Clarisse Blows Up Everything (Like She Always Does)

**Clarisse Blows Up Everything (Like She Always Does)** is the eighty-ninth chapter of The Gift of a Best Friend. It was first published on May 28th, 2019.

## Chapter

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**Jasmine's POV**
“You are in so much trouble,” Clarisse said.
Yeah, what else is new?
We’d just finished a ship tour we didn’t want, through dark rooms overcrowded with dead sailors. We’d seen the coal bunker, the boilers and engine, which huffed and groaned like it would explode any minute, which it definitely feels like it will. We’d seen the pilothouse and the powder magazine and gunnery deck (Clarisse’s favorite, and, I admit, it would be mine too) with two Dahlgren smoothbore cannons on the port and starboard sides and a Brooke nine-inch rifled gun fore and aft—all specially refitted to fire celestial bronze cannon balls.
Everywhere we went, dead Confederate sailors stared at us, their ghostly bearded faces shimmering over their skulls. They were interested in Percy because his name was Jackson—like the Southern general—but then he ruined it by telling them he was from New York. They all hissed and muttered curses about Yankees. Bad idea, Percy.
Tyson was terrified of them. All through the tour, he insisted both me and Annabeth hold his hand, which Annabeth wasn’t too thrilled about, and I’m surprised she agreed to do it at all. I was ok with it, while also holding Will’s hand with my free one.
Finally, we were escorted to dinner. The CSS *Birmingham* captain’s quarters were about the size of a walk-in closet, but still much bigger than any other room on board. The table was set with white linen and china. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips, and Dr Peppers were served by skeletal crewmen. I’m not sure how I felt about eating something served by ghosts, but I was hungry.
“Tantalus expelled you for eternity,” Clarisse told us smugly. “Mr. D said if any of you show your face at camp again, he’ll turn you into squirrels and run you over with his SUV.”
I snorted. “He’s too lazy to do that much. And like I care. I don’t want to go back to camp with those assholes running it.”
“Did *they* give you this ship?” Percy asked.
“’Course not,” Clarisse replied. “My father did.”
“*Ares?*”
Clarisse sneered. “You think your daddy is the only one with sea power? The spirits on the losing side of every war owe a tribute to Ares. That’s their curse for being defeated. I prayed to my father for a naval transport and here it is. These guys will do anything I tell them. Won’t you, Captain?”
The captain stood behind her looking stiff and angry. His glowing green eyes fixed me with a hungry stare. “If it means an end to this infernal war, ma’am, peace at last, we’ll do anything. Destroy anyone.”
Clarisse smiled. “Destroy anyone. I like that.”
“I do too,” I muttered. “But I’d much rather do it myself.”
Tyson gulped.
“Clarisse,” Annabeth said, “Luke might be after the Fleece, too. We saw him. He’s got the coordinates and he’s heading south. He has a cruise ship full of monsters—”
“Good! I’ll blow him out of the water.”
I chuckled. “I’d love to see you try.”
“You don’t understand,” Annabeth said. “We have to combine forces. Let us help you—”
“No!” Clarisse pounded the table. “This is *my* quest, smart girl! Finally *I* get to be the hero, and you two will *not* steal my chance.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said.
“Where are your cabin mates?” Percy asked. “You were allowed to take two friends with you, weren’t you?”
“They didn’t . . . I let them stay behind. To protect the camp.”
“You mean even the people in your own cabin wouldn’t help you?”
“I can’t blame them,” I said.
“Shut up!” Clarisse yelled. “I don’t need them! Or you!”
“Clarisse,” Percy said, “Tantalus is using you. He doesn’t care about the camp. He’d love to see it destroyed. He’s setting you up to fail.”
“Exactly,” I agreed.
“No! I don’t care what the Oracle—” She stopped herself.
“What?” Percy said. “What did the Oracle tell you?”
“Nothing.” Clarisse’s ears turned pink. “All you need to know is that I’m finishing this quest and you’re *not* helping. On the other hand, I can’t let you go . . .”
