Chapter Text
The ocean was too quiet.
At Montauk, water is supposed to have opinions. The tide usually snaps at the sand, gulls scream like they’re owed money, and the waves fight over who gets to smack me in the face first. But that morning the sea had gone flat as glass. No breakers. No foam. Not even a ripple where I stood waist-deep.
It wasn’t natural. Not for the Atlantic. Not for me.
I skimmed my palm across the surface. The water trembled, then smoothed itself instantly, like a hotel sheet that had been yanked tight by a perfectionist. It was waiting for me. Watching me.
I tried ducking under but the water pressed back against my shoulders—gentle, firm. Not enough to stop me if I really wanted to go under. Just enough to make me pause. It wasn’t threatening. It was worse. It felt protective. Possessive.
“Come on,” I muttered. “I’m not a museum exhibit.”
Nothing. Just that exact, unnatural calm.
On shore, my mom stood at the edge of the dunes with Estelle propped on her hip. Paul carried a travel mug and the expression of a man who had made peace with chaos before breakfast. We probably looked like a postcard—Last Morning at the Beach—if postcards included the part where the ocean refuses to move because it has a crush on you.
Mom didn’t call me in. She never worried the sea would hurt me. Mom trusted the Atlantic with me the way other moms trust seatbelts. But even from out here I could read the sadness tugging at her smile. She saw it too—the way the water had stopped treating me like its son and started treating me like… something else.
A crab bulldozed up from the sand near my knee and didn’t bother to run from my shadow. A small school of fish hung where the shallows should’ve tossed them around, hovering like punctuation at the end of a sentence I hadn’t said yet.
I turned toward shore. The calm parted—no splash, no resistance. Like even ripples didn’t want to bump me. When I stepped out, the tide slid back too quickly, leaving a perfect dry outline around my feet, as if it had tried to keep me.
“Morning swim?” Paul asked as I trudged up. He lifted the spare lid he’d filled with coffee like a peace offering.
“More like morning staring contest,” I said, taking it. “The ocean cheats.”
Estelle squealed and smacked my jaw with a sticky fist. I annotated the coffee with a sticky baby handprint and one (manly) tear. Mom kissed Estelle’s hair but didn’t look away from the water. The horizon was a thin blade. The sea hadn’t moved.
Breakfast at the beach house is usually the kind of disaster you remember fondly later. We did toast and cereal and a heroic pile of Mom’s crumpled notes, plus one banana Estelle used as a drumstick. The Seoul International Book Festival had invited Sally Jackson Blofis—my mom said her full name carefully, like it was a new sweater she wasn’t sure fit yet. She’d practiced her keynote for weeks, pacing our tiny kitchen the way a general pace before a battle. She kept changing the first paragraph and then circling back to the same line: we tell the truth to survive it.
“Don’t look so gloomy,” she said, sliding toast onto my plate. “It’s Korea, Percy. You’ll eat something amazing every day. You’ll meet new people. Maybe you’ll even have fun.”
“Yeah,” I said around toast. “Because book festivals are my natural habitat.”
“You like books,” Paul said, sifting through a stack of travel info while Estelle tried to eat the corner of a boarding pass.
“I like books where they hit monsters with swords.” I pointed at the pile. “Do any of these panels include live sword-fighting?”
“Metaphorical,” he said. “You’ll survive.”
“Debatable.”
Mom smiled, and then she said it—the nickname she always says when she wants to pull me back into the light. “Just humor me, Seaweed Brain.”
Something inside me flinched. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a tiny, treacherous sting behind my eyes that I shoved down fast enough to pull a muscle. I forced a smile. “Always do,” I said. The words tasted like old summer and something I refused to name.
Mom’s smile wobbled, because of course she caught it. She didn’t push. She just reached across and smoothed my hair the way she used to when I came home covered in sand and monster goo. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“To be clear,” I said, aiming for levity, “my official job title is Handsome Wall Décor and Bag Carrier.”
“Though I’m not handsome,” I added quickly, to the universe. “I mean, I’m not. I have a face. It’s fine. Functional.”
Paul snorted into his coffee. “Buddy, the number of gate agents and baristas who do double takes at you—”
“That’s because I look like I did crimes,” I said. “Which is unfair. I have only committed crimes against fashion.”
Estelle banged her spoon making milk airborne. I tilted my cup on instinct, so the splash arced back into the bowl.
