DAISY || P. Jackson x Fem O/C

2.1 | 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬

~🌊~{[CHAPTER ONE]}~🌊~

[Attack Of The Canadians]

Percy's day started normally. Or as normal as it ever got at Meriwether College Prep. See, it was this 'progressive' school in downtown Manhattan, which meant they sit on beanbag chairs instead of at desks, and they don't get grades and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert T-shirts to work. That was all cool with Percy. He was ADHD and dyslexic, like most half-bloods, so he'd never done that great in regular schools even before they kicked him out. The only bad thing about Meriwether was that the teachers always looked on the bright side of things, and the kids weren't always ... well, bright.

Take his first class today: English. The whole middle school had read this book called Lord of the Flies, where all these kids got marooned on an island and went psycho.

So for their final exam, their teachers sent them into the 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 wasn't big or strong, but he acted like he was. He had eyes like a pit bull, and shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everybody to see how little he cared about his family's money. One of his front teeth was chipped from the time he'd taken his daddy's Porsche for a joyride and run into a PLEASE SLOW DOWN FOR CHILDREN sign.

Anyway, 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. As near as Percy's mom and him could figure, he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was very young, probably because he was so ... different. He was two metres tall and built like the Abominable Snowman, but he cried a lot and was scared of just about everything, including his own reflection. His face was kind of misshapen and brutallooking. Percy couldn't tell you what colour his eyes were, because he could never make himself look higher than his crooked teeth. His voice was deep, but he talked funny, like a much younger kid – Percy guessed because he'd never gone to school before going to Meriwether. He wore tattered jeans, grimy size-twenty sneakers and a plaid flannel shirt with holes in it. 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. Percy's mom had complained to the school a million times that they weren't doing enough to help him. She'd called social services, but nothing ever seemed to happen. The social workers claimed Tyson didn't exist. They swore up and down that they'd visited the alley they described and couldn't find him, though how you miss a giant kid living in a refrigerator box, he didn't know.

Anyway, Matt Sloan snuck up behind him and tried to give him a wedgie, and Tyson panicked. He swatted Sloan away a little too hard. Sloan flew five metres and got tangled in the little kids' tyre swing.