“So we’re prisoners?” Annabeth asked.
“Guests. For now.” Clarisse propped her feet up on the white linen tablecloth and opened another Dr Pepper. “Captain, take them below. Assign them hammocks on the berth deck. If they don’t mind their manners, show them how we deal with enemy spies.”
———————————————————————————————————————
After we were lead to the berth deck and agreed on which hammocks we were going to sleep on, Will and I decided to share one, with Toothless, temporarily back to a baby, sleeping on my chest.
I snuggled up close to Will, resting my head on his chest, where I could hear the sound of his steady heartbeat.
“Do you really not want to go back to camp?” Will asked me. “Ever?”
“With those assholes running it?” I replied. “No.”
“What if Annabeth went back? Would you let her go without you?”
“Clarisse just told us that we’re all expelled for eternity. She can’t go back, even if she wanted to.”
“But what if she could? Would you leave her to go back alone?”
“Of course not. We’re best friends. Best friends don’t leave each other to face things alone.”
“So you would go back to camp, even with those, and I quote, ‘assholes’ running it.”
“For Annabeth, yes.”
“That’s what I thought. But are you sure that’s the only reason why you don’t want to go back to camp?”
“Yes . . . ?”
“Are you really sure?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I think you know.”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Come on. You’re smart enough to figure it out.”
“I would normally agree, but I can’t figure out what you’re talking about, so will you please elaborate? Or, even better, just tell me exactly what you mean.”
He smiled. “Fine. Is another reason, perhaps even the main reason, you don’t want to go back to camp is because of Luke?”
I adjusted myself on the hammock so that I could look directly at his face. Toothless got up and jumped off of me, moving onto Will instead.
“What?” I asked.
“Come on, Jasmine,” Will told me. “You can’t tell me that isn’t true.”
“I’m not sure what you mean exactly.”
Will looked across from our hammock, over at Annabeth’s to make sure she was asleep, which she was.
He turned back to me. “I know you cared for Luke just as much as Annabeth did. Or does. The three of you were like a team, and—”
“Four,” I interrupted. “You should know better by now not to count out Toothless.”
He nodded in agreement.
“Right. Toothless,” Will said. “You got him from Luke, right?”
Toothless jumped onto my shoulder and rubbed his head against mine and made a noise like a cat purring. I rubbed his tiny head with my finger.
“Yeah,” I replied. “He had originally named him Black, but I thought it was obvious and stupid, so I renamed him Toothless, and he seems to like it better.”
*Yes, I do*, Toothless answered.
“Yeah,” Will said sarcastically. “Because Toothless isn’t obvious either.”
Toothless growled at him.
“Hey, no one knows he’s toothless until he shows them,” I argued.
“Even though it’s already obvious that he is when you learn his name for the first time.”
“Shut up. I was just seven when I named him, but I still wouldn’t change it. Now can you get back to your point?”
“Right. My point is, neither you nor Annabeth have ever been at camp when Luke wasn’t there with you, right?”
“Well, I’ve never been without him or Annabeth there as well, but Annabeth has without either of us.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Long, sad story. Let’s just say, it was my fault.”
“It was *your* fault?”
“Shut up. Annabeth isn’t to blame for everything.”
“Ok. . . . Anyway, so you’ve never been at camp without Luke being there too?”
“Now that you mention it, I guess not.”
“And how has it felt so far?”
“Definitely weird.”
“And?”
“Upsetting. The four of us always went to camp together, ever since we first arrived. Toothless and Luke spent more time at camp during the school year since Annabeth and I were in school and Luke wasn’t. The two of them would wait at the school bus stop with us until the bus arrived, and then wait for us when it was about time for us to get back. He always made sure he was there. There was one time where neither of them were there when we got back from school because of . . . something else, and they got sidetracked. That was the only time they were never there . . . until this year. It was just Toothless this time.”
A couple tears streaked down my face, and I quickly wiped them away. Toothless rubbed his head against mine again and licked it comfortingly.
“I’m sorry,” Will told me. “I can tell it’s been a hard year for you.”