Mom’s eyes flicked to the non-mess. She didn’t comment. She just reached for a napkin and wiped milk off Estelle’s cheeks. “Packing check?” she said. “Passports, diapers, speech, diapers, snacks, diapers—”
“I’ll do a sweep,” I volunteered, because sweeping the house for forgotten stuff is easier than sweeping your head for things you can’t fix.
I took the back hall first—bathroom, laundry hook, the closet that still smelled like wet towels and sunscreen no matter what time of year it was. In my room, the bed looked like it had lost a fight with a storm and a demigod (both true). I grabbed my charger from the floor, the paperback from under the pillow, a stray drachma that had rolled under the dresser.
And then I saw the envelope.
It sat on the dresser like it had always belonged there: heavy cream paper, my name written in Greek characters that made something in my chest sit up straight. The wax seal was a stylized trident. Subtle, Dad. Very low profile.
“Uh-huh,” I said to no one.
cracking the seal inside was a card as black and smug as a tuxedo cat, with a faint shimmer like light seen through deep water. The name across it read PERSEUS JACKSON in letters that did not care whether you liked them. A sticky note, because apparently gods use office supplies now, clung to the front. The handwriting was the kind of formal that looks casual on purpose:
For fun. Try to be young.
— Dad
My face did something between a laugh and an eye roll. I flipped the card. No numbers. No expiration. No limit printed anywhere. It hummed in my hand like a seashell that remembered the tide.
I could practically hear Poseidon clearing his throat like, son, perhaps if you purchased a small island you would remember to relax. I shoved the card back into the envelope and the envelope into my bag.
“Absolutely not,” I muttered not wanting any favors.
I did one last sweep—window latch, bedside drawer, the rock I’d never admit I kept because it looked like a tiny trident head. When I came out, Mom was stuffing a pack of wipes into a diaper bag that had seen unspeakable things. Paul had the stroller half folded, half threatening to unionize. Estelle was shouting at a Cheerio.
“Find anything?” Mom asked.
“Just my dignity,” I said. “Left it under the bed.”
Paul pointed at the stroller. “You versus this latch,” he said. “Final round.”
I squared up, whispered “be cool” at a piece of plastic, and the latch clicked like I’d offered it season tickets. Paul gave me a look.
“What?” I asked. “I’m persuasive.”
“Uh-huh.”
We packed the trunk like a game of Tetris where the pieces are made of regret. When the door finally shut, I felt that weird Montauk stillness had followed us out of the driveway, like the sea had gotten in the car, buckled up, and was critiquing Pual’s GPS settings.
The two-hour drive back to the city smelled like coffee, salt, and stale Goldfish crackers. Estelle had Opinions about traffic lights. She’d point at a red one and yell “NO” like she was a tiny traffic god. When we passed a bus, she gasped as if we’d spotted a rare migrating creature. I gave buses little waves because it made her happy. The drivers waved back because New York is secretly nice when it thinks you’re not looking.
Mom did the back-seat-mom thing—documents triple-checked, boarding passes tucked into a clear pouch, speech pages in a folder labeled DO NOT PANIC. She’d written “Jackson Blofis” on a sticky note and stuck it to the inside flap. Seeing her full name like that made my chest go all weird and warm.
“You, okay?” I asked.
“I’m excited,” she said, which was true. “And scared,” she added, which was also true.
“Good combo,” I said. “Like spicy noodles.”
“Stop talking about noodles,” Paul said. “You’re going to make me try to find a place the second we land.”
“Promise?” I said.
JFK was in a mood. The departures loop was a video game where you lose by obeying signs. We got dropped in front of the right terminal, only to discover the right terminal had decided to be the wrong terminal fifteen minutes ago because of “gate optimization,” which I’m convinced is Greek for we enjoy chaos. We schlepped luggage across moving walkways and under signs that promised nothing. Estelle pointed at airplanes and said “bird” with the confidence of an expert.
Inside, the line for check-in bent like a sea serpent and tried to eat itself. I got that thing I always get in crowds—the itch between my shoulder blades, the automatic mapping of exits, the urge to put myself between my family and whatever might go wrong. Mom squeezed my hand like she’d felt the current inside me turn.
At the counter, the agent smiled at Estelle, then at Mom. “Welcome, Ms. Blofis,” she said, glancing at the screen. She said it like a name she’d practiced. Her eyes slid to me and did that tiny double-take people do lately, like I’d been rendered in a sharper resolution than everything else.
Great. Love that.
“First time to Seoul?” she asked.
