Chapter Text
Percy's POV
Headmaster Chiron's office was too quiet for a guy with a black eye, and I was starting to take it personally.
The silence had a texture to it. That deep, padded hush of dark wood and old books, the kind of room that made every bad decision look worse under the light. A bronze horse statue watched me from the windowsill. The school photos watched me from the walls. Even the carpet seemed to have an opinion.
Beside me, Thalia Grace looked like she might actually follow through on murdering me this time.
She had her arms crossed and one boot tapping the carpet, her jacket still zipped like she hadn't planned on staying. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail that had given up halfway through, and there were shadows under her eyes I was trying very hard not to notice.
She caught me noticing.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
Across the desk, Chiron watched us with the patience of a man who'd survived decades of teenagers and somehow still believed in the whole project. He set a printed report on the blotter and smoothed it flat, unhurried, like none of this was new to him. Like maybe it had all happened before, with different kids and the same chairs.
"Thank you for coming, Thalia. I'm sorry to pull you away from work." He folded his hands. "Since Sally and Paul asked you to handle the school side of things for now, well. Here we are. Percy and Jake Hale got into a fight in the hallway this morning. I've already spoken with Jake and his parents, and he's with Ms. Dodds now, sorting out his end of it."
Thalia turned the full glare on me. "What happened? Who's Jake Hale?"
"It's complicated." I shrugged and found something fascinating to study on the carpet.
"It's a teenage thing," Chiron said, with a tired little smile built to bring the temperature down a few degrees.
It didn't work. Thalia's eyes narrowed into something that could've stripped paint. "Tell me, Percy. What teenage thing."
I shifted my weight. I was still in my swim hoodie, hood bunched at my neck, blond hair damp and curling from morning practice, one blue eye swelling into a bruise that got a shade darker every time I caught it in a window. I lowered the ice pack from my face.
"So. Kira and I were having a conversation in the east stairwell before first period. And then Jake punched me. So that part's true."
"A conversation," Thalia said.
She leaned in. Chiron, wisely, picked up another report and pretended to read it.
"Look, she kissed me first," I said. "She kind of threw herself at me. And I honestly didn't know she was still with the guy. So if anything, this is not my fault."
Thalia rounded on Chiron, her voice climbing. "So I had to drive all the way down here—" She heard the edge in her own voice and stopped, eyes flicking to him for a second. "Sorry, Headmaster." Then she swung back to me, and everything she'd just reined in came right back out. "For the third time in six months. Because you keep making out with other people's girlfriends in the middle of school."
She dropped back into her chair. "God, Perc. I'm already buried, and getting hauled out of work for this was not on my bingo card." A wince, and another apologetic glance at Chiron. That one was for the language.
I rolled my eyes, which wasn't much of a defense, because it was basically true. Three trips down here in six months, every one of them because some guy decided to rearrange my face over his girlfriend. Although, for the record, the girlfriends came to me.
Thalia's my cousin, on my biological father's side. With everything tangled up around how I was born and the family that came attached to him, I didn't even know she existed until three years ago. Before that she was just a name nobody said out loud unless they had to, from a part of my life that mostly stayed in the dark. After everything that happened when my baby sister was born, she'd ended up my guardian. For now, anyway.
I went back to studying the carpet and picking at the cuff of my hoodie while Chiron's voice softened.
"Mr. Hale struck Percy. Percy shoved him into the lockers. One door was damaged."
Thalia pressed two fingers to her forehead. "Of course a locker was damaged."
"The locker had bad structural integrity," I muttered.
"Not now."
I shut up.
Chiron set the disciplinary report aside and opened a second folder. "There's another matter I wanted to discuss, and this one's about Percy's future."
My stomach dropped with it. The black eye was nothing. The stairwell I could survive. This was the part I'd been bracing for.
"Percy's a junior, and one of the most promising athletes I've seen come through this school. He's already eligible for the Olympics, the real ones, not the youth circuit, and the selection committee has had its eye on him for a while." Out of the corner of my eye I caught Thalia smiling, small and proud, the kind she probably didn't mean to let show. "Ivy League programs and colleges across the country want to put a scholarship in front of him. An open door. But to walk through it, he has to keep his grades up. The bare minimum, at least."
And just like that, her smile went out.
Chiron slid three graded assignments out of the folder and lined them up across the desk, one at a time. English. History. Advanced calculus. Red ink on all three, the cheerful red of a teacher who'd given up being subtle.
"What are those?" Thalia asked, though I think she already knew.
"This," Chiron said, "is the larger issue. Percy failed three major assignments."
Her anger shifted into something I hated a lot more. "Three?"
"The calculus one was more like—"
He slid the paper forward. I stopped talking.
Thalia picked it up. Her eyes went down the page, over the crossed-out work and the note at the top, and then to me. "You failed advanced calculus."
"I didn't fail-fail."
Chiron said nothing, which was its own verdict.
"Fine," I said. "I failed."
"The good news is, he's still a junior." Chiron kept going like I hadn't spoken. "There's time to turn this around and hold his grades steady through senior year. But I'm going to insist he be tutored. If you have someone in mind, you're welcome to assign them. Otherwise I'd recommend one of my own students for the first semester." He nodded toward the door. "She's the strongest student we have. A junior, same as Percy, but so far ahead of everyone else she could graduate with the seniors a year early."
It sounded so over-the-top I laughed. Thalia shot me a look.
"But I'll need your help with this part," Chiron added. "Given Percy's personality. And his track record."
I could not believe what I was hearing.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Thalia asked, frowning.
A knock at the door.
"Come in, Ms. Dodds," Chiron said.
I didn't turn around, but I heard two sets of footsteps cross the carpet.
"Thank you for coming," Chiron said. "Thalia, this is Percy's tutor. Annabeth Chase."
