*1. ***ACCIDENTALLY VAPORIZE MY PRE-ALGEBRA TEACHER

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close

this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth,

and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed

in painful, nasty ways.

If you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think its fiction, great. Read

on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages—if you feel something stirring

inside—stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that,

it’s only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they’ll come for you.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My name is Percy Jackson.

I’m twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at

Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.

Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really

started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to

Manhattan— twenty-eight mental-case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus,

heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman

stuff. I know—it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.

But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.

Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had

thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled

like coffee. You wouldn’t think he’d be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us

play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and

weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn’t put me to sleep.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn’t get in

trouble.

Boy, was I wrong.

See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school,

when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary

War cannon. I wasn’t aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway.

And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour

of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our

class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that... Well, you get the idea.

This trip, I was determined to be good.

All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded

kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks

of peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich.

Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated.

He must’ve been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with

acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He

had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his

legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don’t let that fool you. You

should’ve seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria.

Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his

curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn’t do anything back to her because I was

already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death by in-school

suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on

this trip.

“I’m going to kill her,” I mumbled.

Grover tried to calm me down. “It’s okay. I like peanut butter.”

He dodged another piece of Nancy’s lunch.

“That’s it.” I started to get up, but Grover pulled me back to my seat.

“You’re already on probation,” he reminded me. “You know who’ll get

blamed if anything happens.”

Looking back on it, I wish I’d decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there. In-

school suspension would’ve been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get

myself into.

Mr. Brunner led the museum tour.

He rode up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey

galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange

pottery.

It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand

years.

He gathered us around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on

the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a stele, for a girl about our

age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was kind of interesting, but everybody around me was talking, and

every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would

give me the evil eye.

Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always wore a black

leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a

Harley right into your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year,

when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown.

From her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit and figured I was devil

spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, “Now, honey,” real sweet,

and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.

One time, after she’d made me erase answers out of old math workbooks until

midnight, I told Grover I didn’t think Mrs. Dodds was human. He looked at me, real

serious, and said, “You’re absolutely right.”

Mr. Brunner kept talking about Greek funeral art.

Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the ***** guy on the stele,

and I turned around and said, “Will you shut up?”

It came out louder than I meant it to.

The whole group laughed. Mr. Brunner stopped his story.

“Mr. Jackson,” he said, “did you have a comment?”

My face was totally red. I said, “No, sir.”

Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. “Perhaps you’ll tell us

what this picture represents?”

I looked at the carving, and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized

it. “That’s Kronos eating his kids, right?”

“Yes,” Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. “And he did this because ...”

“Well...” I racked my brain to remember. “Kronos was the king god, and—” “God?” Mr. Brunner asked.

“Titan,” I corrected myself. “And ... he didn’t trust his kids, who were the

gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife hid baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a

rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into

barfing up his brothers and sisters—”

“Eeew!” said one of the girls behind me.

“—and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans,” I

continued, “and the gods won.”

Some snickers from the group.

Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbled to a friend, “Like we’re going to use this

in real life.

Like it’s going to say on our job applications, ‘Please explain why Kronos ate

his kids.’“

“And why, Mr. Jackson,” Brunner said, “to paraphrase Miss Bobofit’s

excellent question, does this matter in real life?”

“Busted,” Grover muttered.

“Shut up,” Nancy hissed, her face even brighter red than her hair.

At least Nancy got packed, too. Mr. Brunner was the only one who ever caught

her saying anything wrong. He had radar ears.

I thought about his question, and shrugged. “I don’t know, sir.”

“I see.” Mr. Brunner looked disappointed. “Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson.

Zeus did indeed feed Kronos a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him

disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been

living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan’s stomach. The gods

defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it’s time

for lunch. Mrs. Dodds, would you lead us back outside?”

The class drifted off, the girls holding their stomachs, the guys pushing each

other around and acting like doofuses.

Grover and I were about to follow when Mr. Brunner said, “Mr. Jackson.”

I knew that was coming.

I told Grover to keep going. Then I turned toward Mr. Brunner. “Sir?”

Mr. Brunner had this look that wouldn’t let you go— intense brown eyes that

could’ve been a thousand years old and had seen everything.