“For all of us,” Mom said.
“You’ll love it,” the agent said. “And I think your speech is fully booked. My sister has your book in Korean.”
Mom turned a shade of pink I don’t see often. “That’s… thank you.”
Estelle tried to steal the agent’s stapler, only for mom to take it from her before she could pull a Jason. We got our bags tagged and our passports checked and the weight on our souls lightened by the process, then headed to security where the line moved with the speed of tectonic plates.
Shoes off. Laptop out. Baby shoes off. Baby allowed to keep socks because she has rights. The scanner beeped at me because a drachma had gone rogue in a side pocket. The TSA guy held it up, squinted. The Mist made it read as a subway token. He shrugged and handed it back. I smiled like a person with nothing to hide, which is a thing I have never successfully looked like.
At the end of the conveyor, the stroller decided to turn into a Transformer. I talked softly to it like I was calming a skittish horse. It clicked. A nearby dad mouthed respect at me like I tamed a ragging lion. We reassembled our family from plastic bins and headed for the gate.
The concourse was a parade of languages and bad decisions. A TV droned weather in three states we weren’t in. The smell of pretzels fought the smell of pretzels that had given up. Mom found seats facing the big window. Estelle plastered her hands against the glass and gasped at the world’s largest, slowest birds.
We had time, which is both a blessing and a trap. Mom read her opening paragraph under her breath. I pretended not to listen to the parts that made my chest ache: home, survive, we tell the truth, we keep going. Paul traded the baby back and forth with the effortless hands of a guy who believed in teamwork more than magic.
A couple of travelers did that triple-take at me again, the kind where they blink and then glance away quick, like they’re worried they just stared at a celebrity or a very shiny statue. I tugged my hood up and tried to look blurrier. It didn’t work. If the Mist was doing me favors, they were not related to my face.
“Pre-boarding for families with small children,” the speaker announced. For once, the universe kissed our foreheads.
We lined up. The gate agent scanned our passes and smiled at Estelle. Her smile found me, sharpened, and then she shook her head like she’d forgotten what she was doing. “Have a… wonderful flight,” she said, a half-beat late. I said thanks to the carpet.
Boarding a long-haul flight with a toddler is like playing Tetris in a wind tunnel. Paul strapped the car seat in like a pro. I hoisted bags into overheads, apologized to six people, and made enemies with a rolling suitcase that had declared independence. Mom handled everything else, which is what she does: she handles things and makes them look easy so no one realizes how hard it is.
We buckled. The cabin vibrated with that soft before-takeoff hum that makes your bones think of bees. The safety video tried to teach us how to be human if the sky decides otherwise. The plane pushed back. Estelle frowned at this betrayal. We trundled down the runway. With roaring Engines and seats shaking the lifted off the ground.
Three rows up, a baby struck up a protest solo. Estelle glared in union, then defected when Mom tickled her toes. The plane leveled. Making New York turned into scribble. The seatback map blinked on—our route arcing north over Canada, skirting Alaska, then straight across the big blue nothing toward Korea.
“Snack?” Paul asked, because snacks are how you maintain civilization.
“Yes,” I said, because I’m not a monster.
We made it through the first hour on animal crackers and cartoons. The second hour was a negotiation about headphones. By hour three, Estelle had taken a fifteen-minute nap and awakened refreshed and furious about socks. Mom looked like someone had replaced her spine with admirable resolve. Paul handed me a look over the tray table.
“You good?” he asked quietly.
“Outstanding,” I said. “Can’t feel my knees. That means they can’t feel fear.”
He gave me a look that wasn’t fooled by jokes. “I meant… in general.” I watched the tiny plane inch across the map, our pixel selves creeping toward Hudson Bay.
“In general, I am on an airplane with my family and a bag of pretzels,” I said. “Which is better than a lot of ‘in generals’ I’ve had.”
He nodded, and then, gentler: “I know you two… drifted.”
I didn’t look at him. I watched clouds become continents and tried to remember how to breathe like it was a normal activity you could do without thinking. “Yeah,” I said. “Tides. They do that.”
“You don’t have to carry it alone.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I have a carry-on.”
He huffed a laugh, the kind that acknowledges the joke and the ache behind it. “Okay,” he said. “Just—if the carry-on gets heavy…”
“I’ll check it,” I said. “At the gate.”
He let it be. That’s his superpower. He lets things be and somehow that makes them survivable.
Over northern Canada, Zeus got bored.
