The Lightning Thief

of country road—no place you’d notice if you didn’t break down there. On our side of the highway was nothing but maple trees and litter from passing cars. On the other side, across four lanes of asphalt shimmering with afternoon heat, was an old-fashioned fruit stand.
    The stuff on sale looked really good: heaping boxes of bloodred cherries and apples, walnuts and apricots, jugs of cider in a claw-foot tub full of ice. There were no customers, just three old ladies sitting in rocking chairs in the shade of a maple tree, knitting the biggest pair of socks I’d ever seen.
    I mean these socks were the size of sweaters, but they were clearly socks. The lady on the right knitted one of them. The lady on the left knitted the other. The lady in the middle held an enormous basket of electric-blue yarn.
    All three women looked ancient, with pale faces wrinkled like fruit leather, silver hair tied back in white bandannas, bony arms sticking out of bleached cotton dresses.
    The weirdest thing was, they seemed to be looking right at me.
    I looked over at Grover to say something about this and saw that the blood had drained from his face. His nose was twitching.
    “Grover?” I said. “Hey, man—”
    “Tell me they’re not looking at you. They are, aren’t they?”
    “Yeah. Weird, huh? You think those socks would fit me?”
    “Not funny, Percy. Not funny at all.”
    The old lady in the middle took out a huge pair of scissors—gold and silver, long-bladed, like shears. I heard Grover catch his breath.
    “We’re getting on the bus,” he told me. “Come on.”
    “What?” I said. “It’s a thousand degrees in there.”
    “Come on!” He pried open the door and climbed inside, but I stayed back.
    Across the road, the old ladies were still watching me. The middle one cut the yarn, and I swear I could hear that snip across four lanes of traffic. Her two friends balled up the electric-blue socks, leaving me wondering who they could possibly be for—Sasquatch or Godzilla.
    At the rear of the bus, the driver wrenched a big chunk of smoking metal out of the engine compartment. The bus shuddered, and the engine roared back to life.
    The passengers cheered.
    “Darn right!” yelled the driver. He slapped the bus with his hat. “Everybody back on board!”
    Once we got going, I started feeling feverish, as if I’d caught the flu.
    Grover didn’t look much better. He was shivering and his teeth were chattering.
    “Grover?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What are you not telling me?”
    He dabbed his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “Percy, what did you see back at the fruit stand?”
    “You mean the old ladies? What is it about them, man? They’re not like . . . Mrs. Dodds, are they?”
    His expression was hard to read, but I got the feeling that the fruit-stand ladies were something much, much worse than Mrs. Dodds. He said, “Just tell me what you saw.”
    “The middle one took out her scissors, and she cut the yarn.”
    He closed his eyes and made a gesture with his fingers that might’ve been crossing himself, but it wasn’t. It was something else, something almost—older.
    He said, “You saw her snip the cord.”
    “Yeah. So?” But even as I said it, I knew it was a big deal.
    “This is not happening,” Grover mumbled. He started chewing at his thumb. “I don’t want this to be like the last time.”
    “What last time?”
    “Always sixth grade. They never get past sixth.”
    “Grover,” I said, because he was really starting to scare me. “What are you talking about?”
    “Let me walk you home from the bus station. Promise me.”
    This seemed like a strange request to me, but I promised he could.
    “Is this like a superstition or something?” I asked.
    No answer.
    “Grover—that snipping of the yarn. Does that mean somebody is going to die?”
    He looked at me mournfully, like he was already picking the kind of flowers I’d like best on my coffin.

GROVER UNEXPECTEDLY LOSES HIS PANTS
    C onfession time: I ditched Grover as soon as we got to the bus terminal.
    I know, I know. It was rude. But Grover was freaking me out, looking at me like I was a dead man, muttering “Why does this always happen?” and “Why does it always have to be sixth grade?”
    Whenever he got upset, Grover’s bladder acted up, so I wasn’t surprised when, as soon as we got off the bus, he made me promise to wait for him, then made a beeline for the restroom. Instead of waiting, I got my suitcase, slipped outside, and