The Sea of Monsters

Matt Sloan had promised to kill me.
    The gym uniform at Meriwether is sky blue shorts and tie-dyed T-shirts. Fortunately, we did most of our athletic stuff inside, so we didn’t have to jog through Tribeca looking like a bunch of boot-camp hippie children.
    I changed as quickly as I could in the locker room because I didn’t want to deal with Sloan. I was about to leave when Tyson called, “Percy?”
    He hadn’t changed yet. He was standing by the weight room door, clutching his gym clothes. “Will you . . . uh . . .”
    “Oh. Yeah.” I tried not to sound aggravated about it. “Yeah, sure, man.”
    Tyson ducked inside the weight room. I stood guard outside the door while he changed. I felt kind of awkward doing this, but he asked me to most days. I think it’s because he’s completely hairy and he’s got weird scars on his back that I’ve never had the courage to ask him about.
    Anyway, I’d learned the hard way that if people teased Tyson while he was dressing out, he’d get upset and start ripping the doors off lockers.
    When we got into the gym, Coach Nunley was sitting at his little desk reading Sports Illustrated . Nunley was about a million years old, with bifocals and no teeth and a greasy wave of gray hair. He reminded me of the Oracle at Camp Half-Blood—which was a shriveled-up mummy—except Coach Nunley moved a lot less and he never billowed green smoke. Well, at least not that I’d observed.
    Matt Sloan said, “Coach, can I be captain?”
    “Eh?” Coach Nunley looked up from his magazine. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Mm-hmm.”
    Sloan grinned and took charge of the picking. He made me the other team’s captain, but it didn’t matter who I picked, because all the jocks and the popular kids moved over to Sloan’s side. So did the big group of visitors.
    On my side I had Tyson, Corey Bailer the computer geek, Raj Mandali the calculus whiz, and a half dozen other kids who always got harassed by Sloan and his gang. Normally I would’ve been okay with just Tyson—he was worth half a team all by himself—but the visitors on Sloan’s team were almost as tall and strong-looking as Tyson, and there were six of them.
    Matt Sloan spilled a cage full of balls in the middle of the gym.
    “Scared,” Tyson mumbled. “Smell funny.”
    I looked at him. “What smells funny?” Because I didn’t figure he was talking about himself.
    “Them.” Tyson pointed at Sloan’s new friends. “Smell funny.”
    The visitors were cracking their knuckles, eyeing us like it was slaughter time. I couldn’t help wondering where they were from. Someplace where they fed kids raw meat and beat them with sticks.
    Sloan blew the coach’s whistle and the game began. Sloan’s team ran for the center line. On my side, Raj Mandali yelled something in Urdu, probably “I have to go potty!” and ran for the exit. Corey Bailer tried to crawl behind the wall mat and hide. The rest of my team did their best to cower in fear and not look like targets.
    “Tyson,” I said. “Let’s g—”
    A ball slammed into my gut. I sat down hard in the middle of the gym floor. The other team exploded in laughter.
    My eyesight was fuzzy. I felt like I’d just gotten the Heimlich maneuver from a gorilla. I couldn’t believe anybody could throw that hard.
    Tyson yelled, “Percy, duck!”
    I rolled as another dodgeball whistled past my ear at the speed of sound.
    Whooom!
    It hit the wall mat, and Corey Bailer yelped.
    “Hey!” I yelled at Sloan’s team. “You could kill somebody!”
    The visitor named Joe Bob grinned at me evilly. Somehow, he looked a lot bigger now . . . even taller than Tyson. His biceps bulged beneath his T-shirt. “I hope so, Perseus Jackson! I hope so!”
    The way he said my name sent a chill down my back. Nobody called me Perseus except those who knew my true identity. Friends . . . and enemies.
    What had Tyson said? They smell funny .
    Monsters.
    All around Matt Sloan, the visitors were growing in size. They were no longer kids. They were eight-foot-tall giants with wild eyes, pointy teeth, and hairy arms tattooed with snakes and hula women and Valentine hearts.
    Matt Sloan dropped his ball. “Whoa! You’re not from Detroit! Who . . .”
    The other kids on his team started screaming and backing toward the exit, but the giant named Marrow Sucker threw a ball with deadly accuracy. It streaked past Raj Mandali just as he was about to leave and hit the door, slamming it shut like magic. Raj and some of