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Percy is seven. It’s a number he can count to in his head in a different language, something that isn’t English. When he speaks it out loud in his first, public school, they make him sit with the school psychologist for an hour every day.
The woman is old and she smells like she hates children, like a rotting underground, and she tells the officials she cannot figure out what is wrong with him for a very long time. Then the diagnoses start being read out loud. Attention deficit hyperactive disorder, dyslexia, dyscalculia, words that concern his mom.
Percy understands English and if he tries hard enough, he can read, his head just hurts too much when he does. He can speak English too, knows he can, because that’s how he talks to his mom most of the time, and the kids at school. He can’t help but switch sometimes to something else, a language that fits on his tongue far more comfortably. He wasn’t much of a talker before school, so maybe his mom didn’t understand, wasn’t aware that he didn’t think in the same language she did.
The school psychologist gives up, says he is a lost cause. On the school field trip to the waterpark, Percy’s anger at one of the children who comments on his lack of a father results in a tattered plastic slide display and several broken limbs, and he is expelled a week later.
When he asks his mother if she’s mad, she tells him she’s not. Sally Jackson is a kind woman, afraid of nothing, and she loves her son. But Percy knows her, knows that there’s regret in her eyes when she looks at him, knows that something isn’t right about the life he’s living. His heart yearns for something else, and when he dreams he’s submerged underwater.
The first time he’s expelled, his mom takes him to Montauk. It’s cold, but he runs out into the water anyway, barefoot while she sits on the rocks and sand fully clothed. “Be safe,” she yells at him, but she doesn’t question him when he barrels face-first into the frigid water, isn’t afraid he’ll drown. She is waiting for him to come into something about himself, and Percy is seven when he learns he can breathe underwater. He doesn’t feel the frigid depths of the water, doesn’t question the voices he hears around him in that language he knows like it is written into his soul, doesn’t allow himself to doubt any more.
There is no question this is who he is, where he belongs. When he comes back to the surface hours later, his mother is asleep and there is a man watching over her. He is wearing an ugly shirt and looking at Sally Jackson like she has hung the moon that pulls the tides of the ocean, and then he is looking at Percy like he is a looking-glass.
Percy can’t put the words in English for how he feels, like he is tied to the ancient bedrock of this earth, like he is meant for something more, like his body is fighting torturously between the water and the beach and his mother. He’s seven, too young to feel the weight of the world. His father disappears in a moment’s glance, but he tells Percy everything.
/
Gabe Ugliano comes into Percy’s life when he’s eight. Percy understands a lot, not arithmetic or the alphabet but he understands a lot about the way the world works, can’t quite understand Gabe’s place in it. The man fills him with anger that’s indescribable in any language. He puts his hands in strange places on his mom’s body and his teeth are cigarette-stained yellow and he is an ugly unpredictable eyesore, he is the worst choice in a partner his mother could make. But Percy loves his mother, enough to respect her when she lies and tells Percy she loves this man, because she is only a human but she knows so much, so well.
They get married in a backwards church, and Percy feels uncomfortable the entire ceremony, like the angels on the stairwell with rusted-over cherubic faces want to kill him. His suit is too small and there is a pit in his stomach and there is a language written on the walls when they leave, a language that he can understand, an enemy.
He stays the night with a babysitter, after. And then Gabe is in his space, a disgusting stench lingers in his home, and he does not feel safe anymore. Gabe does not touch him at first, acts like he is a rat off the street in their cramped two-bedroom apartment. Then suddenly, there are old beer bottles in his closet and lottery tickets that smell like sewage under his bed, and when he cannot sleep at night he crawls out on his blanket to the fire escape and dreams about drowning in the snow.
He plays with the snow, makes it change shape in his hands, creates castles like sand and tears them down, controls some part of his own story.
When he comes home from school the man is sitting on the couch, waiting for Sally to feed him and care for him and it fills Percy with rage. The first time, he breaks the beer bottle in Gabe’s hand, pressuring out the liquid until it explodes and he is bleeding.
“You fucking trash,” Gabe sneers at him. “Get me a towel.”
But Percy says nothing, stares at this ugly creature like he is a monster, like he is in shock.
“Waste of space shit,” Gabe mutters when he gets up, pushing Percy to the side with a bloody hand and grabbing Sally’s favorite baking towel. Red leaks down Percy’s neck, down his shirt, and he goes to his room and he does not cry. He wonders about the future and lifts his fingers and draws the blood out of his shirt.
/
Percy is nine when Gabe starts inviting the poker buddies over. He knows their names and their spots in the rotation, knows each is as evil as the next, sees the way they look at his pretty mother like vultures. Sally is tired and Percy just got kicked out of school again, and the reasons why all blend together at this point. There are no psychologists left with any patience and he is no longer a shocking wonder child, he has somehow made it this far, he means nothing to them anymore.
He struggles to make friends, because how does he explain his odd fascinations? He watches the upper-school fencing team in the park, he finds his own way to the public pool with his mother’s faith, both concerned for him and certain that he will find a path with his father’s blessing. When he’s nine he first learns the way to the public library, he is a short child with an angry look in his eyes and the aura of something religious. He reads in a language he can understand and learns a lot more about instinct.
Percy could almost feel safe in his own home, but he doesn’t, he fears something unimaginable. He knows he can protect himself, he is a child with cuts and scrapes who plays with his wounds with blood and water. He could only be this terrified because of his mom who has a mortal soul and who is made of glass. He understands love in a way that the gods could not, that she cannot. He understands its transcendence of a life on this planet and something holy, written into a cosmos, a plane of thought.
