Guess What? Weasel Butt
We got up at way too early o’clock, thanks to the hellhound’s and polecat’s growling stomachs. We fed them breakfast, threw the eels some dead fish, and coaxed Hecuba into swallowing her seven million Vitamin McNuggets. Then we enjoyed the wonders of Hecate’s antigravity showers and enchanted toilets before heading to the kitchen, where I got dog hair in my orange juice and a weasel butt in my cereal bowl. (Polecat butt—
whatever.)
Grover suggested a daily walking schedule for the pets. He figured there should always be at least two of us on leash duty. Every morning, he and I
could escort Annabeth down to SODNYC. Then, in the afternoon, he and Annabeth would come meet me with the pets at AHS and we’d walk to the manse together from Astoria. My school was a lot farther away than Annabeth’s, but I didn’t mind the plan if she didn’t. I was just happy to spend extra time with her and Grover, even if it involved being dragged
across town by our new fuzzy supernatural overlords.
“Grover, what about you?” Annabeth asked. “That means you’re doing all
the walking.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. Fresh air!”
You don’t see fresh air on a lot of Tripadvisor reviews for Manhattan, but I appreciated Grover’s enthusiasm.
We packed our stuff for school, got the pets geared up in their heavy-metal and Hello Kitty accoutrements, then headed out to escort Annabeth to SODNYC. As we locked up, the door knockers told us: 1) to have a great day, 2) we would die in agony, and 3) PORK BELLIES! Honestly, I’d had stranger multiple-choice tests.
We were more prepared for Hecuba’s and Gale’s walking habits this time, so we weren’t surprised when Hecuba led us on a series of high-speed, high-terror sprints through traffic, stopping to smell all the things and then
pee on them. Annabeth had even found a pair of sneakers in one of Hecate’s closets, which seemed to help. I just hoped the shoes didn’t end up being
cursed. I didn’t want Annabeth to accidentally float to the moon or bust out in a fit of Irish line dancing.
As for Gale, we found out she had a strange affinity for drugstores. Every time we passed one, the polecat tried to tug Grover inside. Maybe she realized she needed some anti-gas medicine in the worst way. Or maybe Duane Reade was having a sale on chicken carcasses.
By the time we reached SODNYC, I was feeling almost optimistic about our chances of surviving through Halloween. We were laughing and having fun, which I’ll take any Tuesday morning of a school week.
It felt good. Almost domestic. Just three besties and their magical rent-a- pets enjoying life. I didn’t say anything, because that would jinx it, but we could totally make it to Friday night … right?
“Have a good day at school, dear,” I told Annabeth. “Thanks, Mom!” She gave me a big wet kiss.
“You guys and your public displays of affection,” Grover grumbled.
On cue, Annabeth and I got on either side of him, wrapped him in a hug, and kissed him on either cheek with a big Mmm-whah!
“Much better,” he muttered, blushing hard.
“See you this afternoon,” Annabeth told us, handing me Hecuba’s leash. I wished her borrowed sneakers could magically grow bigger to fit me, but no such luck. Then she was off.
Grover and I headed back toward the manse. We had some trouble on Third Avenue when Hecuba decided to attack a Lil Zeus Greek food cart, but I managed to pull her off before she killed the cook or devoured his meat supply. Dude wasn’t too happy. He yelled something in Greek at me—
maybe Please control your rhinoceros—but I couldn’t be too mad at Hecuba. For one thing, the food smelled good. For another, anything labeled Zeus sent me into attack mode, too.
Back at Gramercy Park, I realized I had about twenty minutes to make the forty-minute trip to school. Fortunately, my first-period teacher was pretty lax about attendance.
“You sure you’ll be okay?” I asked Grover at the front door once the pets were safely back inside.
“Oh, yeah!” His eye twitched. “I got a ton to do. Going to send out the party invitations for Friday, play with the animals, maybe bake a cake.
We’ll pick you up at AHS. Then we can have a nice walk home over the Queensboro Bridge!”
“Okay,” I said. “Don’t forget to put the ice cream potion stuff in the—” “Freezer, I know! I’ll be fine, ’kay? Thanks, bye!”
He closed the door.
“He’ll do well!” one of the door knockers assured me. “He’ll ruin everything!” said another. “RAINFOREST CAFÉ!” said the third.
Hmm … probably nothing to worry about. It wasn’t until I got to the subway that I realized I wasn’t sure which door knocker had said that Grover would ruin everything—the truth-teller or the liar. I tried to put it out of my mind. Grover was smart. He was responsible. He’d been my protector for years, and we’d both grown wiser over that time. I knew I could trust him to do the right thing.
I made it to school late enough for the secretary to give me a disappointed sigh, but not late enough to get a full scolding. I considered that a win.
On the way to class, I saw my counselor, Eudora, again. She was creeping down the hall on tiptoe. When she spotted me, she froze like a polecat in headlights.
“Is she gone?” she stage-whispered. “Um … you mean Hecate?”
