“He said, ‘You saw her snip the cord.’ ‘Yeah. So?’ But even as I said it, I knew it was a big deal. ‘This is not happening,’ Grover mumbled. He started chewing at his thumb. ‘I don’t want this to be like the last time.‘”
“I had always assumed he knew me as a baby. My mom had never said it outright, but still, I’d felt it must be true. Now, to be told that he’d never even seen me . . .”
″‘But they’re stories,’ I said. ‘They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.‘”
“But suddenly the world turned sideways. I realized I’d been played with. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades had been set at each other’s throats by someone else. The master bolt had been in the backpack, and I’d gotten the backpack from . . .”
“Yes. Read The Iliad. It’s full of references to the stuff. Whenever divine or monstrous elements mix with the mortal world, they generate Mist, which obscures the vision of humans. You will see things just as they are, being a half-blood, but humans will interpret things quite differently. Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.”
“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.”
“All I could think of was that the teachers must’ve found the illegal stash of candy I’d been selling out of my dorms 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.”