“You have no idea. Well, actually, you do, but like—”
“I understand.”
I smiled. “I know you do.”
I leaned into him and gave him a quick kiss.
“How do you feel about Luke now?” Will asked.
I sighed. “I don’t know. I can’t believe the shit he’s done. He tried to kill Percy, and then he poisoned Thalia. I just . . . I can’t believe he did that. I mean, I always thought he liked Thalia in that way. I swear, before she was turned into that tree, before we came to camp, I saw them almost kiss.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“I did! Didn’t you see it to, Toothless?”
He nodded in agreement. *And Annabeth interrupted it.*
“Yep.”
“Ok. So Luke . . .”
“Is an asshole. He’s changed a lot in the past year, and not in a good way. We are no longer his little girls. Not after what he’s done. So far, anyway. I just hope Annabeth now realizes that.”
I took a glance towards her lying on her hammock. She appeared to still be sleeping, peacefully, which is surprising considering the day we’ve had. Percy, on the other hand, seemed to be having a bad dream.
He was tossing and turning in his hammock, saying something I couldn’t quite make out. Oh, great. I know how demigod dreams are. I especially know what kind of dreams Percy has. I wonder what he was dreaming about now . . .
“And what about Emily?” Will asked.
I turned back toward him and gave him an evil glare. “You don’t want to know what I think about that bitch.”
“You responding like that tells me what you think.”
“I still can’t believe her.”
“How has she been since last summer? Did you notice anything weird?”
“Well, she was kind of upset, like I expected her to be. But after a while, she did act a little different.”
“How different?”
“She still seemed upset, but maybe a little guilty . . . just like she did when I first saw her on that ship.”
“Because she had reunited with Luke then.”
“Yep.”
“And didn’t tell you.”
“Yep.”
“What are you going to say to her when you see her again? Like, at home?”
“I have no idea. But I’m pretty sure my grandmother has been on that ship, and I’ll have even more to say to her about it.”
“And I don’t want to be there when you do.”
“No, you probably don’t.”
“But I will be there when you’ve said all you have to say to them and want to cool off, preferably with a song.”
I gasped. “I would love that.”
“I know.” He leaned in and kissed me.
I rested my head on his chest again, Toothless on my stomach, and closed my eyes, trying to get as much sleep as we could. But it looks like we wasted more time talking rather than sleeping.
Suddenly, the alarm bells were ringing throughout the ship. I heard voices coming toward us, officers yelling orders to ready the cannon.
We all jolted up in our hammocks. We gathered up what we had left of our stuff and ran upstairs to the spar deck. I turned Toothless back into his regular self since he had room to be full-size again.
We gathered in a circle while the dead men crew rushed around us.
“Wait,” I realized. “Where’s Percy?” I looked around the deck, but I couldn’t spot him anywhere. “I thought he came up with us.”
“He could still be down in the berth deck,” Annabeth said.
I headed for the stairs.
“Jasmine!” Will called. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think?” I called back.
I went back down the stairs. But I didn’t need to, as Percy was coming up it just then, and we met half way. He was startled when he saw me. He seemed distracted, like his mind was focused on something else right now.
“Are you ok?” I asked.
He just shook his head and walked past me and up the stairs. I followed close behind him.
“What’s wrong?” Annabeth asked him when we reached the deck, noticing it too. “Another dream?”
He nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
Clarisse came up the stairs right after us. Percy was trying to avoid looking at her.
Seriously, what the hell happened down there?
Clarisse grabbed a pair of binoculars from a zombie officer and peered toward the horizon. “At last. Captain, full steam ahead!”
I looked in the same direction as she was, but I couldn’t see much. The sky was overcast. The air was hazy and humid, like steam from an iron. If I squinted real hard, I could just make out a couple of dark fuzzy splotches in the distance.
I could tell we were somewhere near the Sea of Monsters. We’d come a long way overnight, farther than any mortal ship should’ve been able to travel.
The engine groaned as we increased speed.
Tyson muttered nervously. “Too much strain on the pistons. Not meant for deep water.”