“She can’t see me!” She dove into the nearest room and locked the door behind her. I waited to see if she would come back out, since she’d just shut herself in the janitor’s closet. She didn’t. I was already late, so I decided to keep going. At some point, though, I was going to have to find out why the Nereid was so terrified of Hecate. I mean, aside from the obvious reason that the goddess was terrifying.
My classes went okay. I hadn’t done my homework, but that wasn’t unusual.
Back in August, my stepdad Paul had tried to help me organize my schoolwork when he saw that it was way too much for me to keep straight on my own. He suggested I think of homework as triage. “Look at your
assignments like they’re wounded patients,” he’d said, “and handle them in order of severity. ‘Okay, you need immediate attention, or you’ll die. You can wait a bit. You aren’t that bad—go home, take some aspirin, and call me tomorrow.’”
I gave my homework a lot of aspirin.
Paul’s system worked most of the time. I could usually tell which projects were important and which ones my teachers had only assigned because they felt they had to and they didn’t want to grade any more than I wanted to do them. Having a teacher in the family can be handy.
I was feeling pretty good by the end of the school day. I hadn’t failed any quizzes. I hadn’t fallen asleep. Miraculously, my history teacher said, “Very good, Mr. Jackson,” when I answered a question, which was probably a sign she was actually a monster, but I wasn’t going to judge unless she attacked me. Some of my best friends are monsters.
After swim practice I waited in front of AHS, my hair still smelling of chlorine. I was looking forward to seeing my friends, even Hecuba and Gale.
That’s the weird thing about pets, I guess. Even when they’re a total pain, they still manage to burrow their way into your heart. I kept looking down 37th Avenue, expecting a huge hellhound to come barreling over the horizon, possibly dragging Annabeth on roller skates.
Twenty minutes passed. For an ADHD guy like me, that translated into about forty Percy hours. Maybe Grover and Annabeth had gotten stuck in a traffic jam … walking across the river to Queens. Maybe the pets had pulled them off course to Hackensack. It could be nothing.
Having no cell phone is something I’d gotten used to. Yes, it sucked not to be able to look things up quickly, scroll through funny videos, or text my friends to see where they were. But none of my friends could have cell
phones either, so it didn’t matter much. Plus, watching cats ride Roombas or frat dudes failing at backflips is cool, but not worth getting eaten by monsters. Every year or so, I borrowed a mortal’s cell phone to see if the
magic had worn off or gotten weaker—if maybe I could use a phone now without causing a Great Monster Migration and a Kill Percy Rodeo. Every year, the experiment failed. Once I touched a phone screen, the average
time until a monster showed up was thirty-six seconds.
Long story short: I had no way of knowing where Grover and Annabeth were. Iris-messages only worked in certain situations, like I said before, and if the person you’re trying to reach is moving—for instance, being dragged across the Tri-State Area by a hellhound—an Iris-message often won’t connect.
So I waited. After an hour, I started to panic. If something had happened to Annabeth and Grover and I was just standing here not helping … If
they’d been swallowed by Janet and her gang of moray eels, or if the manse had exploded from a buildup of polecat gas …
I took out Riptide. With the tip of the blade, I etched a message on the sidewalk: Went to Gramercy.
That was another trick I’d only learned in the last month. One day when I was bored, sitting on a sidewalk while my mom shopped for clothes for her first author signing, I discovered that Riptide could sketch glowing lines on asphalt that no regular mortals could see. The markings lasted about three hours before fading away—less if it rained. It made me wonder why I’d never seen Celestial bronze graffiti around from other demigods. Maybe they’d never gotten bored enough to try it. Or maybe their weapons didn’t have a side hustle as writing utensils.
I began walking back to Manhattan, taking the route I figured Annabeth and Grover would take so I would intercept them if they were still coming my way.
I still hadn’t met them when I got to the Upper East Side. By the time I reached East 60th, I was so concerned I started to jog.
It was still a long way to Gramercy Park, with crosswalk lights that didn’t cooperate and plenty of cars and pedestrians to navigate. I got honked at, cursed at, scowled at, and almost creamed a few times by motorized delivery bikes, but I am a native New Yorker. Such obstacles barely slowed me down.
A block out, I spotted Annabeth running toward the manse from the
opposite direction. A chunk of ice formed in my stomach. Apparently, Grover hadn’t come to pick her up, either.
We met in front of the house. “You okay?” she asked. “Fine, you?”
“Yeah, but … I guess I lost track of time studying. Grover never showed.
I thought maybe he fell asleep, or …” Her voice faltered when she looked at the mansion. “Oh, gods.”
I was so anxious I had troubling focusing through the Mist.
When the facade of Hecate’s house finally revealed itself, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The front windows were all broken, their shattered glass strewn across the garden as if the panes had been busted from within.
Several tombstone tiles had fallen off the walls. Blue smoke billowed from the front porch, where the massive three-paneled door had
exploded outward, like someone had hit it with a battering ram from the inside.
“Grover,” we both said at once. And we ran into the disaster zone.
