Dear Secrets, Please Fly Quietly

7) In My Subconcious Mind

Percy opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. "We should talk somewhere else."

We walked into the city from the beach and from there took a cab to Percy's apartment.

"Is your mom home?" I asked at the door.

He shook his head. "She went out to visit some friends. Told me not to get killed while she was gone. She'll be back tomorrow."

"Wow. Bye, Percy. Stay alive at least until I get home."

He smiled and unlocked the door. "That's more or less exactly what she said."

The door didn't open. "What the-"

I smiled slyly. "Hypothetically, if I telekinetically unlocked the door while we were on the beach, then you locked it again just now, what position would the door be in?"

"You unlocked the door while we were at the beach?! Someone could have broken in!"

"I said hypothetically, Percy."

He glared.

We finally got in and I stood leaning against the wall. "Please tell me you have food here that I can eat. I haven't had anything all day and I'm starving. After that, I'll tell you about all the stuff that's going on."

"There's some stuff in here." Percy said, looking in the refrigerator. "What food can you eat?"

"Funny story, but I'm a vegan."

"You want chicken?"

"Funny story, but I'm a vegan." I repeated.

"I heard you. What are you getting at?"

"You don't know what a vegan is, do you?" I shook my head. "Vegan is a noun denoting a person who does not or cannot eat animal products including but not limited to any meat, eggs, milk, or cheese."

"Okay, Merriam Webster." He muttered. "You want meatless sandwich?"

I smiled. "A CLT would be nice. Cucumbers, lettuce and tomato. With black and green olives. And olive oil. On toasted whole wheat bread."

Percy threw up his hands after I mentioned olive oil. "Okay, you're doing that yourself. I have homework to do."

"Seriously?"

"Yes," he turned and smiled. "I have a biology test tomorrow that I'm totally unprepared for."

"That's not what I meant." I said flatly.

"I know." Percy left and I had to make my own food.

A few minutes later, I called out to him. "Where are the green olives?"

"We don't have any."

"Really?! Athena would have your head! What kind of Greek demigod are you?"

"One of Poseidon. I thought you knew that."

I sighed. Almost 20 minutes later, after I had eaten my green-olive-less sandwich, I walked into Percy's room without knocking. Surprisingly, he found fault with this.

"I have this thing called Right of Passage, Percy." I explained. "Which means I can go anywhere, anytime, for any reason or no reason at all. And nobody can stop me."

"But this is my private property."

"But I have Right of Passage."

Let's skip the argument that followed. Which I won.

"Okay fine! Whatever! But you've distracted me enough so what do you want now?!"

"For you to leave your room for... 10 minutes. And then come back and squeeze my hand. Hard. But it doesn't matter which one. Also, don't wake me up first."

Percy stared at me for a few seconds. "You know what? I'm not even going to ask. Because I don't want to know what craziness is about to happen." He gathered his homework and left.

I closed the door. I had approximately 10 minutes to fall asleep. And I mean actually fall asleep, like the deep sleep it takes a while to wake up from. Apparently it worked, because I had vaguely registered that my hand had been touched when Percy appeared in my subconscious mind.

Let me back up and explain. Gods have double bodies: conscious and subconscious. When we fall asleep, our subconscious, which has a physical form, wakes up and starts doing things like dream and move. It's like I have a mini-me inside my own body. Anyway, when Percy touched my hand, my conscious self felt it, but that doesn't count because it was asleep. He entered my subconscious by pressing harder. So if you kick a sleeping god or something extremely rude like that, you would be briefly sucked into their subconscious. And then pulled back out as they woke up obviously and beat you up.

That's the simplest way I can explain it. Back to Percy and me, I had just finished explaining this to him. "So, that's pretty much it. Sorry if that was confusing. And welcome to my subconscious mind." I spread my hands gesturing to the mostly empty space.

"What is this again?"

I sighed. "All this blackness doesn't mean I'm stupid and don't know anything, it's just the way my mind looks for some reason." There was one other thing the room, if we can call it that, besides Percy and me. A large screen like at a movie theater. Millions of images flashed across it, too fast to look at. "This screen displays all of my thoughts right now. And I want you to see something."

"Wow. No offense, but are you ADHD or something?"

"Thanks, Percy, thank you very much. And yes, as well as dyslexic." Ever-changing strings of random letters flashed across the screen. "I altho had a lithp."

"What?"

"I said 'I also had a lisp.' Moving on, I'm going to show you something I've never shown anyone else. None of the Olympians know anything about this, not even Apollo. And you're not going to tell them or anyone else."

"Okay."

"Promise it." I demanded.

"I promise on the River Styx that I won't tell anyone about whatever you're going to show me." There was no thunder afterward because this is my subconscious mind and I don't want that stuff in here.

"Okay." I said, stepping closer to Percy. "While you're in there, remember this: it's my memory. You don't exist. No one in there can hear, feel, see, or otherwise sense that you are there. Because you're not actually there. You can't do anything to them, they can't do anything to you. But again, it's my memory. So I'm in control of everything that happens."

"In where? There?" he asked, glancing at the screen. "As in, actually inside your memory?"

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Yes." Without giving him time to respond, I grabbed Percy and shoved him backward into the screen, which rippled slightly. "Enjoy the show."