The Lightning Fart: A Parody of The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 1)

Look, I didn’t want to be a Half-Wit.

Now by “Half-Wit,” I don’t mean someone who’s, you know, not playing with a full deck, always stuck on level 1, a few pieces short of a whole pizza. If you’re that kind of half-wit…well obviously you’re not, because you never would’ve managed to read this far.

If, on the other hand, you think you might be the other kind of Half-Wit, stop reading right now and burn this book and completely forget you ever heard about Half-Wits. Because being a Half-Wit is dangerous. And gnarly. And it just might get you killed.

Now if you’re simply a normal kid who’s reading this because you feel like it and not because you think you’re a Half-Wit, then congratulations. You read for pleasure. You are now ahead of 99.99% of other kids your age.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages, please stop now and read something else. You know, something harmless, like Harry Potter. What, Harry Potter is old and boring? Well then how about that book about the teenage couple with cancer? Oh, you read it already? Well then try that one where all the dudes are trapped in the maze. You read that, too? Look, I’m not a freakin’ library. Just figure it out for yourself, geez.

With that out of the way, let me introduce myself.

My name is Percy Stinkson.

Yeah, that’s right, that’s my name. And yes, I’m constantly being made fun of for it. Apparently people think being stinky is funny. But it’s actually serious business.

And it just might get you killed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Until a few months ago, I was a student at Yancy Academy, a school for “troubled youth” in Upstate New York. I was considered “troubled” because I’d flunked out of six straight schools. The schools said it was because I didn’t try at all. But it wasn’t actually my fault: I have this learning disorder called HADD, which stands for “Homework Attention Deficit Disorder.” Due to this disorder, I can’t focus on homework for longer than 15 seconds. And if that weren’t bad enough, I also have another disorder which makes me focus on video games for as much as 16 hours at a time.

But even though it wasn’t my fault, my stupid teachers and principals blamed everything on me, so I ended up at Yancy, which is where our story begins.

One day in April we took a field trip to a museum to go look at ancient Greek art. I know, it sounds like torture: being made to do something besides play video games and watch YouTube videos. But I still had some hopes for the field trip because it was being led by our history teacher, Mr. Brunner. You wouldn’t think Mr. Brunner would be cool, because he was a middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. But he actually was really cool. And by “cool” I mean he gave me above a C.

The entire bus ride to the museum I had to listen to this girl Nancy Bobofit make fun of my friend Grover. He was an easy target: he had these two odd growths on his head that looked like horns, a weird wispy beard, and a short tail. Also, he liked to eat grass and chew on tin cans and walk on all fours and say “bahhhhhhh.”

Nancy kept calling Grover “goat-dude” and asking him what farm he lived on and stuff, which made me really angry. Of course it was really fun to tease Grover, but when Nancy was doing it that kept me from doing it, which was super annoying.

I wanted to make Nancy stop, but my hands were tied because I couldn’t afford to get detention that weekend. On Saturday the local movie theater was having a Lord of the Rings quadruple-triple feature: they’d show all three Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back, and then repeat this four times. (Luckily, my disorder did not affect my ability to concentrate on movies.)

So I just sat there until we got to the museum. When we arrived, Mr. Brunner led us to the Greek sculpture section, where we gathered around a statue of a naked Greek god.

“Can anyone tell me which god this is?” said Mr. Brunner. “Percy, how ‘bout you?”

I had no idea. I hadn’t done the reading for that week. Or for any week.

“Uh…is it Stupidos, God of Forgetting to Put On Your Clothes?” I said.

Everyone laughed. Except Mr. Brunner, who shook his head sadly.

“Percy, that answer gets a B-minus-minus,” he said. “As I hope most of you know, this is Kronos. Now who was Kronos, and why is he important? Percy, I’ll give you a second chance.”

He could’ve given me a million chances and it wouldn’t have mattered. I still had no idea.

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Mr. Brunner. “He ate something.”

“His clothes?” I said.

Mr. Brunner buried his head in his hands. “B-minus-minus-minus,” he said. “Kronos, of course, was the King of the Gods, and he ate his own children because he didn’t trust them. But Kronos’ wife hid one of the kids, Zeus, and when Zeus grew up he tricked Kronos into barfing up Zeus’s siblings. A war followed between Kronos’ kids and Kronos, and the kids won. Those kids became the 12 major Greek gods.”

“Now there’s something I’ll use in real life,” I muttered to myself.

“And why are you so sure this won’t be useful in real life?” Mr. Brunner had insane radar-ears. It was almost like he wasn’t human.

“Oh come on,” I said. “All these stories about the gods are made-up. They’re fairy tales about things that aren’t real.”

A loud thunderclap shook the building.

“See Percy?” said Mr. Brunner. “You’re upsetting them when you talk that way.”

He actually seemed serious. Apparently Mr. Brunner really believed this stuff. Great, I was being taught by a crazy person. Although that wasn’t such a bad thing, since only a crazy person would give me above a C.

