Vines and Thorns

𝟘𝟙𝟘-𝔼𝕩𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕋𝕖𝕒𝕞 𝟙

I hate High School.

I know that I shouldn't give into the clichés about the popular girls being rude or the jocks being assholes...but they're true.

Maybe it has something to do with me going to an overly rich boarding school, but some of the people here are downright cruel, and my dad is arguably the douchiest god, so that's saying something.

After begging Chiron and my father for nearly a month, they agreed that I could help Oliver with an extraction at one of the schools this year. I was excited, considering going to school and leaving camp was all I wanted to do since I was 5.

I spent the rest of summer preparing for it, and I was ready to finally be normal.

FYI, normal sucks.

I don't know what I was prepared for, but it sure as hell wasn't this.

The presumed half-blood was at a private school in Maine (duh) that was for grades 6-12. I was enrolled for ninth grade, while Oliver had enrolled in seventh grade in order to be with the possible demigod.

My first thought about high school was that it was going to be a fresh start—that no one would know a thing about me and I might be able to make friends who weren't terrified of me. Hah.

What I didn't expect was for everyone to have known each other since they were kids, meaning that newbies were treated as the weird stranger unless you were either a god at a sport, rich, or simply extremely attractive.

I am none of those things.

So I was gracefully ignored for the first week I was there, which was fine by me considering I had been ignored for most of my time at camp. But then I made a complete fool of myself in class, and all of a sudden everyone knew my name.

It was Language Arts, and the teacher was having us read Romeo and Juliet (gross) and my name was called to read one of the sections out loud.

If you didn't know, demigods are dyslexic as fuck, and I was no exception. Our brains were 'hard-wired to read Greek' as Chiron would say and reading English would be a general pain for any half-blood you ran into.

The words had a habit of scrambling together as if they were trying to arrange themselves into Greek so they would make sense, but it only made it harder to read and you would spend three minutes trying to decipher a single sentence. Yeah, it sucks.

And being called on to read in front of the class? My worst nightmare.

I wasn't known for stuttering—I have never had a problem talking before. But the gods really must hate me because I struggled to make out even a word on that page, and the more annoyed I got, the more the letters seemed to entangle themselves with one another.

The result? The teacher, a balding man with big, framed glasses and a pinched face asked me if I was illiterate. The rest of the class naturally thought it was hilarious, and I have been the target of stupid jokes more times than I could count.

So, yeah. High School sucks.

With Oliver two grades below me, it left me virtually alone besides lunch and the occasional passing period, but every time we met up, all we talked about was the new half-blood.

Her name was Tory Springs. She had a poor track record from past schools, and that mixed with her obvious dyslexia and ADHD made her a prime candidate for a possible demi-god. She kept to herself mostly and didn't seem to have many people that she talked to on a regular basis besides Oliver.

Satyrs are trained in a myriad of different ways to get close with possible demigods, making them masters at the art of friend-making and socializing. As soon as Oliver has you in his sights, it's nearly impossible to get rid of him.