"you could be the king, but watch the queen conquer"
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Rosalyn Carter is the daughter of Aphrodite and the last thing Percy expected to find at Camp Half-Blood.
But he wouldn't want to fight deadly battles with anyone else.
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Percy managed to have a calm year without any monster mishaps, which he was thankful for. The only bad thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side of things, and the kids weren't alway bright.
The whole middle school had read this book called Lord of the Flies, where all these kids get marooned on an island and go psycho. For his English final exam, his teachers sent them into the break yard to spend an hour with no adult supervision to see what would happen.
What happened was a massive wedgie contest between the seventh and eighth graders, two pebble fights, and a full-tackle basketball game. The school bully, Matt Sloan, led most of those activities.
Sloan was giving everybody wedgies until he made the mistake of trying it on Percy's friend Tyson.
Tyson was the only homeless kid at Meriwether College Prep. He was six-foot-three and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything. His face was kind of misshapen and brutal-looking.
His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid. It was like he'd never gone to school before coming to Meriwether. He smelled like a New York City alleyway, because that's where he lived, in a cardboard refrigerator box off 72nd Street.
Meriwether Prep had adopted him as a community service project so all the students could feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, most of them couldn't stand Tyson. Once they discovered he was a big softie, despite his massive strength and his scary looks, they made themselves feel good by picking on him.
Percy was pretty much his only friend, which meant he was Percy's only friend at the school.
Sloan tried to give Tyson a wedgie, causing the giant kid to panic. He swatted at the bully, sending him flying a good fifteen feet.
"You freak!" Sloan yelled. "Why don't you go back to your cardboard box!"
Tyson started sobbing. He sat down on the jungle gym so hard he bent the bar, and buried his head in his hands.
"Take it back, Sloan!" Percy shouted.
Sloan just sneered, "Why do you even bother, Jackson? You might have friends if you weren't always sticking up for that freak."
Balling his fists, Percy spat, "He's not a freak. He's just..."
Percy couldn't think of a way to describe his friend correctly, but it didn't matter. The bully didn't care what Percy had to say.
"Just wait until PE, Jackson. You're so dead."
English ended soon after that, and Percy had to promise to buy Tyson a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch to get him to stop crying. It reminded him a little bit of the way he and Rosie would trade the best parts of their lunches everyday just to make each other feel better about being an outsider.