It started with a shiver through the cabin, the kind that makes everyone lift their heads like meerkats. The seatbelt sign pinged. The plane did a “small”, sassy drop that made three people gasp in unison. The captain came on sounding like a calm uncle. “Bit of choppy air ahead, folks. Perfectly normal.” The sky laughed and shouldered us again.
Static crawled in my teeth. The hairs on my arms rose. Somewhere behind the thick plastic world of the cabin, something old flexed—thunderhead muscles rolling, lightning thinking about stretching.
“Hey,” I whispered under my breath, to no one who would admit was listening. “of course he wouldn’t be nice.”
The plane jittered like an insulted shopping cart. A soft crackle went through the speakers, like the storm was clearing its throat.
Mom’s hand found my arm. She wasn’t scared; she was making sure I wasn’t about to pick a fight with the king of the sky at thirty-seven thousand feet. I made my face scream, “who, me?” The turbulence eased a notch as we crossed into the endless white above Alaska.
More hours. Time gets weird up there. You eat dinner at an hour that does not believe it was dinner. You try to sleep, and your spine laughs. Estelle did her best impression of a tiny drunken sailor and finally passed out with her cheek welded to my shoulder making my arm numb and my heart weirdly full.
On the map, our pixel plane left land and slid out over the huge blue. The cabin lights dimmed. Somewhere someone started snoring like a cartoon. I stared at the cup of water on my tray. Everyone else’s glasses had little ripples from the engines. Mine was flat as a promise.
“Stop,” I told it, because I have boundaries. The water pretended innocence making me annoyed so I put it on Paul’s tray. He sipped, then quirked an eyebrow at me over the rim. I shrugged and looked out the window.
The cloud deck below us rolled like a white sea. For a second—just a second I saw a shadow glide under us, long and serpentine, as if something huge and winged was surfing the jet stream. I glanced at Paul to see if he saw what I had, his eyes were on his book, but not moving. He didn’t look up.
I leaned my forehead against the plexiglass. “Just clouds,” I told myself. The lie was gentle. let me be.
By the twelfth hour, reality was optional. We were somewhere over the Pacific. The cabin lights cycled through night and fake morning. A flight attendant passed with a cart and did the triple-take at me that strangers keep doing, like I’d been painted more carefully than the rest of the world. She blinked, smiled too brightly, and asked if I wanted something to eat. I said yes and got an egg sandwich that smelled funky
Mom dozed with her mouth half open, which she would deny later. Paul read three lines and then fell asleep upright because dads are magic and can sleep in any chair.
When the map finally started its slow curve down toward Korea, the cabin woke in little pockets of hope. People stretched. Someone clapped because they believed in applause as a weather system. The captain told us it was very early morning in Seoul even though it was night in my bones.
We came through a layer of cloud, and the world reassembled: black water veined with light, bridges like strings of pearls, highways glowing like veins in a giant. The airport appeared all at once, a constellation you could land on.
We kissed the runway, bounced, then rolled. People applauded again because apparently that’s a thing now.
Incheon at night looks like a spaceship that decided to learn manners. Glass and hush, plants in places you don’t expect plants, signs that point in three languages and actually mean it. The air was a different flavor—cleaner, sharper, like rain that had changed its mind from falling.
Estelle woke up, yawning with the fury of a betrayed queen. Mom rocked and shushed. We spilled out with the rest of humanity and followed the river of rolling suitcases. The arrivals hall opened like a cathedral. We found boarder control. The officer looked at us like people and not problems, which was a welcome new. Mom’s broken Korean made the corner of his mouth soften.
Baggage claim is where optimism goes to reconsider its choices. We stood at the carousel and pretended we weren’t timing how long it took for each bag to appear. Mine came first and immediately tried to take out a businessman. I stilled a laugh at the frightened man and took my suitcase. The stroller surfaced like a whale returning from a deep dive. Paul high-fived it. We stacked everything into a precarious tower and headed for the taxi line.
Outside, Seoul breathed on us with a flood of neon and the scent of something sweet from a bakery that had decided not to sleep. The driver had kind eyes and a dashboard full of tiny figures. He loaded our mountain of luggage like gravity worked for him. He clicked the meter, smiled in the mirror, and turned on a radio station where the singer sounded like they were smiling too. Was Korea just a place where everyone smiled?
The highway out of the airport slid under us. The Han River kept pace on our right, a black ribbon with coins of light pinned to it. Bridges stitched from shore to shore. Towers pricked the night. Traffic flowed like it had been taught choreography.
