The Lightning Thief

me?”
    Mr. D snorted. “I asked the same question.”
    The camp director dealt the cards. Grover flinched every time one landed in his pile.
    Chiron smiled at me sympathetically, the way he used to in Latin class, as if to let me know that no matter what my average was, I was his star student. He expected me to have the right answer.
    “Percy,” he said. “Did your mother tell you nothing?”
    “She said . . .” I remembered her sad eyes, looking out over the sea. “She told me she was afraid to send me here, even though my father had wanted her to. She said that once I was here, I probably couldn’t leave. She wanted to keep me close to her.”
    “Typical,” Mr. D said. “That’s how they usually get killed. Young man, are you bidding or not?”
    “What?” I asked.
    He explained, impatiently, how you bid in pinochle, and so I did.
    “I’m afraid there’s too much to tell,” Chiron said. “I’m afraid our usual orientation film won’t be sufficient.”
    “Orientation film?” I asked.
    “No,” Chiron decided. “Well, Percy. You know your friend Grover is a satyr. You know”—he pointed to the horn in the shoe box—“that you have killed the Minotaur. No small feat, either, lad. What you may not know is that great powers are at work in your life. Gods—the forces you call the Greek gods—are very much alive.”
    I stared at the others around the table.
    I waited for somebody to yell, Not! But all I got was Mr. D yelling, “Oh, a royal marriage. Trick! Trick!” He cackled as he tallied up his points.
    “Mr. D,” Grover asked timidly, “if you’re not going to eat it, could I have your Diet Coke can?”
    “Eh? Oh, all right.”
    Grover bit a huge shard out of the empty aluminum can and chewed it mournfully.
    “Wait,” I told Chiron. “You’re telling me there’s such a thing as God.”
    “Well, now,” Chiron said. “God—capital G , God. That’s a different matter altogether. We shan’t deal with the metaphysical.”
    “Metaphysical? But you were just talking about—”
    “Ah, gods, plural, as in, great beings that control the forces of nature and human endeavors: the immortal gods of Olympus. That’s a smaller matter.”
    “Smaller?”
    “Yes, quite. The gods we discussed in Latin class.”
    “Zeus,” I said. “Hera. Apollo. You mean them.”
    And there it was again—distant thunder on a cloudless day.
    “Young man,” said Mr. D, “I would really be less casual about throwing those names around, if I were you.”
    “But they’re stories,” I said. “They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.”
    “Science!” Mr. D scoffed. “And tell me, Perseus Jackson”—I flinched when he said my real name, which I never told anybody—“what will people think of your ‘science’ two thousand years from now?” Mr. D continued. “Hmm? They will call it primitive mumbo jumbo. That’s what. Oh, I love mortals—they have absolutely no sense of perspective. They think they’ve come so-o-o far. And have they, Chiron? Look at this boy and tell me.”
    I wasn’t liking Mr. D much, but there was something about the way he called me mortal, as if . . . he wasn’t. It was enough to put a lump in my throat, to suggest why Grover was dutifully minding his cards, chewing his soda can, and keeping his mouth shut.
    “Percy,” Chiron said, “you may choose to believe or not, but the fact is that immortal means immortal. Can you imagine that for a moment, never dying? Never fading? Existing, just as you are, for all time?”
    I was about to answer, off the top of my head, that it sounded like a pretty good deal, but the tone of Chiron’s voice made me hesitate.
    “You mean, whether people believed in you or not,” I said.
    “Exactly,” Chiron agreed. “If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth, an old story to explain lightning? What if I told you, Perseus Jackson, that someday people would call you a myth, just created to explain how little boys can get over losing their mothers?”
    My heart pounded. He was trying to make me angry for some reason, but I wasn’t going to let him. I said, “I wouldn’t like it. But I don’t believe in gods.”
    “Oh, you’d better,” Mr. D murmured. “Before one of them incinerates you.”
    Grover said, “P-please, sir. He’s just lost his mother. He’s in shock.”
    “A lucky thing, too,” Mr. D grumbled, playing a