#epic-grapes

But the grown-ups are talking, and his Aunt Alicia is praising his sister, saying that intelligent women run in the family, that she can’t wait to see what little Jazz comes up with, and his sister is looking quite proud of herself, smiling in a way that is both bashful and delighted, and he feels something bubble up inside him at the whole situation, and holds up his drawing in the middle of it all, says that he’s gonna go into space one day, gonna fly a rocket ship.

His dad likes to mumble on about how Aunt Alicia is a bitter old bat, but she stops at his outburst and looks at him and his picture and smiles a big smile and says, That’s great, kid, and it almost even sounds kind, like she’s not bothered at all by the interruption, and like she maybe might even sort of mean it. But even four-year-old Danny Fenton knows it’s not said in the same, glowing way she was just talking about his sister, but said in that way that grown-ups say things when they really mean to say stuff like how there’s no way he’s getting into NASA when even his preschool teachers are worried about him and it’s only his mother’s wrath that keeps them from saying anything more than that.

So he puts down his drawing and declares he’s going to bed, even though it’s not even eight and he’s always been one to fight bedtimes, but of course he can’t even sleep. He pulls the itchy sleeping bag over himself and tries and tries but his sister is there in a moment, his picture clutched in her hands.

“You know Aunt Alicia wasn’t trying to be mean,” she says. She puts the drawing down beside him, smiling in a way that is reassuring. “I know you’ll fly to outer space someday.”

He manages a smile back.

Danny Fenton could never fly, but he gets close with the school’s flagpole. There’s that brief second right after his underwear can’t hold him up anymore, the fabric ripping away and leaving a quick, measly gasp of milliseconds before he falls where he can imagine, maybe, that he’s flying.

And then he hits the ground. His face full of dirt, his cheeks redder than the setting sun, he hits the ground, and all around they laugh, because humans can’t fly, and especially not humans like weak, puny, loser Danny Fenton.

His sister sees. She knows all their names, and she reports it coolly and calculated, saying that this kind of behavior is unacceptable, that it’s damaging her baby brother’s psyche. And since she’s the star student of their junior high and it’s before high school sports, the principal listens and all his perpetrators are suspended. They come back to school two weeks later and they say, What a snitch! What a tattletale! And they lash out at him with even greater intensity, and this time Danny makes sure his sister does not see.

He comes home with a long-sleeved T-shirt even though it’s spring and the air is already the warm and sticky air of summer, and his sister is at the table, papers strewn all across the surface, her face hidden behind the cover of a book. She doesn’t even look up as he enters.

Mom’s worried about your grades, she says, as he puts down his bag, as he considers and reconsiders getting something to eat. She still doesn’t look his way as she tells him, You know, there are three things I’ve learned in life. Study hard, do your best…

He doesn’t listen for number three.

Danny Fenton could never fly.

Danny Phantom, though. He could fly.

All he’d have to do was jump, and it’d be as natural as anything. The skies were his home, the stars his friends.

Usually, anyway.

He can’t do it tonight. He thought he’d fly around town a bit before heading back to Fenton Works, let off some steam. It usually worked wonders to ease off the stress about that assignment he’d have in no way done by tomorrow, or smooth out those frustrations about his parents giving him more chores to make up for the fact that he was shirking on his chores.  Just a fly a bit, and your problems felt as tiny as everything looked from way up high. You could close your eyes and enjoy the moment and nothing else would matter. At least for a little while.

Sam always chided him it was dangerous. She’d get very in-his-face about it whenever he laughed about how much fun it is to fly, saying that he’s attracting trouble just doing it for sport way out in the open like that, and he shouldn’t draw unwanted attention to himself. And he knows well that she’s just worried—and rightfully so, maybe—but he’d always insist back that it’s practice, that he needs to understand his environment and be comfortable in the air. It’s a totally new world out there. He has to know it as his own. He’s not looking for trouble, but preparing for it. It’s definitely not just reckless fun. That’s ridiculous.