“You must learn the answer to my question,” Mr. Brunner told me.

“About the Titans?”

“About real life. And how your studies apply to it.”

“Oh.”

“What you learn from me,” he said, “is vitally important. I expect you to treat

it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson.”

I wanted to get angry, this guy pushed me so hard.

I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a

suit of Roman armor and shouted: “What ho!’“ and challenged us, sword-point

against chalk, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had

ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshipped. But Mr. Brunner

expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact that I have dyslexia and

attention deficit disorder and I had never made above a C— in my life.

No—he didn’t expect me to be as good; he expected me to be better. And I just

couldn’t learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly. I mumbled something about trying harder, while Mr. Brunner took one long

sad look at the stele, like he’d been at this girl’s funeral.

He told me to go outside and eat my lunch.

The class gathered on the front steps of the museum, where we could watch

the foot traffic along Fifth Avenue.

Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I’d ever seen

over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the

weather all across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We’d had

massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn’t have

been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.

Nobody else seemed to notice. Some of the guys were pelting pigeons with

Lunchables crackers. Nancy Bobofit was trying to pickpocket something from a

lady’s purse, and, of course, Mrs. Dodds wasn’t seeing a thing.

Grover and I sat on the edge of the fountain, away from the others. We thought

that maybe if we did that, everybody wouldn’t know we were from that school—the

school for loser freaks who couldn’t make it elsewhere.

“Detention?” Grover asked.

“Nah,” I said. “Not from Brunner. I just wish he’d lay off me sometimes. I

mean—I’m not a genius.”

Grover didn’t say anything for a while. Then, when I thought he was going to

give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, “Can I

have your apple?”

I didn’t have much of an appetite, so I let him take it.

I watched the stream of cabs going down Fifth Avenue, and thought about my

mom’s apartment, only a little ways uptown from where we sat. I hadn’t seen her

since Christmas. I wanted so bad to jump in a taxi and head home. She’d hug me and be glad to see me, but she’d be disappointed, too. She’d send me right back to Yancy,

remind me that I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I

was probably going to be kicked out again. I wouldn’t be able to stand that sad look

she’d give me.

Mr. Brunner parked his wheelchair at the base of the handicapped ramp. He

ate celery while he read a paperback novel. A red umbrella stuck up from the back of

his chair, making it look like a motorized cafe table.

I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of

me with her ugly friends—I guess she’d gotten tired of stealing from the tourists—

and dumped her half-eaten lunch in Grover’s lap.

“Oops.” She grinned at me with her crooked teeth. Her freckles were orange,

as if somebody had spray-painted her face with liquid Cheetos.

I tried to stay cool. The school counselor had told me a million times, “Count

to ten, get control of your temper.” But I was so mad my mind went blank. A wave

roared in my ears.

I don’t remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, Nancy was sitting on

her butt in the fountain, screaming, “Percy pushed me!”

Mrs. Dodds materialized next to us.

Some of the kids were whispering: “Did you see—”

“—the water—”

“—like it grabbed her—”

I didn’t know what they were talking about. All I knew was that I was in

trouble again.

As soon as Mrs. Dodds was sure poor little Nancy was okay, promising to get

her a new shirt at the museum gift shop, etc., etc., Mrs. Dodds turned on me. There was a triumphant fire in her eyes, as if I’d done something she’d been waiting for all

semester. “Now, honey—”

“I know,” I grumbled. “A month erasing workbooks.”

That wasn’t the right thing to say.

“Come with me,” Mrs. Dodds said.

“Wait!” Grover yelped. “It was me. I pushed her.”

I stared at him, stunned. I couldn’t believe he was trying to cover for me. Mrs.

Dodds scared Grover to death.

She glared at him so hard his whiskery chin trembled.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Underwood,” she said.

“But—”

“You— will—stay—here.”

Grover looked at me desperately.

“It’s okay, man,” I told him. “Thanks for trying.”

“Honey,” Mrs. Dodds barked at me. “ Now.”

Nancy Bobofit smirked.

I gave her my deluxe I’ll-kill-you-later stare. Then I turned to face Mrs.

