The Lightning Thief

brownies, hamburgers on the grill and wildflowers, and a hundred other good things that shouldn’t have gone well together, but did. I could almost believe the gods could live off that smoke.
    When everybody had returned to their seats and finished eating their meals, Chiron pounded his hoof again for our attention.
    Mr. D got up with a huge sigh. “Yes, I suppose I’d better say hello to all you brats. Well, hello. Our activities director, Chiron, says the next capture the flag is Friday. Cabin five presently holds the laurels.”
    A bunch of ugly cheering rose from the Ares table.
    “Personally,” Mr. D continued, “I couldn’t care less, but congratulations. Also, I should tell you that we have a new camper today. Peter Johnson.”
    Chiron murmured something.
    “Er, Percy Jackson,” Mr. D corrected. “That’s right. Hurrah, and all that. Now run along to your silly campfire. Go on.”
    Everybody cheered. We all headed down toward the amphitheater, where Apollo’s cabin led a sing-along. We sang camp songs about the gods and ate s’mores and joked around, and the funny thing was, I didn’t feel that anyone was staring at me anymore. I felt that I was home.
    Later in the evening, when the sparks from the campfire were curling into a starry sky, the conch horn blew again, and we all filed back to our cabins. I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I collapsed on my borrowed sleeping bag.
    My fingers curled around the Minotaur’s horn. I thought about my mom, but I had good thoughts: her smile, the bedtime stories she would read me when I was a kid, the way she would tell me not to let the bedbugs bite.
    When I closed my eyes, I fell asleep instantly.
    That was my first day at Camp Half-Blood.
    I wish I’d known how briefly I would get to enjoy my new home.

WE CAPTURE A FLAG
    T he next few days I settled into a routine that felt almost normal, if you don’t count the fact that I was getting lessons from satyrs, nymphs, and a centaur.
    Each morning I took Ancient Greek from Annabeth, and we talked about the gods and goddesses in the present tense, which was kind of weird. I discovered Annabeth was right about my dyslexia: Ancient Greek wasn’t that hard for me to read. At least, no harder than English. After a couple of mornings, I could stumble through a few lines of Homer without too much headache.
    The rest of the day, I’d rotate through outdoor activities, looking for something I was good at. Chiron tried to teach me archery, but we found out pretty quick I wasn’t any good with a bow and arrow. He didn’t complain, even when he had to desnag a stray arrow out of his tail.
    Foot racing? No good either. The wood-nymph instructors left me in the dust. They told me not to worry about it. They’d had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. But still, it was a little humiliating to be slower than a tree.
    And wrestling? Forget it. Every time I got on the mat, Clarisse would pulverize me.
    “There’s more where that came from, punk,” she’d mumble in my ear.
    The only thing I really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn’t the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur.
    I knew the senior campers and counselors were watching me, trying to decide who my dad was, but they weren’t having an easy time of it. I wasn’t as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids. I didn’t have Hephaestus’s skill with metalwork or—gods forbid— Dionysus’s way with vine plants. Luke told me I might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I got the feeling he was just trying to make me feel better. He really didn’t know what to make of me either.
    Despite all that, I liked camp. I got used to the morning fog over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. I would eat dinner with cabin eleven, scrape part of my meal into the fire, and try to feel some connection to my real dad. Nothing came. Just that warm feeling I’d always had, like the memory of his smile. I tried not to think too much about my mom, but I kept wondering: if gods and monsters were real, if all this magical stuff was possible, surely there was some way to save her, to bring her back. . . .
    I started to understand Luke’s bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But