Sally is working a late shift, like she has been a lot lately, because Gabe likes losing at poker more than making money. Percy is at the Hudson River and finds his way home late at night to five men smoking cigars in his living room, crumbs of blue cookies and seven-layer dip in front of them. Their pupils are all dilated and Gabe leers at Percy when he walks in, steps up and grabs the hood of his jacket before he escapes to his room.
“What ya doin’, boy,” he booms.
Eric is the one who is short and insecure about it, with balding blond hair. “Pretty boy that girl got, huh.” Eddie commiserates. Nate looks at Percy like he is not a child but something to eat.
Gabe’s fingers tug Percy closer until he is against the man’s guacamole-stained shirt, and he can smell the stench of human in a way that makes him want to gag. He is full of disgust, like he is when he thinks about the state of the river or the bruises his mother hides that he cannot protect her from because he is not as he wants to be, only half of what he could be, trapped to feel so much.
Before Gabe can do anything, before Eric can lurch forwards, Percy grasps onto the energy in their bloodstream and pulls, pulls in a way he didn’t know was possible, plays into his instincts until he is far away from Gabe and in the shower and there are five men unconscious around a half-played round of poker in Sally’s living room.
He wishes he didn’t love his mom so much. He wishes she did not have to do this for him. He wishes the hate in his heart was not so hard to fight, that he had not paid attention in science class last week and learnt how much of the human body was water.
/
When Percy is ten, he tells the new school that his father is from Greece. The accent that underlies his words is explainable, more obvious, and he is suddenly a novelty to his classmates. They think he is secretly rich or powerful or a prince, because they are ten and they believe in fairy-tales. They are not so wrong.
Sally loses her job and then gets a new one at another café, but there are four months where there is never enough to eat and she loses her spark. They go to Montauk that summer with Gabe and he throws away her blue cookies because food cannot be blue and Percy has not had cookies in so long. He wants to encase his mother in a bubble and drag her into the ocean with him, swim with her until he can see his father again, beg a god to make her a princess.
Percy loves his mother so much, she would be his downfall. He chooses to live underwater, befriends the fish and falls in love with the coral, drags the ocean out to Gabe’s feet and freezes it around the man’s ankles. He thinks it would be so easy, just one push of his imagination, and the man would not be found for a millennium, a skeleton offering to his favorite sharks.
He never tells his mother about what Gabe’s friends try to do because he can stop them and she needs to watch out for herself because she cannot stop them. There are bruises on her thighs, on her arms, and she sleeps on the couch. He pulls Gabe into a dead sleep and then drags a pitcher up to her and heals her, every night.
At home, he gets hungry, not just for food but in revenge, in anger. Gabe’s friends come around and smoke and cloud up his home and leer at him and he thinks they are the worst people to ever exist, he wants to take control of their destiny, he has done his reading about the fates.
The New York Public Library has a database in Ancient Greek. Percy has learned not to learn technology but he crawls up in its boroughs and reads in a way he can, feels normal for once. Then he goes home and makes Gabe sleep and heals the scrapes on his mom’s arms and then pretends he does not hear her cry when he sleeps, like he cannot feel her tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispers in the night like she knows he can hear, like she understands him. Percy’s curse is that she cannot understand, never will, he has outgrown her far too soon.
/
The change starts when Percy is eleven. The ocean is louder, roaring in his ears, speaking to him all the time. The rivers ask to listen to him, the trees stop him in his ways, he starts to see creatures lurking behind buildings and scuttle out of view. He grows three inches and Gabe asks him for money, so once he throws the man a sand dollar and stares blankly after.
“You shit,” the man yells, his voice wheezy, gasping for air instead of smoke, “you little shit, I’m going to throw you on the streets, you fucking bastard child.” He takes the lit match in his hand and throws it at his step-son, and Percy’s shirt catches fire.
Percy does not feel anything, of course he does not, so he looks with wide-eyes at this human monster while his shirt falls off him, while smoke fills the room.
“What the fuck,” Gabe says, ugly eyes squinting, because Percy is not in pain, just standing with ashes on his chest. “What the fuck, you fucking demon.”
It feels like so much is on the verge of change and yet it is too much, to have control over this situation and also to know nothing at all. Sally is working an overtime shift and Percy wants to kill this man who has taken what he loves most and ruined it, but death is too kind a curse.
He walks to the fire escape and jumps down thirteen floors, the asphalt doesn’t kill him, he knows it wouldn’t, he walks until it starts to rain and he feels at home again, he has done this. He was just expelled from his last school because he accidentally shot a cannon. He cannot keep torturing his mom like this, she is going to die and it is going to be his fault and he is going to leave. He looks up at the heavens and begs for his father’s mercy, for anything.
/
He is sent a satyr named Grover who is not very good at hiding his goat legs when he is twelve. Percy’s worst fears are realized when Hades steals his mother but at least she is safe in the Underworld, at least he can bring her back from death. He learns the game he has been playing is the most complicated one, that the world of others like him are not actually like him, not at all.
Percy was not supposed to know. The ocean does not like to be restrained, this is a secret he and his father and mom have, that he has known, that there is something in him that has always been awake. He keeps a tight leash on this creature, this little boy who could bend blood and only spoke in Greek.
He thinks death would be too kind a death for Gabe Ugliano, he loves his mother, knows she is godly enough to send her an ultimate weapon.
A Greek monster, the statue is called, and Sally carves rough horns onto its head.