Dodds, but she wasn’t there. She was standing at the museum entrance, way at the

top of the steps, gesturing impatiently at me to come on.

How’d she get there so fast?

I have moments like that a lot, when my brain falls asleep or something, and

the next thing I know I’ve missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the

universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it. The school counselor told

me this was part of the ADHD, my brain misinterpreting things.

I wasn’t so sure. I went after Mrs. Dodds.

Halfway up the steps, I glanced back at Grover. He was looking pale, cutting

his eyes between me and Mr. Brunner, like he wanted Mr. Brunner to notice what

was going on, but Mr.

Brunner was absorbed in his novel.

I looked back up. Mrs. Dodds had disappeared again. She was now inside the

building, at the end of the entrance hall.

Okay, I thought. She’s going to make me buy a new shirt for Nancy at the gift

shop.

But apparently that wasn’t the plan.

I followed her deeper into the museum. When I finally caught up to her, we

were back in the Greek and Roman section.

Except for us, the gallery was empty.

Mrs. Dodds stood with her arms crossed in front of a big marble frieze of the

Greek gods. She was making this weird noise in her throat, like growling.

Even without the noise, I would’ve been nervous. It’s weird being alone with a

teacher, especially Mrs. Dodds. Something about the way she looked at the frieze, as

if she wanted to pulverize it...

“You’ve been giving us problems, honey,” she said.

I did the safe thing. I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She tugged on the cuffs of her leather jacket. “Did you really think you would

get away with it?”

The look in her eyes was beyond mad. It was evil.

She’s a teacher, I thought nervously. It’s not like she’s going to hurt me.

I said, “I’ll—I’ll try harder, ma’am.”

Thunder shook the building.

“We are not fools, Percy Jackson,” Mrs. Dodds said. “It was only a matter of

time before we found you out. Confess, and you will suffer less pain.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

All I could think of was that the teachers must’ve found the illegal stash of

candy I’d been selling out of my dorm room. Or maybe they’d realized I got my

essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they

were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the

book.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Ma’am, I don’t...”

“Your time is up,” she hissed.

Then the weirdest thing happened. Her eyes began to glow like barbecue coals.

Her fingers stretched, turning into talons. Her jacket melted into large, leathery

wings. She wasn’t human. She was a shriveled hag with bat wings and claws and a

mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons.

Then things got even stranger.

Mr. Brunner, who’d been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled

his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand.

“What ho, Percy!” he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air.

Mrs. Dodds lunged at me.

With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the

ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn’t a pen anymore. It was

a sword—Mr. Brunner’s bronze sword, which he always used on tournament day.

Mrs. Dodds spun toward me with a murderous look in her eyes. My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the

sword.

She snarled, “Die, honey!”

And she flew straight at me.

Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I

swung the sword.

The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed clean through her body as if she

were made of water. Hisss!

Mrs. Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow

powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying

screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still

watching me.

I was alone.

There was a ballpoint pen in my hand.

Mr. Brunner wasn’t there. Nobody was there but me.

My hands were still trembling. My lunch must’ve been contaminated with

magic mushrooms or something.

Had I imagined the whole thing?

I went back outside.

It had started to rain.

Grover was sitting by the fountain, a museum map tented over his head. Nancy

Bobofit was still standing there, soaked from her swim in the fountain, grumbling to

her ugly friends. When she saw me, she said, “I hope Mrs. Kerr whipped your butt.”

I said, “Who?”

“Our teacher. Duh!”

I blinked. We had no teacher named Mrs. Kerr. I asked Nancy what she was

talking about.

She just rolled her eyes and turned away.

I asked Grover where Mrs. Dodds was.

He said, “Who?”

But he paused first, and he wouldn’t look at me, so I thought he was messing

with me.

“Not funny, man,” I told him. “This is serious.”

Thunder boomed overhead.

I saw Mr. Brunner sitting under his red umbrella, reading his book, as if he’d

never moved.

I went over to him.

He looked up, a little distracted. “Ah, that would be my pen. Please bring your

own writing utensil in the future, Mr. Jackson.”

I handed Mr. Brunner his pen. I hadn’t even realized I was still holding it.