Estelle had a second wind and used it to object to the existence of car seats. Mom deployed emergency snacks and emergency forehead kisses to distract the fussing baby. Paul found my knee with his hand and squeezed once, the universal sign for we made it, almost.
I watched the river. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t think “hi” in the language water and I sometimes share. But for a heartbeat, an eddy near a pier tightened and loosened against the wind, wrong in a way only I would notice. A sleek shape broke the surface and vanished a fish probably. The river smoothed its face and pretended it hadn’t paused.
“First time in Seoul?” the driver asked, glancing back.
“Yes,” Mom said. “For the book festival.”
“Welcome,” he said, delighted. “Many readers. Good food. City very safe.”
“Big selling point,” I said. “We’re fans of safe.”
He laughed. “You will like the river. Han is very beautiful.”
I kept my voice even. “Yeah,” I said. “I can tell.”
We crossed a bridge where the lights changed color in slow pulses, like the city was breathing. I couldn’t tell if the river was looking up at me or if I was looking down at it too hard. Both felt true and wrong at once.
The taxi slid into the city center—streets bright as day, signs stacked like book spines, convenience stores glowing like aquariums. Our hotel rose out of the block like someone had taught a greenhouse to stand upright. The bellhop said annyeonghaseyo and Estelle waved like she was on a parade float, which earned her a bow so solemn it almost redeemed the entire flight.
At the desk, the clerk checked the reservation. “Two rooms,” she said, smiling at Mom. “A crib is in the room for Mr. and Ms. Blofis, and a connecting room for Mr. Jackson.” She handed over keycards. “We placed you high for a nice river view.”
“Thank you,” Mom said, her voice small with the kind of gratitude that makes you want to hug a stranger.
We rode the elevator up into the quiet. The hallway carpet was so soft it felt like walking on good news. Our door opened onto two rooms with a connecting door propped open—one with a crib already set under a reading lamp, the other with a bed that looked like it could forgive anything. A wall of window turned Seoul into a painting.
“This is too nice,” I said, because complimenting things directly is not in my skill set.
Mom put the diaper bag down like she was setting down a flag. “You deserve space,” she said. “We all do.”
Translation: I know you need a door you can close when the world is loud. She didn’t look at me when she said it. She didn’t have to.
We did the ritual: lights, outlets, where’s the kettle is, how do we not lose the keycards, where do we hide the snacks from the baby and the teenager (good luck). Paul checked the crib and pronounced it safe. Estelle pronounced the bed bouncy. I wandered to the window in my room and pressed my palm to the glass.
Seoul sprawled below like someone had poured stars into a river valley and told them to behave. The bridges made long jewelry. The Han moved with a patient authority that didn’t care who was watching.
Behind me, a faucet turned on in the bathroom—just a thin ribbon of water, then off. I hadn’t touched it. Mom’s voice floated from the other room, gentle and tired: “Percy?”
“Wasn’t me,” I said.
She appeared in the doorway between our rooms. Even exhausted, she glowed the way brave people glow when they’ve run out of adrenaline and are running on whatever comes next. “Tomorrow,” she said, smoothing Estelle’s blanket. “We do the thing.”
“You’ll be incredible,” Paul said from behind her.
“You are incredible,” I added, because one is future and one is present and both are true.
She crossed to me and put a hand on my cheek the way she used to when I was small enough for it to cover half my face. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “Both of you.”
“Always,” I said, and it was true in the ways that mattered, and also the sort of promise I try not to make anymore.
We said goodnight. The connecting door clicked softly. Their room settled into the creaks and sighs of a family making sleep happen. My room remembered it was just me.
I turned off the lamp and stood at the window again. The city went on breathing without me. Down below, the river slid through its banks like time pretending to be water.
For a breath, near the far bank, the surface stilled in a precise circle, a coin of calm laid onto velvet. It held, brightened almost—maybe it was just a trick of the light. Then a breeze walked across it, and the circle blurred, and the Han went back to pretending it had never paused.
“Goodnight,” I told no one in particular. The glass was cool under my palm. The dark pressed close and kind.
Tomorrow, my mom will speak. Tomorrow, I’d be the guy holding her bag and cracking jokes in the wings. Tomorrow, Seoul will be loud and bright and full of new people and old fears and whatever the future thinks it has planned.
Tonight, the water waited.
And I pretended I didn’t feel it waiting for me.