After checking out a few more Greek statues, which thankfully were wearing clothes, we went outside to eat lunch. Grover and I sat away from the others, next to a fountain where the water spewed out of the blowhole of a giant dolphin. The reason we sat by ourselves wasn’t that we didn’t like the other kids. It’s just that we’d get weird looks when Grover got down on all fours and started eating the grass.

I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of Grover. “Hey goat-dude, I bought you something at the snack bar,” she said, and then dumped a handful of grass on Grover’s head.

I tried to stay cool. But then the next thing I knew, Nancy was sitting in the fountain on top of the dolphin, soaking wet, with the grass she’d dumped on Grover stuffed up her nose.

I wondered how she got there. Then I heard some of the kids whispering:

“Did you see—”

“—the dolphin farted—”

“—and it totally blew her into the fountain—”

The dolphin statue farted and blew her into the fountain? Sounded unlikely, to say the least. These must’ve been the kids with that cold that was going around, and they’d accidentally taken too much cough syrup, causing them to hallucinate.

 While I didn’t remember putting Nancy into the fountain, it was the only logical explanation. I must’ve gotten so angry at her that I blacked out while doing it.

Whatever happened, I was gonna be in trouble.

“Percy Stinkson!” said Mrs. Dodds, the icky old math teacher with pink hair who was chaperoning the trip. “You come with me!”

Mrs. Dodds led me back into the museum, where I figured I’d have to spend the rest of lunch period writing a boring essay on the Kronos sculpture. But instead of going to the Greek sculpture gallery, she took me into a gallery with no one else in it, and just stared at me.

“You really thought we’d never find out,” said Mrs. Dodds.

Uh oh. This was the day I’d dreaded my entire life: the day my teachers found out there was no such thing as Homework Attention Deficit Disorder and that all my difficulties in school were entirely due to my being lazy.

“Sorry, I should’ve tried harder,” I said. “But look at it this way: if you add up all the homework I didn’t do, I saved you hours and hours of grading!”

But Mrs. Dodds wasn’t listening. Instead, she was transforming. From her back sprouted large, leathery wings. Her fingernails became claws. Her pink hair grew into a coat of fur. And as she smiled her evil smile, I could see that she now had razor-sharp fangs.

“Whoa, sorry, I didn’t know you liked grading so much,” I said. Mrs. Dodds let out a loud screech and started stalking toward me.

“Um, security?” I said, but there were no guards to be found, even though there was a human-sized bat monster in the middle of the gallery. I will never again be surprised when I read about an art theft.

I was seconds away from being eaten by my math teacher when Mr. Brunner wheeled into the gallery. “Hey Percy, catch!” he said, and threw me a pen.

What was I supposed to do with a pen?

Mr. Brunner signaled to take the cover off. I did, and the pen transformed into…a pen without a cover on it.

“Dagnabbit, I could’ve sworn that was the right pen!” said Mr. Brunner, frantically checking his pockets.

There was no escape now. “Prepare to die, Stinkson!” said Mrs. Dodds, and she flapped her wings and flew right at me.

So I did what I always did when I got really nervous: I farted.

Mrs. Dodds was just millimeters from me when she smelled what I’d done and her face contorted into horror. She gagged and veered away, and flew right into the sword of a nearby statue. The sword pierced through her body and she exploded into white powder, leaving nothing but her chaperone badge.

I looked back toward Mr. Brunner, but he was gone.

Ok, that couldn’t have just happened, I thought. Maybe I’d taken too much cough syrup last night?

I walked back outside, still trembling from my probably-imagined fight with Mrs. Dodds. The museum staff had gotten Nancy out of the fountain and were using a chisel to pry the grass out of her nose.

“Hope Mrs. Kerr gave you a Zeus-style butt-whooping,” Nancy said.

“Mrs Kerr?” I said. “Who’s that?” But Nancy couldn’t hear me because it turns out her ears were stuffed with grass, too.

I walked over to Grover. “Hey Grover, who’s Mrs. Kerr?” I asked.

“Our math teacher, duh,” he said.

“But Mrs. Dodds is our math teacher.”

“Who?” he said. “We don’t have a teacher named Mrs. Dodds.”

Everyone must be playing a practical joke on me, I thought. Then I spotted Mr. Brunner. Surely he’d confirm that Mrs. Dodds was our math teacher. But before I could even say anything to him, he saw me and said, “Thank heavens, you found my pen! Mrs. Kerr and I have been looking all over for it.” Then I noticed that standing next to him was a woman I’d never seen before wearing a badge that said “CHAPERONE: Mrs. Kerr.”

This can’t be happening, I thought. It had to be the cough syrup. It had made me forget Mrs. Kerr and hallucinate being attacked by Mrs. Dodds. I’d made the entire thing up.

At least that’s what I thought until I sat down to finish lunch. I took a bite of my apple, and immediately got that annoying feeling of there being a hair in my mouth. I reached inside my mouth and searched around, and finally I found the hair and pulled it out.

It was bright pink.