“Sir,” I said, “where’s Mrs. Dodds?”

He stared at me blankly. “Who?”

“The other chaperone. Mrs. Dodds. The pre-algebra teacher.”

He frowned and sat forward, looking mildly concerned. “Percy, there is no

Mrs. Dodds on this trip. As far as I know, there has never been a Mrs. Dodds at

Yancy Academy. Are you feeling all right?”

3. THREE OLD LADIES KNIT THE SOCKS OF DEATH

I was used to the occasional weird experience, but usually they were over

quickly. This twenty-four/seven hallucination was more than I could handle. For the rest of the school year, the entire campus seemed to be playing some kind of trick on

me. The students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs.

Kerr—a perky blond woman whom I’d never seen in my life until she got on our bus

at the end of the field trip—had been our pre-algebra teacher since Christmas.

Every so often I would spring a Mrs. Dodds reference on somebody, just to see

if I could trip them up, but they would stare at me like I was psycho.

It got so I almost believed them—Mrs. Dodds had never existed.

Almost.

But Grover couldn’t fool me. When I mentioned the name Dodds to him, he

would hesitate, then claim she didn’t exist. But I knew he was lying.

Something was going on. Something had happened at the museum.

I didn’t have much time to think about it during the days, but at night, visions

of Mrs. Dodds with talons and leathery wings would wake me up in a cold sweat.

The freak weather continued, which didn’t help my mood. One night, a

thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room. A few days later, the biggest

tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from

Yancy Academy. One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the

unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic

that year.

I started feeling cranky and irritable most of the time. My grades slipped from

Ds to Fs. I got into more fights with Nancy Bobofit and her friends. I was sent out

into the hallway in almost every class.

Finally, when our English teacher, Mr. Nicoll, asked me for the millionth time

why I was too lazy to study for spelling tests, I snapped. I called him an old sot. I

wasn’t even sure what it meant, but it sounded good. The headmaster sent my mom a letter the following week, making it official: I

would not be invited back next year to Yancy Academy.

Fine, I told myself. Just fine.

I was homesick.

I wanted to be with my mom in our little apartment on the Upper East Side,

even if I had to go to public school and put up with my obnoxious stepfather and his

stupid poker parties.

And yet... there were things I’d miss at Yancy. The view of the woods out my

dorm window, the Hudson River in the distance, the smell of pine trees. I’d miss

Grover, who’d been a good friend, even if he was a little strange. I worried how he’d

survive next year without me.

I’d miss Latin class, too—Mr. Brunner’s crazy tournament days and his faith

that I could do well.

As exam week got closer, Latin was the only test I studied for. I hadn’t

forgotten what Mr.

Brunner had told me about this subject being life-and-death for me. I wasn’t

sure why, but I’d started to believe him.

The evening before my final, I got so frustrated I threw the Cambridge Guide

to Greek Mythology across my dorm room. Words had started swimming off the

page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding

skateboards. There was no way I was going to remember the difference between

Chiron and Charon, or Polydictes and Polydeuces. And conjugating those Latin

verbs? Forget it.

I paced the room, feeling like ants were crawling around inside my shirt.

I remembered Mr. Brunner’s serious expression, his thousand-year-old eyes. I

will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson.

I took a deep breath. I picked up the mythology book.

I’d never asked a teacher for help before. Maybe if I talked to Mr. Brunner, he

could give me some pointers. At least I could apologize for the big fat F I was about

to score on his exam. I didn’t want to leave Yancy Academy with him thinking I

hadn’t tried.

I walked downstairs to the faculty offices. Most of them were dark and empty,

but Mr.

Brunner’s door was ajar, light from his window stretching across the hallway

floor.

I was three steps from the door handle when I heard voices inside the office.

Mr. Brunner asked a question. A voice that was definitely Grover’s said “... worried

about Percy, sir.”

I froze.

I’m not usually an eavesdropper, but I dare you to try not listening if you hear

your best friend talking about you to an adult.

I inched closer.

“... alone this summer,” Grover was saying. “I mean, a Kindly One in the

school! Now that we know for sure, and they know too—”

“We would only make matters worse by rushing him,” Mr. Brunner said. “We

need the boy to mature more.”