I shook my head in agreement. “No.”
After a few more minutes, the dark splotches ahead of us came into focus. To the north, a huge mass of rock rose out of the sea—an island with cliffs at least a hundred feet tall. About half a mile south of that, the other patch of darkness was a storm brewing. The sky and sea boiled together in a roaring mass.
“Hurricane?” Annabeth asked.
“No,” Clarisse said. “Charybdis.”
Annabeth paled. “Are you crazy?”
“Only way into the Sea of Monsters. Straight between Charybdis and her sister Scylla.” Clarisse pointed to the top of the cliffs.
“What do you mean the only way?” Percy asked. “The sea is wide open! Just sail around them.”
Clarisse rolled her eyes. “Don’t you know anything? If I tried to sail around them, they would just appear in my path again. If you want to get into the Sea of Monsters, you *have* to sail through them.”
“Unfortunately, she’s right,” I said.
“What about the Clashing Rocks?” Annabeth said. “That’s another gateway. Jason used it.”
“I can’t blow apart rocks with my cannons,” Clarisse said. “Monsters, on the other hand . . .”
“You are crazy,” Annabeth decided.
“Totally,” I agreed.”
“Watch and learn, Wise Girl.” Clarisse turned to the captain. “Set course for Charybdis!”
“Aye, m’lady.”
The engine groaned, the iron plating rattled, and the ship began to pick up speed.
“Clarisse,” Percy said, “Charybdis sucks up the sea. Isn’t that the story?”
“And spits it back out again, yeah.”
“What about Scylla?”
“She lives in a cave, up on those cliffs. If we get too close, her snaky heads will come down and start plucking sailors off the ship.”
“Choose Scylla then,” Percy said. “Everybody goes below deck and we chug right past.”
“No!” Clarisse insisted. “If Scylla doesn’t get her easy meat, she might pick up the whole ship. Besides, she’s too high to make a good target. My cannons can’t shoot straight up. Charybdis just sits there at the center of her whirlwind. We’re going to steam straight toward her, and train our guns on her, and blow her to Tartarus!”
She said it with such relish I almost wanted to believe her.
The engine hummed. The boilers were heating up so much I could feel the deck getting warm beneath my feet. The smokestacks billowed. The red Ares flag whipped in the wind.
As we got closer to the monsters, the sound of Charybdis got louder and louder—a horrible wet roar like the galaxy’s biggest toilet being flushed. Every time Charybdis inhaled, the ship shuddered and lurched forward. Every time she exhaled, we rose in the water and were buffeted by ten-foot waves.
I timed the whirlpool. As near as I could figure, it took Charybdis about three minutes to suck up and destroy everything within a half-mile radius. To avoid her, we would have to skirt right next to Scylla’s cliffs. I wasn’t sure which path was worse.
Undead sailors calmly went about their business on the spar deck. I guess they’d fought a losing cause before, so this didn’t bother them. Or maybe they didn’t care about getting destroyed because they were already deceased. Neither thought made me feel any better.
Annabeth stood on the other side of Percy, gripping the rail. “You still have your thermos full of wind?”
He nodded. “But it’s too dangerous to use with a whirlpool like that. More wind might just make things worse.”
“What about controlling the water?” she asked. “You’re Poseidon’s son. You’ve done it before.”
She was right, as usual. Well most of the time. Percy closed his eyes and tried to calm the sea.
“I—I can’t,” he said miserably.
“We need a backup plan,” Annabeth said. “This isn’t going to work.”
“Annabeth is right,” Tyson said. “Engine’s no good.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Pressure. Pistons need fixing.”
“He’s right,” I agreed. “This ship is practically breaking apart.”
Before either of us could explain, the cosmic toilet flushed with a mighty roaaar! The ship lurched forward and I was thrown to the deck. We were in the whirlpool.
“Full reverse!” Clarisse screamed above the noise. The sea churned around us, waves crashing over the deck. The iron plating was now so hot it steamed. “Get us within firing range! Make ready starboard cannons!”
