The Lightning Thief

cheeseburger.
    We kept walking until I saw a deserted two-lane road through the trees. On the other side was a closed-down gas station, a tattered billboard for a 1990s movie, and one open business, which was the source of the neon light and the good smell.
    It wasn’t a fast-food restaurant like I’d hoped. It was one of those weird roadside curio shops that sell lawn flamingos and wooden Indians and cement grizzly bears and stuff like that. The main building was a long, low warehouse, surrounded by acres of statuary. The neon sign above the gate was impossible for me to read, because if there’s anything worse for my dyslexia than regular English, it’s red cursive neon English.
    To me, it looked like: ATNYU MES GDERAN GOMEN MEPROUIM.
    “What the heck does that say?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Annabeth said.
    She loved reading so much, I’d forgotten she was dyslexic, too.
    Grover translated: “Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium.”
    Flanking the entrance, as advertised, were two cement garden gnomes, ugly bearded little runts, smiling and waving, as if they were about to get their picture taken.
    I crossed the street, following the smell of the hamburgers.
    “Hey . . .” Grover warned.
    “The lights are on inside,” Annabeth said. “Maybe it’s open.”
    “Snack bar,” I said wistfully.
    “Snack bar,” she agreed.
    “Are you two crazy?” Grover said. “This place is weird.”
    We ignored him.
    The front lot was a forest of statues: cement animals, cement children, even a cement satyr playing the pipes, which gave Grover the creeps.
    “Bla-ha-ha!” he bleated. “Looks like my Uncle Ferdinand!”
    We stopped at the warehouse door.
    “Don’t knock,” Grover pleaded. “I smell monsters.”
    “Your nose is clogged up from the Furies,” Annabeth told him. “All I smell is burgers. Aren’t you hungry?”
    “Meat!” he said scornfully. “I’m a vegetarian.”
    “You eat cheese enchiladas and aluminum cans,” I reminded him.
    “Those are vegetables. Come on. Let’s leave. These statues are . . . looking at me.”
    Then the door creaked open, and standing in front of us was a tall Middle Eastern woman—at least, I assumed she was Middle Eastern, because she wore a long black gown that covered everything but her hands, and her head was completely veiled. Her eyes glinted behind a curtain of black gauze, but that was about all I could make out. Her coffee-colored hands looked old, but well-manicured and elegant, so I imagined she was a grandmother who had once been a beautiful lady.
    Her accent sounded vaguely Middle Eastern, too. She said, “Children, it is too late to be out all alone. Where are your parents?”
    “They’re . . . um . . .” Annabeth started to say.
    “We’re orphans,” I said.
    “Orphans?” the woman said. The word sounded alien in her mouth. “But, my dears! Surely not!”
    “We got separated from our caravan,” I said. “Our circus caravan. The ringmaster told us to meet him at the gas station if we got lost, but he may have forgotten, or maybe he meant a different gas station. Anyway, we’re lost. Is that food I smell?”
    “Oh, my dears,” the woman said. “You must come in, poor children. I am Aunty Em. Go straight through to the back of the warehouse, please. There is a dining area.”
    We thanked her and went inside.
    Annabeth muttered to me, “Circus caravan?”
    “Always have a strategy, right?”
    “Your head is full of kelp.”
    The warehouse was filled with more statues—people in all different poses, wearing all different outfits and with different expressions on their faces. I was thinking you’d have to have a pretty huge garden to fit even one of these statues, because they were all life-size. But mostly, I was thinking about food.
    Go ahead, call me an idiot for walking into a strange lady’s shop like that just because I was hungry, but I do impulsive stuff sometimes. Plus, you’ve never smelled Aunty Em’s burgers. The aroma was like laughing gas in the dentist’s chair—it made everything else go away. I barely noticed Grover’s nervous whimpers, or the way the statues’ eyes seemed to follow me, or the fact that Aunty Em had locked the door behind us.
    All I cared about was finding the dining area. And sure enough, there it was at the back of the warehouse, a fast-food counter with a grill, a soda fountain, a pretzel heater, and a nacho cheese dispenser. Everything you could want, plus a few steel picnic tables