Eventually they fixed the train and an hour later we arrived in New York City. Confession time: I told Grover I’d share a cab with him to the Upper East Side, but I ditched him when he went to the bathroom.
I know, I know, it was rude. But the dude was freaking me out. Not only was he stalking me, but during the train ride he’d eaten all the fabric on the seat in front of us. It was time to bounce.
I walked outside the train station and caught a cab to 94th street. I was really hoping my mom would be home from work when I got there. My mom is awesome. She’s like the best mom ever! She just has one tiny problem, though: she’s not very good at choosing husbands.
My mom’s first husband, my dad, took off when I was six weeks old. Whenever I’d ask my mom about him she’d change the subject. I didn’t blame her—I’d want to change the subject too if I’d married such a loser.
Husband number two, the current husband, was this guy named Gabe Uglyano. As far as I could tell, Gabe’s selling points were that he was fat, smelly, didn’t work, played fantasy football all day, liked to order my mom around, and hated me. Great choice, Mom.
When I got to the apartment I was disappointed to find that Mom wasn’t there—just Gabe in the living room as usual, watching football as usual, and using my laptop to manage his fantasy football team as usual. Gabe didn’t say hi, so I kept walking past him. “Hey!” he shouted, and held out a bowl shaped like a football. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Every time I came home, even if I’d only been out for a few minutes, Gabe made me give a donation to the fantasy football gods. Gabe said if everyone in the house didn’t regularly donate to the fantasy football gods, the gods wouldn’t let his team win. I knew I was actually just donating to the Gabe Uglyano Snacks Fund, but I didn’t really have a choice. So I put a couple bucks in the bowl and moved on.
I felt kinda sweaty and gross from the train ride, so I figured I’d take a shower. But when I went into the bathroom I was completely overwhelmed by the smell. When I said before that Gabe was “smelly,” I wasn’t really doing him justice. Gabe has the particular distinction of making the bathroom smell worse than any human being alive. Not only is the smell so awful as to clear out every living thing within a 50-foot radius, but the smell persists. It’s like the smoke from a fireplace: once you get it on you, it takes a week to go away. I decided the shower could wait and headed back to my room.
When I walked in, Mom was there waiting for me.
“Percy!” she said and gave me a giant hug. “My gosh, you must’ve grown three inches since winter break!”
I started to tell her the bad news about losing my scholarship, but she cut me off. “We can talk about it later,” she said, “but right now, I have a big surprise: we’re going to the beach! You and me!”
“When?” I said.
“Now!” she said.
“Sallllyyyyy!” came Gabe’s annoying voice from the living room. “Where’s the seven-layer bean dip? The Fantasy Football Gods are hungry!”
Mom rolled her eyes. “By ‘now’, I mean we’ll leave right after I make his bean dip,” she said.
“Mom, I’ve always wondered: what are the seven layers in the dip?”
“I can’t tell you because it’s a secret recipe,” she said. “But I can tell you that layers 1, 3, and 6 are spit.”
A half-hour later Mom and I had loaded our luggage into Gabe’s car and were standing with Gabe in the driveway.
“Remember,” said Gabe, “you need to refill the gas to the level it’s at now before returning the car, or you’ll incur a $100 penalty.”
“Got it,” Mom said. She went to hug him goodbye, but he’d already started walking back inside. What a jerk, I thought, and as a small protest, I turned my back to him and farted.
I didn’t think the fart would actually be noticeable, but right when I farted a huge wind gust blew and slammed the screen door on Gabe’s behind so hard he flew twenty feet into the house. Ha, what a cool coincidence! I thought.
Only much later would I realize that it wasn’t a coincidence at all.
The weather forecast had predicted sunny weather for our beach trip, but as we drove to the beach, conditions got worse and worse. First it started raining, then the wind picked up, and finally by the time we got to our rental cabin it was a full-fledged hurricane. “This makes no sense,” said Mom. “There’s always advance warning of weather like this.”
We hunkered down and ate popcorn while listening to the cabin shake. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. “Who’d be knocking on our door in a hurricane?” I said. Mom opened the door, and standing there soaking wet…was Grover.
Omigod, I thought, his stalking has truly reached epic proportions.
“Mom, don’t let him in!” I said. “Shut the door and call 911!”
But instead, she said “Hey Grover!” and ushered him in.
Wait, how did my Mom know Grover?
Then I noticed something was different about Grover. Where his sneakers used to be…there were now hooves.
Mom handed Grover a towel. “What are you doing here?” she said.
“I’ve been searching all over for Percy!” he said.
Mom looked at me anxiously. “Did something strange happen at school that you didn’t tell me about?” she said.
“Yeah, this weird dude with horns and hooves who eats grass started stalking me,” I said.
“Besides that,” she said.
I told her about the fight with Mrs. Dodds and seeing the old women knitting the underwear and cutting the thread, and my Mom’s mouth dropped open.
“Get to the car!” she said. “Now!”
She grabbed Grover and me and we ran through the rain to the car. “Mom, why are we bringing him?” I asked, pointing at Grover. “Shouldn’t we be using the car to get away from him?”
“I’ll explain later,” she said. “Hurry Percy, you’re in danger!”
“Of course I’m in danger!” I said. “There’s a freaking half-goat here!”
Mom insisted that both Grover and I sit in the front seat with her, so I couldn’t avoid looking at Grover’s hooves. I also noticed that he smelled like a petting zoo that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. “Dude, why’d you never tell me about this?” I asked.
“If you’d known, you might not have let me be your friend,” he said. “And I needed to be friends with you so I could protect you from baaaaaad things.”
Well at least now I knew why he pronounced “baaaaaad” that way.