Dead Confederates rushed back and forth. The propeller grinded into reverse, trying to slow the ship, but we kept sliding toward the center of the vortex.
A zombie sailor burst out of the hold and ran to Clarisse. His gray uniform was smoking. His beard was on fire. “Boiler room overheating, ma’am! She’s going to blow.”
“Well, get down there and fix it!”
“Can’t!” the sailor yelled. “We’re vaporizing in the heat.”
Clarisse pounded the side of the casemate. “All I need is a few more minutes! Just enough to get in range!”
“We’re going in too fast,” the captain said grimly. “Prepare yourself for death.”
“No!” Tyson bellowed. “I can fix it.”
Clarisse looked at him incredulously. “You?”
“He’s a Cyclops,” Annabeth said. “He’s immune to fire. And he knows mechanics.”
I did, too, but I haven’t been doing as much mechanics as he’s been lately.
“Go!” Clarisse yelled.
“Tyson, no!” Percy grabbed his arm. “It’s too dangerous!”
He patted his hand. “Only way, brother.” His expression was determined—confident, even. I’d never seen him look like this before. “I will fix it. Be right back.”
He followed the smoldering sailor down the hatch.
I placed a comforting hand on Percy’s shoulder. “He can do this.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t like it, obviously, but he seemed to understand.
Then came in Charybdis to distract him from worrying about Tyson.
She appeared only a few hundred yards away, through a swirl of mist and smoke and water. The first thing I noticed was the reef—a black crag of coral with a fig tree clinging to the top, an oddly peaceful thing in the middle of a maelstrom. All around it, water curved into a funnel, like light around a black hole. Then I saw the horrible thing anchored to the reef just below the waterline—an enormous mouth with slimy lips and mossy teeth the size of rowboats. And worse, the teeth had braces, bands of corroded scummy metal with pieces of fish and driftwood and floating garbage stuck between them.
Charybdis was definitely an orthodontist’s nightmare. She was nothing but a huge black maw with bad teeth alignment and a serious overbite, and she’d done nothing for centuries but eat without brushing after meals. As I watched, the entire sea around her was sucked into the void—sharks, schools of fish, a giant squid. And I realized that in a few seconds, the CSS *Birmingham* would be next.
“Lady Clarisse,” the captain shouted. “Starboard and forward guns are in range!”
“Fire!” Clarisse ordered.
Three rounds were blasted into the monster’s maw. One blew off the edge of an incisor. Another disappeared into her gullet. The third hit one of Charybdis’s retaining bands and shot back at us, snapping the Ares flag off its pole.
“Again!” Clarisse ordered. The gunners reloaded, even Toothless tried to help by shooting his plasma blast, but I knew it was hopeless. We would have to pound the monster a hundred more times to do any real damage, and we didn’t have that long. We were being sucked in too fast.
Then the vibration in the deck changed. The hum of the engine got stronger and steadier. The ship shuddered and we started pulling away from the mouth.
“Is that what I think it is?” Will asked.
“Yes!” I cheered.
“Tyson did it!” Annabeth said.
“Wait!” Clarisse said. “We need to stay close!”
“We’ll die!” Percy said. “We have to move away.”
I gripped the rail as the ship fought against the suction. The broken Ares flag raced past us and lodged in Charybdis’s braces. We weren’t making much progress, but at least we were holding our own. Tyson had somehow given us just enough juice to keep the ship from being sucked in.
Suddenly, the mouth snapped shut. The sea died to absolute calm. Water washed over Charybdis.
Then, just as quickly as it had closed, the mouth exploded open, spitting out a wall of water, ejecting everything inedible, including our cannonballs, one of which slammed into the side of the CSS *Birmingham* with a *ding* like the bell on a carnival game.
We were thrown backward on a wave that must’ve been forty feet high. We were spinning out of control, hurtling toward the cliffs on the opposite side of the strait.
Another smoldering sailor burst out of the hold. He stumbled into Clarisse, almost knocking them both overboard. “The engine is about to blow!”
