Lesson 5: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

 

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.

Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any point in 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 Latin teacher, 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 only teacher 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 expelled anyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-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.

All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, redheaded kleptomaniac girl, 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 PE for 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.

Vocabulary:

Troubled: Having a lot of problems.

Example sentence: You look troubled.

Torture: To cause someone to have lots of pain.

Example sentence: The lecture today was so long, it was torture!

Scruffy: Dirty and untidy. 

Example sentence: I don’t like to look scruffy.

Fray: When the threads of a piece of cloth break and become loose. 

Example sentence: His shirt was fraying around the collar. 

Aim: To try and hit an object by throwing or shooting something at it.

Example sentence: She aimed for the basket, and then threw the ball.

Chunk: A large piece of something.

Example sentence: There were chunks of cheese in the cake.

Scrawny: Too thin.

Example sentence: He has a scrawny neck.

Frustrated: Annoyed or angry because things are not happening the way that you want them to.

Example sentence: I’m very frustrated with my lack of progress.

Excuse: To say that someone does not have to do something that they usually have to do.

Example sentence: Could I be excused from football training today?