“But he may not have time. The summer solstice deadline— “

“Will have to be resolved without him, Grover. Let him enjoy his ignorance

while he still can.”

“Sir, he saw her... .”

“His imagination,” Mr. Brunner insisted. “The Mist over the students and staff

will be enough to convince him of that.”

“Sir, I ... I can’t fail in my duties again.” Grover’s voice was choked with

emotion. “You know what that would mean.”

“You haven’t failed, Grover,” Mr. Brunner said kindly. “I should have seen

her for what she was. Now let’s just worry about keeping Percy alive until next fall—

”

The mythology book dropped out of my hand and hit the floor with a thud.

Mr. Brunner went silent.

My heart hammering, I picked up the book and backed down the hall.

A shadow slid across the lighted glass of Brunner’s office door, the shadow of

something much taller than my wheelchair-bound teacher, holding something that

looked suspiciously like an archer’s bow.

I opened the nearest door and slipped inside.

A few seconds later I heard a slow clop-clop-clop, like muffled wood blocks,

then a sound like an animal snuffling right outside my door. A large, dark shape

paused in front of the glass, then moved on.

A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.

Somewhere in the hallway, Mr. Brunner spoke. “Nothing,” he murmured. “My

nerves haven’t been right since the winter solstice.”

“Mine neither,” Grover said. “But I could have sworn ...”

“Go back to the dorm,” Mr. Brunner told him. “You’ve got a long day of

exams tomorrow.”

“Don’t remind me.”

The lights went out in Mr. Brunner’s office.

I waited in the dark for what seemed like forever.

Finally, I slipped out into the hallway and made my way back up to the dorm.

Grover was lying on his bed, studying his Latin exam notes like he’d been

there all night.

“Hey,” he said, bleary-eyed. “You going to be ready for this test?”

I didn’t answer.

“You look awful.” He frowned. “Is everything okay?”

“Just... tired.”

I turned so he couldn’t read my expression, and started getting ready for bed.

I didn’t understand what I’d heard downstairs. I wanted to believe I’d

imagined the whole thing.

But one thing was clear: Grover and Mr. Brunner were talking about me

behind my back.

They thought I was in some kind of danger.

The next afternoon, as I was leaving the three-hour Latin exam, my eyes

swimming with all the Greek and Roman names I’d misspelled, Mr. Brunner called

me back inside.

For a moment, I was worried he’d found out about my eavesdropping the night

before, but that didn’t seem to be the problem.

“Percy,” he said. “Don’t be discouraged about leaving Yancy. It’s ... it’s for

the best.”

His tone was kind, but the words still embarrassed me. Even though he was

speaking quietly, the other kids finishing the test could hear. Nancy Bobofit smirked

at me and made sarcastic little kissing motions with her lips.

I mumbled, “Okay, sir.”

“I mean ...” Mr. Brunner wheeled his chair back and forth, like he wasn’t sure

what to say.

“This isn’t the right place for you. It was only a matter of time.”

My eyes stung.

Here was my favorite teacher, in front of the class, telling me I couldn’t handle

it. After saying he believed in me all year, now he was telling me I was destined to

get kicked out.

“Right,” I said, trembling.

“No, no,” Mr. Brunner said. “Oh, confound it all. What I’m trying to say ...

you’re not normal, Percy. That’s nothing to be—”

“Thanks,” I blurted. “Thanks a lot, sir, for reminding me.

“Percy—”

But I was already gone.

On the last day of the term, I shoved my clothes into my suitcase.

The other guys were joking around, talking about their vacation plans. One of

them was going on a hiking trip to Switzerland. Another was cruising the Caribbean

for a month. They were juvenile delinquents, like me, but they were rich juvenile

delinquents. Their daddies were executives, or ambassadors, or celebrities. I was a

nobody, from a family of nobodies.

They asked me what I’d be doing this summer and I told them I was going

back to the city.

What I didn’t tell them was that I’d have to get a summer job walking dogs or

selling magazine subscriptions, and spend my free time worrying about where I’d go

to school in the fall.

“Oh,” one of the guys said. “That’s cool.”

They went back to their conversation as if I’d never existed.