Child of lightning-Percy Jackson X reader-Book two

There goes my normal school year

After my bumpy morning, the rest of the day up to that point felt like smooth sailing. Things were pretty normal, well normal is a relative word when you're talking about Meriwether College Prep.

See, it's this weird "progressive" school in downtown Manhattan, which means we sit on bean bag 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 though. I mean, I'm ADHD and dyslexic, like most half-bloods, so I had never done all too great in regular schools even before they eventually kicked me out. 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.

Take my first class today, English. The whole middle school had read this book called 'Lord of the Flies', where all these kids get trapped on an island and go cuckoo for cocoa puffs. So for our final exam, our teachers sent us into the break yard to spend an hour with no adult supervision, just to see what would happen. What happened was a massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth grade boys, two pebble fights, a full-tackle basketball game and a cat fight where this one girl almost got her eye scratched out. The school bully, Matt Sloan, led most of those activities, strangely enough he even led the cat fight.

Sloan wasn't big or strong or anything like that. I had to give him some credit though, he sure acted like he was. He had these ugly eyes that made him look like a psychotic dog. It didn't help that he also had shaggy black hair, and that 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 even chipped from the time he'd taken his daddy's Porsche for a joyride and run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.

Anyway, while Percy Tyson and I camped out in a corner Sloan was giving all the boys wedgies. Then he made the ultimate mistake of trying it on my friend Tyson.

Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriwether College Prep. As near as Percy, Sally and I could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was really little. No one talked about this but we all knew it was probably because he was so...different. You see, he was six-foot-three and built like a Lumberjack. He cried a lot though and was scared of just about everything, including his own reflection. His face was also kind of misshapen and brutal-looking. I couldn't tell you what color his eyes were because for some reason I could never make myself look higher than his crooked teeth. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid—I guessed it was 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.

Meriwether Prep had "adopted" him as a community service project so all the students could feel good about themselves. Which is probably the most problematic thing I've ever seen rich people do. 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.

I was drawn to him on one of the first days of school. Maybe it was because I felt bad for him, or maybe it was because if I hadn't been taken in by Sally I could have ended up in the same situation. Once I got to talking to him I realized he was a pretty great guy. I introduced him to Percy and we all became fast friends.

Sally had complained to the school a million times that they weren't doing enough to help him. She'd called social services too, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. The social workers claimed Tyson didn't exist. They swore up and down that they'd visited the alley we described and couldn't find him, though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box, I don't know.