Sun kissed - Apollo.

32: We play dodgeball with cannibals.

Our day started normal. Or as normal as it ever gets at Meriwether College Prep.

See, it's this "progressive" school in downtown Manhattan, which means we sit on beanbag chairs instead of at desks, and we don't get grades, and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert T-shirts to work.

That's all cool with me. I mean, I'm ADHD and dyslexic, like most half-bloods, so I'd never done that great in regular schools even before they kicked me and my brother out, i had fine grades but never any special. The only bad thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side of things, and the kids weren't always . . . well, bright.

But i liked the school a lot, they had never made a fuss about Styx. From the first day he had come with me, they had shrugged it off and said something about, "oh you have a service dog, that's cute." And never bothered again. Styx was always well behaved and just slept with one eye open next to me on the beanbag.

However, back to the topic. Take my first class today: English. The whole middle school had read this book called Lord of the Flies, where all these kids get marooned on an island and go psycho. So for our final exam, our teachers sent us into the break yard to spend an hour with no adult supervision to see what would happen. What happened was a massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth graders, two pebble fights, and a full-tackle basketball game. The school bully, Matt Sloan, led most of those activities.

I had stayed out of it and sat on one of the school tables with Styx beside me and read a book. I had gotten a book from my stepmother, Grimm's fairytales so i was content.

The school bully, Sloan wasn't big or strong, but he acted like was he. He had eyes like a pit bull, and shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everybody 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 run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.

Which was a high in stupidity. If you ask me and i had only asked if he was okay when he got back to school. He always seemed to want to chat with me and include me with his friends and stuff.

Anyway, Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he made the mistake of trying it on my friend Tyson.

Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriwether College Prep. As near as my mom and I could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so . . . different, i mean, it's not every day your friend has just one eye. He was 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. I know that his eye is brown but my brother couldn't tell you what color his eyes were, because he could never make himself look higher than his crooked teeth. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid—I guess because he'd never gone to school before coming to Meriwether. He wore tattered jeans, grimy size-twenty sneakers, and a plaid flannel shirt with holes in it. He smelled like a New York City alleyway, because that's where he lived, in a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd Street.

I felt bad for him and sometimes he enjoyed it when i would read him a book. Sometimes it was books for young kids or like fairytales. Styx is very fond of him and Tyson likes to throw sticks through the school yard for styx to catch.

Meriwether Prep had adopted him as a community service project so all the students could feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, most of them couldn't stand Tyson. Once they discovered he was a big softie, despite his massive strength and his scary looks, they made themselves feel good by picking on him. Percy and i were pretty much his only friends, which meant he was Percy's only friend.