Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief

•°•▪︎☆Chapter 1☆▪︎•°•

Chapter 1: Percy accidentally vaporized his Maths Teacher

Look, he didn't want to be a half-blood. If you're reading this because you think you might be one, his 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 it's fiction, great. Read on. He envies 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 them. 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 he didn't warn you.

His name is Percy Jackson. He's twelve years old. Until a few months ago, he was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.

Is he a troubled kid? Yeah. You could say that.

He could start at any point in his short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when his 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. He knows – it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were. But Mr Brunner, his Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so he 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 them play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armour and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put him to sleep.

He hoped the trip would be okay. At least, he hoped that for once he wouldn't get in trouble. He wouldn't mind if it was getting in trouble with his sister, but more to that later.

Boy, was he wrong.

See, bad things happen to him on field trips. Like at his fifth-grade school, when he went to the Saratoga battlefield, he had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. He wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course he got expelled anyway.

And before that, at his fourth-grade school, when he took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, he sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and his class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that... Well, you get the idea.

This trip, he was determined to be good. All the way into the city, he put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly red-headed kleptomaniac girl, hitting his 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.