Halie Jackson and the Race to Camp

I Get Blown Into a Fishpond

I Get Blown Into A Fishpond

It was early in May, and I sat at the table outside of our house, next to our fishpond. It was a bright, cheerful day - not a cloud in the sky, about 70 degrees, and all the flowers were blooming. I never could have known how today would end up.
My name is Halie Jackson. I am 11 and a half years old, and I live with my two wonderful parents, Perseus and Annabeth Jackson. Or at least I did, until a few weeks ago.
Anyways, where was I? Oh, right: perfect day. Sitting next to fishpond. Lots of ominous foreshadowing. So, as I was saying, as I relaxed in the sun, my mom came out holding my favorite food in the world: a bright blue colored grilled cheese sandwich. As I licked my chops, my mom laughed. "You're just as crazy as your father," she said, her bright, beautiful smile on her face. It was the last time I would see her smile.
"Hey," I said, the same smile on my face, "you always say that I take completely after you!"
It was true - I had my mother's stormy gray eyes, blond, curly hair, and bright teeth. You could almost say that I was her twin - just 25 years younger and not quite as tan. But, while my looks were my mother's, my mannerism was my fathers. Sure, I did have my mother's intelligence, but I had my father's crazy imagination, his sense of humor, his, to quote my mother, "thirst for near-death-experiences", and his calm, care-free attitude. Oh, and his love of blue food.
My mother laughed. Her laugh was wonderful, like the sound of an angel singing. "That's true. So, tomorrow at work, it's bring-in-your-kid day. Would you like to skip school and come?"
Let me pause: my mother normally would never, ever suggest that you skip school, but as she was a professor at New York University. She taught literary history, and in her spare time she ran the scholastic decathlon team. All she was really offering me was to get out of school to go to another, bigger school. But, as I had read enough of my mother's school books to teach the class, I was fine going - it'd be cool to be able to outsmart kids almost twice my age.
"Sure", I replied. "Who are they learning about tomorrow?"
"We're actually reading Homer. The Odyssey and the Illiad."
I remembered my mom making me read both of these stories two years ago, along with Hestoid, Aristotle, Plato, and every other Greek and Roman author, telling me that I would need to know these books cover to cover for the future. Probably so I could ace that part of her class.
"So, which book? I'm hoping for the Odyssey. It's much better: it got Media, Calypso, Polyphemus..."
Suddenly, despite the fact that there wasn't a cloud in the sky, it began to thunder.
"Halie!" My mother snapped, her smile gone instantly. "What have we told you about saying their names?"
My parents were amazing, but they have their quirks. Like the fact that they are never willing to say the names of people from Greek myths.
"Come on, Mom," I said, "it's not like they are real."
Right then, my father came out, grabbed half of my sandwich, stuffed it all in his mouth, and ran back inside. "Get back here, dad!" I screamed. "That's the third sandwich he had stolen from me in the past four days!" I grumbled as I stood up, prepared to go inside and find that annoying marine biologist and get him to make me another sandwich.
Suddenly, a violent explosion roared through the house, breaking the glass windows and sending me flying into our fish pond. As I struggled to rise, I found that I didn't seem to be harmed. Weird. I should have had several broken bone.
I heard my mother cuss, then she screamed my father's name.
I saw him stumbling out of the house into my mom's arms. Only when he collapsed did I notice a piece of shrapnel in his chest. He whispered something to my mom, and a single tear came out of her eye. She laid him down and pulled a ruler out from her pocket. No, I realized, the image of the object flickering, it wasn't' a ruler, it was a long, bronze knife. As my mother stood in the doorway, I heard her gasp and, as she turned around, I saw the hilt of a knife, much like her's, protruding from where I knew her stomach was. She stumbled back to me, and fell into my arms. "Find Jason..." she whispered to me with her dying breaths. "He will... help you.. to camp. I love you..... Halie." And as she began to cough up blood, her last words were, "Run, Halie. Run."