“Where’s Tyson?” Percy demanded.
“Still down there,” the sailor said. “Holding it together somehow, though I don’t know for how much longer.”
“We have to abandon ship,” The captain said.
“No!” Clarisse yelled.
“We have no choice, m’lady. The hull is already cracking apart! She can’t—”
He never finished his sentence. Quick as lightning, something brown and green shot from the sky, snatched up the captain, and lifted him away. All that was left were his leather boots.
“Scylla!” a sailor yelled, as another column of reptilian flesh shot from the cliffs and snapped him up. It happened so fast it was like watching a laser beam rather than a monster. I couldn’t even make out the thing’s face, just a flash of teeth and scales.
Percy uncapped Riptide and tried to swipe at the monster as it carried off another deckhand, but he was way too slow. Toothless was standing close to me, looking up at Scylla and growling, daring her to try and get me. Aww.
“Everyone get below!” Percy yelled.
“We can’t!” Clarisse drew her own sword. “Below deck is in flames.”
“Lifeboats!” Annabeth said. “Quick!”
“They’ll never get clear of the cliffs,” Clarisse said. “We’ll all be eaten.”
“We have to try. Percy, the thermos.”
“I can’t leave Tyson!”
“We have to get the boats ready!”
Clarisse took Annabeth’s command. She and a few of her undead sailors uncovered one of the two emergency rowboats while Scylla’s heads rained from the sky like a meteor shower with teeth, picking off Confederate sailors one after another.
“Get the other boat.” Percy threw Annabeth the thermos. “I’ll get Tyson.”
“You can’t!” she said. “The heat will kill you!”
He didn’t listen, of course. But I wasn’t going to let him go alone.
He ran for the boiler room hatch, me following close behind him, when suddenly Percy was rising into the air. He was flying straight up, the side of the cliff only inches from my face. Oh, shit.
“Percy!” I called.
Scylla had somehow caught him by the knapsack, and was lifting him up toward her lair.
“Toothless!”
He shot his plasma blast at her, directly hitting the side of her face. Percy swung his sword behind him and managed to jab the thing in her beady yellow eye. She grunted and dropped him.
I jumped on top of Toothless. “Go!”
He launched himself into the air, flapping his wings as fast as he could. He managed to grab onto Percy with his claws, then he dived toward the lifeboat with Annabeth and Will on it. But it was too late.
The CSS *Birmingham* exploded below us.
*KAROOM!*
The engine room blew, sending chunks of ironclad flying either direction like a fiery set of wings. And, of course, one of them just had to hit us.
The force took Toothless by surprise that he accidentally dropped Percy and we spiraled out of control.
“Toothless!” I yelled. I held on tight to his collar and tried to pull him up straight like I’ve done so many times when flying my grandparents’ griffin, but it didn’t really help since I was below him instead of above. “Open your wings!”
Then I heard a different kind of explosion—the sound of Hermes’s magic thermos being opened a little too far. White sheets of wind blasted in every direction. Toothless spread his wings out just a second before they made contact with us, and just like when you’re flying a kite, the force was even stronger. It knocked us out of our free fall and propelled us across the ocean.
I couldn’t see anything. Once the wind pushed us out far enough that it could no longer reach us, we went spiraling down once again. We hit the water with a crash that would’ve killed me, especially being pushed down by Toothless’s weight, had I not had the powers that I did.
The water was freezing, as I expected it to be, but it also brought back bad memories. So bad that I started to panic and thrash around, which I knew was not helping me at all, but I had a hard time calming myself down enough to think straight.
The last thing I remembered was sinking in a burning, cold sea, with my dragon’s weight continuing to weigh me down, and me being afraid that I was going to drown just like I almost had so long ago.

I honestly forgot how different I wrote this chapter. It's been *forever* since I've written this.
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## Character Appearances

### Main Characters

* Jasmine Saturday
* Annabeth Chase
* Percy Jackson
* Will Solace

### Minor Characters

* Tyson
* Clarisse

### Enemies

* Scylla
* Charybdis