Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods(51)

“You have lasted longer than most,” the old man conceded. “It was a good try.”

A good try, I thought, my mind drowning in pain.

Awesome. I couldn’t win, but at least I’d get a participation award from Old Age. After I dissolved into dust, Annabeth could frame the certificate and keep it in her dorm room when she went to New Rome University by herself.

My legs trembled. Pressed between Gary and the pole, my rib cage felt like an overtightened piano frame, ready to snap and implode.

I thought about how much pain I was going to cause Annabeth. I’d promised I would never leave her again. When we left this life, I wanted it to be together, many years from now, when we were old and gray. . . .

Wait a minute.

I felt some strength come back into my legs. I was still in agony, but maybe I was getting crushed a little more slowly?

I remembered something my buddy Jason once told me. In a moment of crisis, he’d had a dream that he was an old man, married to his girlfriend, Piper, with a bunch of grandchildren running around. He hadn’t taken the dream as an iron-clad glimpse of the future. When it comes to mortal lives, the Fates never hand out money-back guarantees. But he told me that wasn’t the point. When he’d needed it most, that vision had made him feel like there was a way forward—something to live for and fight for.

I dug my fingers harder into Gary’s arms. He grunted in surprise.

I thought about a conversation I’d had with Paul a few months back. I’d teased him about how he was getting more gray hair every year. He’d said, “Hey, getting older sucks, but it beats the alternative.” I didn’t really get that at the time. Were the only choices really dying or getting old?

When you’re a demigod, you worry a lot about staying alive. You hardly ever think about old age. I’d been so focused on just making it out of high school, becoming an adult . . . but maybe that wasn’t the ultimate goal. Getting old might be scary and difficult. It involved things I didn’t want to think about, like arthritis and varicose veins and hearing aids. But if you grew older with people you loved, wasn’t that better than any other alternative?

I glanced at Annabeth and Grover. We’d been through so much together. I imagined Annabeth with silver hair and wrinkles, chuckling as she called me Seaweed Brain for the four millionth time in our lives. I imagined Grover with tufts of white hair coming out of his ears, his back hunched as he leaned on a cane, bleating as he complained about his aching hooves, then maybe taking a nap on a bench in our beachside garden while I sat next to him, resting my aching bones as I watched the waves and smelled the sea air. Aching bones weren’t hard for me to imagine. Actually, the rest wasn’t hard to imagine, either.

Gary expected me to wrestle him. And unless I died young, I couldn’t beat Old Age. But what if I embraced him?

It was a ridiculous idea. Stop fighting and just hug it out with Geriatric Gary?

My knees started wobbling again. I had maybe one second before he crushed me against the tetherball pole.

I loosened my grip and wrapped my arms around the god.

Then I said what I was pretty sure would go down in history as the dumbest last words ever: “I love you, bro.”





Gary froze.

I hugged him so hard he hiccupped.

“What is going on?” His voice quavered as he loosened his grip on my shoulders. He was so surprised, I probably could have pushed him down onto one knee, but somehow, I knew that was the wrong move. I just kept hugging him.

I never knew my mortal grandparents. (I suppose Kronos was technically my grandpa, but I tried not to think about that.)

Now I imagined what it would’ve been like to know my mom’s parents. They’d died when she was really young. In fact, when they’d died, they had been younger than my mom was now. That kind of blew my mind. Did they laugh with the same kind of joy my mom did? Had she inherited her love of cooking or writing from them? Did they hum as they walked in the rain without an umbrella, or was that just a Sally thing? If they hadn’t died so young, they could’ve been there for my mom during her hardest years. They could have gotten to know me. Maybe Geras wasn’t such a bad guy, despite his questionable loincloth fashion choices.

As I hugged him, I imagined that I was hugging my grandparents and also embracing the idea of growing older and looking back on a great life, thinking, Well, we made it. Yeah, we’ll die someday—maybe soon—but we had a pretty good run, didn’t we?

I pictured myself holding hands with Annabeth when we were both wrinkly and frail, and I still looked into her eyes and loved her as much as ever. I imagined ruffling Grover’s gray hair when he fell asleep on a garden bench, telling him, “Wake up, there, G-man. Food’s ready!” I imagined us sitting around a table together, sharing a good meal and laughing about all the crazy things we’d done in our lives. Including that time I wrestled the god of old age in Washington Square Park.

I ignored Gary’s musty smell, his baggy skin, his liver spots and weird hairs, and I just embraced him like an old friend. A very old, past-his-expiration-date friend.

It was better than the alternative.

Living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse is a cool-sounding philosophy—until it’s your corpse people are talking about. Gary pushed me against the tetherball pole one last time, but I guess his heart wasn’t in it.