Well, it all feels like petty, stupid lies right now. He can’t even keep himself flying straight, and while most times he’d welcome a ghost attack to distract his mind even further, the thought now makes him want to throw up, and he’s not even sure ghosts can throw up. So he ducks behind a trash can and then he’s the unflying, unfabulous Danny Fenton once more, his whole body sore and aching even though that ghost didn’t hurt him much at all, and he walks at a pace of a mile an hour as the sky darkens around him and he kicks garbage across the sidewalk and thinks to himself that he can’t do this anymore, that it hurts and he’s useless anyway so he should just stop. Someone else would step up in his place.

It’s leftovers for dinner. He remembers as soon as he opens the door and last night comes flooding back and fills him with dread. He was so tired he’d fallen asleep right in his mashed potatoes, and his mom looked concerned and his dad looked concerned and Jazz looked like she was going to write another note about him in her journal, or whatever. He could just imagine it. “Subject not faring any better even after treatment. Subject is a loser.”

Whir. He opens the fridge a little more forcefully than he intended. He hears the jars rattle and the plastic sigh, but nothing breaks, and he can breathe at least a bit of a sigh of relief about that. Fingers push past the ectoplasmic samples—or whatever the heck those green test tubes next to the Kraft singles and mustard are—hands reaching for the stacks of round containers that hold yesterday’s chicken and his mom’s mashed potatoes and those freezer-burned peas that he ate just to convince himself that he was being somewhat healthy. He carries them all to the table in a big pile. Looks like no one else has eaten yet, with how much is still left.

He gets out a plate and thinks of microwaving the stuff, but then he remembers that the microwave was last used for some sort of experiment and Jazz swears that it violates all sorts of health codes so he decides he won’t put up with any of that, and takes to eating it cold. He sits down with a heavy creak of the metal chair, poking mashed potatoes with his fork, knocking around peas ‘til they fall right off his plate, straight onto the placemat his dad had sewn himself, once upon a time.

Distantly, he hears them tinkering around in the lab. His mom’s voice, full of excitement, his dad going straight for the power tools. They’re probably getting all worked up about some new killer weapon. Explains well enough why they’re not sitting around eating with him, he supposes, but that doesn’t explain anything about why Jazz isn’t there. So much for being concerned about him, right? He runs off to fight ghosts and she acts like she’s all worried, but in reality she doesn’t care about him. He’s just an experiment to her, a study, a thing to prove that she can turn even a mess like him into a success.

We used to talk all the time, she’d said, in the therapist’s room, like she really cared. Yeah, he thinks, knocking more peas over. Back when she treated him like a person.

The fork falls to the plate with a clatter, slipping right through his hand. Right. A person.

He can’t even handle getting a halfway-decent GPA. What made him think he could handle this?

The food in front of him looks more unappealing than ever. He tells himself it’s because it’s still refrigerator-cold, and chicken and mashed potatoes and peas just don’t taste good that way.

His sister doesn’t tell him what went through her mind that night until they’re both older and more grown-up—even her, when she felt so grown-up already—and he collapses down by the kitchen table, white hair shifting to black in a flurry of bright lights as he smiles and says, Well, it’s because Danny Fenton could never fly. No one suspects because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a good thing.

And she’s very quiet then, and he watches as she riffles through her bag, looking for something to clean up the mess on his arm, no doubt, even though it’s really not so bad and he’ll get to it in a moment, once he’s a little less tired.

She gets to it now. She places antiseptic and bandages on the table, tells him that if he’s not going to do it himself, she’ll do it for him. He’s too exhausted to argue.

Danny Fenton doesn’t know until his sister is dressing his wounds that night and she says, You’re wrong, you know, that back when she first learned the truth, she abandoned her schedule and sat a long time in the park, looking over the journal she kept, the one that believed that greatness was just a series of steps, a pattern, an algorithm, and anyone could reach it, if they only did the right things.

Danny Fenton doesn’t know until it’s years later that she threw the journal away before heading home, and that even though a part of her wanted to ask how and study and wonder what got it all to work, the greater part wanted to stop analyzing, to stop theorizing and thinking there’s a right and wrong answer for a moment and just be there for once, to listen without judgment.

And she says now, You think only Danny Phantom can fly, but you’re wrong, because Danny Phantom is Danny Fenton, and what I saw that night was that Danny Fenton had been flying all along, and I was just too blind to see it.