The Lightning Thief

your incredibly important poker game. Please go back to it right now.”
    Gabe’s eyes narrowed. His tiny brain was probably trying to detect sarcasm in my statement.
    “Yeah, whatever,” he decided.
    He went back to his game.
    “Thank you, Percy,” my mom said. “Once we get to Montauk, we’ll talk more about . . . whatever you’ve forgotten to tell me, okay?”
    For a moment, I thought I saw anxiety in her eyes—the same fear I’d seen in Grover during the bus ride—as if my mom too felt an odd chill in the air.
    But then her smile returned, and I figured I must have been mistaken. She ruffled my hair and went to make Gabe his seven-layer dip.
    An hour later we were ready to leave.
    Gabe took a break from his poker game long enough to watch me lug my mom’s bags to the car. He kept griping and groaning about losing her cooking—and more important, his ’78 Camaro—for the whole weekend.
    “Not a scratch on this car, brain boy,” he warned me as I loaded the last bag. “Not one little scratch.”
    Like I’d be the one driving. I was twelve. But that didn’t matter to Gabe. If a seagull so much as pooped on his paint job, he’d find a way to blame me.
    Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can’t explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I’d seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement toward Gabe. The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the butt and sent him flying up the staircase as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Maybe it was just the wind, or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn’t stay long enough to find out.
    I got in the Camaro and told my mom to step on it.
    Our rental cabin was on the south shore, way out at the tip of Long Island. It was a little pastel box with faded curtains, half sunken into the dunes. There was always sand in the sheets and spiders in the cabinets, and most of the time the sea was too cold to swim in.
    I loved the place.
    We’d been going there since I was a baby. My mom had been going even longer. She never exactly said, but I knew why the beach was special to her. It was the place where she’d met my dad.
    As we got closer to Montauk, she seemed to grow younger, years of worry and work disappearing from her face. Her eyes turned the color of the sea.
    We got there at sunset, opened all the cabin’s windows, and went through our usual cleaning routine. We walked on the beach, fed blue corn chips to the seagulls, and munched on blue jelly beans, blue saltwater taffy, and all the other free samples my mom had brought from work.
    I guess I should explain the blue food.
    See, Gabe had once told my mom there was no such thing. They had this fight, which seemed like a really small thing at the time. But ever since, my mom went out of her way to eat blue. She baked blue birthday cakes. She mixed blueberry smoothies. She bought blue-corn tortilla chips and brought home blue candy from the shop. This—along with keeping her maiden name, Jackson, rather than calling herself Mrs. Ugliano—was proof that she wasn’t totally suckered by Gabe. She did have a rebellious streak, like me.
    When it got dark, we made a fire. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Mom told me stories about when she was a kid, back before her parents died in the plane crash. She told me about the books she wanted to write someday, when she had enough money to quit the candy shop.
    Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask about what was always on my mind whenever we came to Montauk—my father. Mom’s eyes went all misty. I figured she would tell me the same things she always did, but I never got tired of hearing them.
    “He was kind, Percy,” she said. “Tall, handsome, and powerful. But gentle, too. You have his black hair, you know, and his green eyes.”
    Mom fished a blue jelly bean out of her candy bag. “I wish he could see you, Percy. He would be so proud.”
    I wondered how she could say that. What was so great about me? A dyslexic, hyperactive boy with a D+ report card, kicked out of school for the sixth time in six years.
    “How old was I?” I asked. “I mean . . . when he left?”
    She watched the flames. “He was only with me for one summer, Percy. Right here at this beach. This cabin.”
    “But . . . he knew me as a baby.”
    “No, honey. He knew I was expecting a baby, but he never saw you. He had to