Andromeda Jackson

Percy

*I want to state that I do not own any of Rick's characters. The only one I own is my own original character, Andromeda Jackson. A lot of my work is taken from Rick's writing and modified to fit my story. *

~Four Years Ago~

My name is Percy Jackson.  

I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, my sister and I were boarding students at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. 

Are we troubled kids?

Yeah, you could say that. 

I could start at any point in our short miserable lives to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan. Twenty-eight mental-case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff. 

I know, it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were. 

But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so Andy and I had hopes. 

Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, sso he was the only teacher whose class didn't put us to sleep. 

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once we wouldn't get in trouble. 

Boy was I wrong. 

See, bad things happen to my sister and I on field trips. Like at our fifth-grade school, when we went to Saratoga battlefield, we had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. We weren't aiming for the school bus, but of course we got expelled anyway. And before that, at our fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, we sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that...Well, you get the idea. 

This trip, Andy and I made a pact to be good. 

All the way into the city, we put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded kleptomaniac girl who shared a dorm with Andy, hitting our best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter and ketchup sandwich. 

Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria. 

Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew Andy and I couldn't do anything back to her because we were already on probation. 

The headmaster had threatened us with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip.

"I'm gonna kill her," Andy mumbled. 

My twin sister, Andromeda Jackson, was my spitting image. She had the same black hair, sea-green eyes, and sarcastic sense of humor. She was a head shorter than me, seeing as we're not identical twins, but she made up for it in attitude. Our only difference was that she was more ADHD and less dyslexic than me. She could actually read (and she'd kill me if anyone knew, but she actually liked to read), which made her seem smarter than me (she was not), and she was constantly moving. Either playing with her long hair, or drumming her thighs, or tapping her feet. I'd get exhausted just watching her.