“So is there a term for what you are?” I asked. “‘Mutant?’ ‘Circus freak?’ ‘Genetic abomination?’”
“I’m a satyr,” he said. “You know, from Mr. Brunner’s class.”
“I never did any of the reading,” I said.
“He discussed them all the time in lecture,” said Grover.
“I never listened to any of the lectures,” I said.
Grover rolled his eyes. “A satyr is a half-man, half-goat from Greek mythology.”
“Oh-kayyyyy,” I said. “So what does this have to do with you?”
“Like I said, I’m a satyr,” he said.
Oh great, so now this guy thought he was a character from Greek mythology?
“Mom, I really think the best call here would be to head to the mental hospital so we can dump off mythology man.”
“No stops!” said Mom. “We need to get you to safety!”
“Safety from what?” I said.
“Oh nothing much,” said Grover. “Just an army of thousands of monsters sent after you by Hades, God of the Underworld.”
“Don’t say his name aloud!” said Mom.
I didn’t know which was more disturbing: the fact that the guy next to me thought we were being chased by monsters sent by Hades, or the fact that my mom believed him. He must’ve brainwashed her, I thought. Or had she brainwashed him? The one thing I knew for sure is that Mom was doing 95 down a treacherous country road in the middle of a hurricane.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“It’s the place your father always wanted to send you,” she said.
My father wanted to send me somewhere? It was the first I’d ever heard of it.
“What kind of place is it?” I said.
Mom exchanged a look with Grover. “It’s…uh…a summer camp,” she said.
Yeah, right. I knew what “summer camp” meant: summer school. I guess Mom was concerned about me losing my scholarship after all.
“Mom, summer school is based on a faulty premise,” I said. “If a kid isn’t able to concentrate during the school year, how’s the kid supposed to concentrate when it’s 80 degrees and sunny outside?”
“Please dear, just trust me,” said Mom. “You need to go to this place because you’re in danger.”
“Just because some old ladies cut some thread?”
“Those weren’t old ladies,” said Grover. “They were the Fates.”
“The who?”
“The Fates are the three Greek goddesses who determine human destiny,” he said. “They only appear when someone’s about to die.”
Okay, this guy was now certifiably nutty, and at the moment Mom didn’t seem to be too far behind. I began to consider whether I could survive jumping out of the car at full speed. But I didn’t get the chance to decide, because BOOM!—a bolt of lightning struck the car and we skidded off the road into a ditch.
When the car finally came to a stop, Grover fell into my lap with a big bump on his head. “This is baaaaaad,” he groaned.
“Percy, you need to get out of here!” said my mom, who was stuck behind the steering wheel, which had bent in the crash. I tried the doors, but neither of them would open. Then through the rear window I saw a man approaching us from the road. But there was something odd about him: he was wearing a bull mask. A really realistic one.
“Mom, what’s a guy with a really realistic bull mask doing walking out here in a hurricane?” I asked.
Mom looked and saw the man and her face filled with horror. “Percy, smash the window and run for it!” she yelled. “There’s a farmhouse behind that big tree on the hill. Just run there and don’t look back!”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Why are you so worried about this guy with a mask? He’s probably just walking home after partying a little too hard.”
“Percy, that’s no guy,” said Mom. “That’s the minotaur!”
Minotaur—now that term I recognized, because I’d seen a fantasy movie once with a minotaur in it. A minotaur was a man with the head of a bull.
“Mom, I think you’ve gone into shock and aren’t thinking straight,” I said. “Just relax and I’ll ask the guy if he can help us out.”
“Percy, no!”
I kicked out the window, climbed out of the car, and walked up to the guy.
“What up, bro,” I said. “Looks like someone had a few hurricanes to celebrate the hurricane, am I right?”
The guy’s nostrils flared and he let out a giant roar.
“Whoa whoa whoa, don’t blame me ‘cause you couldn’t find anyone to take home,” I said. “Hey, you look like a strong guy. Any chance you could give me a hand pushing our car out of this ditch?”
The bull guy roared again, then got down on all fours and started pawing the ground, like an actual bull getting ready to charge. I realized my estimate of “a few” hurricanes might’ve been a little conservative.
“You know what? Forget I even asked,” I said. “Nice meeting you! Get home safely!” I turned and started walking back to the car, but a second later I heard a loud thump-thump, thump-thump. I turned around just in time to see the bull guy charging toward me, his horns aimed directly at my chest. Instinctively I tried to jump out of the way…and I landed on the bull guy’s shoulders, straddling his head
The bull guy started bucking to try to throw me off, like we were in a rodeo. My fingers began to slip from his neck, and I knew that in seconds I’d be thrown off and there’d be no rodeo clown around to help me.
So I got scared, which of course led me to fart. And this was no ordinary fart. It was more like a rocket fart: an explosive burst of gas that propelled me up into the air and sent the bull guy hurtling away at what seemed like supersonic speed. A second later the bull guy slammed into a tree and disintegrated into powder, just like Mrs. Dodds had at the museum.
I stumbled back to the car in a daze, and I was shocked to see my Mom had turned very pale, and had a big wound on her head from the accident that I hadn’t noticed before. “Mom, I’m back!” I cried. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you help!”
“It’s too late,” she said weakly. “Just remember that I love you, Percy.”
“No! Stay with me, Mom!”
“Will…always…love…you…”
And then she was gone.
Not dead-gone, though. Like, actually gone. There was a flash of golden light and she just disappeared.
It was all too confusing. I needed to go get help. I remembered what Mom had said about the farmhouse beyond the tree, and I picked up Grover and headed for it. I didn’t really want to take Grover with me. But I knew if I didn’t take him, he’d eventually just stalk me anyway.
