The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan Page A

you weren’t one of us.”
    “You don’t know anything about me.”
    “No?” She raised an eyebrow. “I bet you moved around from school to school. I bet you were kicked out of a lot of them.”
    “How—”
    “Diagnosed with dyslexia. Probably ADHD, too.”
    I tried to swallow my embarrassment. “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “Taken together, it’s almost a sure sign. The letters float off the page when you read, right? That’s because your mind is hardwired for ancient Greek. And the ADHD—you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal’s. Of course the teachers want you medicated. Most of them are monsters. They don’t want you seeing them for what they are.”
    “You sound like . . . you went through the same thing?”
    “Most of the kids here did. If you weren’t like us, you couldn’t have survived the Minotaur, much less the ambrosia and nectar.”
    “Ambrosia and nectar.”
    “The food and drink we were giving you to make you better. That stuff would’ve killed a normal kid. It would’ve turned your blood to fire and your bones to sand and you’d be dead. Face it. You’re a half-blood.”
    A half-blood.
    I was reeling with so many questions I didn’t know where to start.
    Then a husky voice yelled, “Well! A newbie!”
    I looked over. The big girl from the ugly red cabin was sauntering toward us. She had three other girls behind her, all big and ugly and mean looking like her, all wearing camo jackets.
    “Clarisse,” Annabeth sighed. “Why don’t you go polish your spear or something?”
    “Sure, Miss Princess,” the big girl said. “So I can run you through with it Friday night.”
    “Erre es korakas!” Annabeth said, which I somehow understood was Greek for ‘Go to the crows!’ though I had a feeling it was a worse curse than it sounded. “You don’t stand a chance.”
    “We’ll pulverize you,” Clarisse said, but her eye twitched. Perhaps she wasn’t sure she could follow through on the threat. She turned toward me. “Who’s this little runt?”
    “Percy Jackson,” Annabeth said, “meet Clarisse, Daughter of Ares.”
    I blinked. “Like . . . the war god?”
    Clarisse sneered. “You got a problem with that?”
    “No,” I said, recovering my wits. “It explains the bad smell.”
    Clarisse growled. “We got an initiation ceremony for newbies, Prissy.”
    “Percy.”
    “Whatever. Come on, I’ll show you.”
    “Clarisse—” Annabeth tried to say.
    “Stay out of it, wise girl.”
    Annabeth looked pained, but she did stay out of it, and I didn’t really want her help. I was the new kid. I had to earn my own rep.
    I handed Annabeth my minotaur horn and got ready to fight, but before I knew it, Clarisse had me by the neck and was dragging me toward a cinder-block building that I knew immediately was the bathroom.
    I was kicking and punching. I’d been in plenty of fights before, but this big girl Clarisse had hands like iron. She dragged me into the girls’ bathroom. There was a line of toilets on one side and a line of shower stalls down the other. It smelled just like any public bathroom, and I was thinking—as much as I could think with Clarisse ripping my hair out—that if this place belonged to the gods, they should’ve been able to afford classier johns.
    Clarisse’s friends were all laughing, and I was trying to find the strength I’d used to fight the Minotaur, but it just wasn’t there.
    “Like he’s ‘Big Three’ material,” Clarisse said as she pushed me toward one of the toilets. “Yeah, right. Minotaur probably fell over laughing, he was so stupid looking.”
    Her friends snickered.
    Annabeth stood in the corner, watching through her fingers.
    Clarisse bent me over on my knees and started pushing my head