Calicles

THE LIGHTNING THIEF
Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Book 1
Rick Riordan

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1 I ACCIDENTALLY VAPORIZE

MY PRE-ALGEBRA TEACHER

Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.

If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now.
Believe what-ever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being ahalf-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. I envy 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 us. And onceyou know that, it's only a mat-ter of time before they
sense it too, and they'll come for you.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

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.

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Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any pointin my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last
May, when our 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.

I know-it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.

But Mr. Brunner, our Latinteacher, was leading this trip, so I 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 us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman
armor and weapons, so he was the onlyteacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get in trouble.

Boy, was I wrong.

See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga
battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but
of course I got expelledanyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behindthe-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our
class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that... Well, you get the idea.

This trip, I was determined to be good.

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All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded kleptomaniacgirl, hitting
my 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 PEfor 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.

Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew
I couldn't do anything back to her because I was already onprobation. The headmaster had threatened
me with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining
happened on this trip.

"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled.

Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter."

He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.

"That's it." I started to get up, but Grover pulled me back to my seat.

"You're...