd seen the show many times before, Annabeth and I told Percy how the blasts would be sequenced so tightly they'd look like frames of animation across the sky. The finale was 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.