The Lightning Thief

himself killed and now he’ll have an even bigger head. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday. . . .”
    I moved back into cabin three, but it didn’t feel so lonely anymore. I had my friends to train with during the day. At night, I lay awake and listened to the sea, knowing my father was out there. Maybe he wasn’t quite sure about me yet, maybe he hadn’t even wanted me born, but he was watching. And so far, he was proud of what I’d done.
    As for my mother, she had a chance at a new life. Her letter arrived a week after I got back to camp. She told me Gabe had left mysteriously—disappeared off the face of the planet, in fact. She’d reported him missing to the police, but she had a funny feeling they would never find him.
    On a completely unrelated subject, she’d sold her first life-size concrete sculpture, entitled The Poker Player , to a collector, through an art gallery in Soho. She’d gotten so much money for it, she’d put a deposit down on a new apartment and made a payment on her first semester’s tuition at NYU. The Soho gallery was clamoring for more of her work, which they called “a huge step forward in super-ugly neorealism.”
    But don’t worry, my mom wrote. I’m done with sculpture. I’ve disposed of that box of tools you left me. It’s time for me to turn to writing.
    At the bottom, she wrote a P.S.: Percy, I’ve found a good private school here in the city. I’ve put a deposit down to hold you a spot, in case you want to enroll for seventh grade. You could live at home. But if you want to go year-round at Half-Blood Hill, I’ll understand.
    I folded the note carefully and set it on my bedside table. Every night before I went to sleep, I read it again, and I tried to decide how to answer her.
    On the Fourth of July, the whole camp gathered at the beach for a fireworks display by cabin nine. Being Hephaestus’s kids, they weren’t going to settle for a few lame red-white-and-blue explosions. They’d anchored a barge offshore and loaded it with rockets the size of Patriot missiles. According to Annabeth, who’d seen the show before, the blasts would be sequenced so tightly they’d look like frames of animation across the sky. The finale was supposed to be a couple of hundred-foot-tall Spartan warriors who would crackle to life above the ocean, fight a battle, then explode into a million colors.
    As Annabeth and I were spreading a picnic blanket, Grover showed up to tell us good-bye. He was dressed in his usual jeans and T-shirt and sneakers, but in the last few weeks he’d started to look older, almost high-school age. His goatee had gotten thicker. He’d put on weight. His horns had grown at least an inch, so he now had to wear his rasta cap all the time to pass as human.
    “I’m off,” he said. “I just came to say . . . well, you know.”
    I tried to feel happy for him. After all, it wasn’t every day a satyr got permission to go look for the great god Pan. But it was hard saying good-bye. I’d only known Grover a year, yet he was my oldest friend.
    Annabeth gave him a hug. She told him to keep his fake feet on.
    I asked him where he was going to search first.
    “Kind of a secret,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I wish you could come with me, guys, but humans and Pan . . .”
    “We understand,” Annabeth said. “You got enough tin cans for the trip?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And you remembered your reed pipes?”
    “Jeez, Annabeth,” he grumbled. “You’re like an old mama goat.”
    But he didn’t really sound annoyed.
    He gripped his walking stick and slung a backpack over his shoulder. He looked like any hitchhiker you might see on an American highway—nothing like the little runty boy I used to defend from bullies at Yancy Academy.
    “Well,” he said, “wish me luck.”
    He gave Annabeth another hug. He clapped me on the shoulder, then headed back through the dunes.
    Fireworks exploded to life overhead: Hercules killing the Nemean lion, Artemis chasing the boar, George Washington (who, by the way, was a son of Athena) crossing the Delaware.
    “Hey, Grover,” I called.
    He turned at the edge of the woods.
    “Wherever you’re going—I hope they make good enchiladas.”
    Grover grinned, and then he was gone, the trees closing around him.
    “We’ll see him again,” Annabeth said.
    I tried to believe it. The fact that no searcher had ever come back in two thousand years . . . well, I decided not