Tell him, Nico di Angelo, said Cupid, voice sounding a lot like someone Nico knew. Tell him that you are a coward, afraid of yourself and your feelings. Tell him the real reason you left Camp Half-Blood, and why you are always alone.
The word echoed around Nico’s head in that strangely familiar voice: coward, coward, coward. That’s what he was,
Sanırım bunu hiç kimse okumayacak
That’s how the black people feel.
Once, she asked him:
‘Richard, did you go to school much when you was little?’
And he looked at her a long moment. Then:
‘Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. I didn’t hardly go to school at all.’
‘Then how come you got to be so smart? how come you got to know so much?’
And he smiled, pleased, but he said: ‘Little-bit, I don’t know so much.’ Then he said, with a change in his face and voice which she had grown to know: ‘I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of a- bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, front, and sideways. He weren’t going to beat my arse, then. And if he tried to kill me, I’d take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.’ Then he looked at her again, and smiled and kissed her, and he said: ‘That’s how I got to know so much, baby.’