Thalia gasped. "She's a girl"
I twisted around to look. There was a girl in the doorway, a notebook hugged to her chest.
"Can he get a different tutor?" Thalia asked.
Chiron gave her a look. "She's our best student. If you have another recommendation, you're welcome to make it."
The girl frowned, confused.
"I don't," Thalia admitted, and all at once she just looked tired. "But seriously. She's too pretty."
Her eyebrows climbed, more confused than before. And that was when I actually looked at her.
Dark curls framed her face in loose, stubborn coils, and her brown skin caught the warm light of the office. She had wide brown eyes that should have looked soft and didn't, because they were already moving over the room, over me, taking measurements before she'd said a single word. Cream sweater, faded denim jacket, jeans, sneakers gone soft at the edges and inked along the seams with tiny pen drawings. Nothing about her was built to be looked at, which somehow made it harder not to.
Yeah. Annabeth was pretty. She was also smart as hell, and I knew that before I knew anything else about her, because I made a point of not knowing things and I still knew her name. Top of our year. Debate team, math league, the girl teachers handed their room keys to. Famous in the way you actually had to earn.
Thalia caught me staring. "Percyyy." She gave me the tired look again.
"What? What's wrong now?"
Chiron cut in before it could get worse. "Ms. Chase, thank you for coming. I assume Ms. Dodds filled you in. I'm sorry to spring this on you, but you'll be tutoring our resident golden boy here." A pause. "Be good to each other."
Annabeth nodded. "She did. And I already told her I'd do it, on two conditions." She didn't slow down. "I get extra credit. And you approve my debate team proposal."
Chiron chuckled. "Yes, of course, Ms. Chase. I'm well aware."
She smiled then, and it was a really good smile.
"Great. Thank you." The smile dropped straight back into business. "As much as I want to help, I have to put my own work first. No offense." She looked at me when she said it. "I signed on to keep your grades from sinking. That's it. Anything past that and I lose time I need for my portfolio."
"None taken," I said.
"All right," Chiron said. "As for the rest, you're both juniors and you share all three classes, so I'll trust the two of you to sort out the scheduling yourselves."
We nodded. Thalia was still giving off heat as the three of us filed out of the office.
---
"Hi, I'm—"
"No need." She didn't look up from her notebook. "I know who you are. The whole school knows who you are." A little laugh, mostly to herself. "Pretty sure they all know about the black eye by now too."
Great. So that was everywhere already.
Beside me, Thalia made a sound somewhere between I told you so and don't. I ignored it. I was good at ignoring her.
"That sounds ominous," I said.
Annabeth's mouth twitched. Not a smile, exactly. More like her face thought about it, ran the numbers, and decided I hadn't earned one yet.
"It's hard not to know you," she said. "You're either breaking a swim record or turning into hallway gossip. Today you pulled off both."
There it was again.
She didn't even say it mean. That was the worst part. No heat, no eye-roll, just flat facts, like she was reading off the lunch menu. Somehow that stung more than if she'd laughed at me. I felt my face go warm and hated it.
Thalia's eyes flicked between us, narrowing, like she was already counting down the seconds till she'd have to step in.
"Okay," I said slowly. "For the record? The hallway thing is being exaggerated."
"Your black eye disagrees."
"It's biased."
"It's visible."
Thalia exhaled through her nose. "Percy."
"What? I'm being civil."
"You're being you."
"That feels vague. And unfair."
Annabeth glanced down at the three papers in her hands, then back up at me, and set it out plain. "So. You failed English, history, and advanced calculus."
I stared at her. She said it so easily. No pity, no dramatic pause, none of that careful adult disappointment I'd been bracing for since Ms. Dodds first hauled me out of the stairwell. Just the facts, laid side by side like she was naming the weather. Cloudy, with a high chance of academic ruin.
"Wow," I said. "Straight there."
"That's usually how tutoring works."
"We're still in the hallway."
"And yet the grades remain failed."
Beside me, Thalia pressed her lips into a flat line, and I could see exactly how much it was costing her not to laugh. Traitor.
Annabeth shifted the strap of her bag and rattled off a list without checking a single note. "I'll need your latest report card, your grade breakdowns for all three classes, the original assignment prompts, the rubrics, and any drafts or notes you've got."
I stared at her again. I'd been doing that a lot in the last five minutes.
"That was a lot of words."
"They were organized words."
"I don't know if I have all that."
"You have access to it."
"Technically."
"That means yes."
Thalia jabbed a finger toward Annabeth without taking her eyes off me. "Listen to her."
"I am listening."
"You look like you're about to bolt."
"That's just my face."
Annabeth's gaze flicked to the bruised half of it. "Your face has had a long day."
I opened my mouth and waited for something good to arrive. Nothing did.
Thalia looked thrilled. "She's fast."
"Can everyone please stop enjoying this?"
"No," they said, at exactly the same time. Which, two minutes in, felt like a bad omen.
Annabeth opened her notebook, pen ready, already moving on. "We'll start with the reading. The prompts, then the rubrics, then your own drafts, and we'll find where it's actually breaking down." She clicked the pen. "When are you free?"
I did the math. It was depressing math. "Thursdays. It's the only day I don't have practice." I dug for more and came up empty. "And weekends, I guess."
"Library's closed on weekends."
"Then I'm down to one day a week." I tried not to sound as pleased as I felt. One day a week I could survive. One day a week was basically a vacation. "Or, hey — we could just do it at your place?"
Annabeth frowned. Not offended, exactly. More like I'd suggested something faintly unhygienic.
"Or somewhere else," I added quickly. "Coffee shop. Wherever."
Thalia cut in before I could even start enjoying the loophole. "No, no, no. It'll be at percy place. And I'll be there."