What Elephant
I've had this thing half-drafted for 2 years. Then yesterday @ghostfiish gave me an idea that helped click the pieces into place. Enjoy!!
...
“Trite, farcical, patronizing, an exercise in nationalistic indoctrination. They only started doing these things during World War II to boost American patriotism, you know.”
Tucker sucked a breath in through his teeth, and he closed his eyes, and he steepled his fingers together in a display of immense patience. He leaned across his desk to Danny instead, gesturing. “Okay, I will ask Danny instead. How did YOU like the pep rally?”
“Same opinion as Sam.”
“Dude come on.”
“No really. You coulda toned down the farcical a little. Maybe less indoctrination next time,” Danny said, a bit too tired for any response more sophisticated than autopilot ribbing.
Tucker spread his arms imploringly. “The light displays? Synchronized to the band playing the school anthem? Tell me I did not kill it with the light displays.”
“The band’s never gonna kill it until Tommy Marshall fixes his flat trumpet,” Sam remarked.
“Outta my control. You know Sam, you could take some inspiration from me. I saw a planning committee not up to my own standards and I stepped in to save the pep rally from itself. You should do the same. Take Tommy’s place in the marching band.”
“You joined the pep rally committee to chat up Hazel Parker,” Sam said, and it would have been an accusation if it were not Tucker’s professed and entirely non-secret plan from day one. “Besides, marching band exists for students who WANT to practice willful conformity. Pass.”
“See this is not rallying any pep in me, Sam.” Tucker paused. “The balloon thing. The balloon thing killed it. Danny you have to back me up on the balloon thing. I crushed it with the balloon thing.”
“The balloon thing was your idea?” Danny asked, only about a quarter of the way tuned in to the conversation, and about three-quarters tuned in to the idea of taking a nap.
“God you’re not rallied either. Yes it was my idea. Well I saw it in a video. But I pitched the idea to Hazel, and she loved it. Everyone loved it. Kwan getting knocked flat on his ass was a highlight of the whole rally.”
“He fell over because a balloon popped in his face,” Sam said. “Is that a highlight?”
“A very very large balloon. Everyone thought it was gonna pop three rounds earlier and instead it kept going. It had the audience enraptured. That’s what Hazel said. Enraptured.”
Danny had, admittedly, been kind of enraptured for the balloon thing. But it wasn’t so much that watching four students take turns blowing up a balloon bigger and bigger and bigger until it popped was his idea of a rallying activity. It was more that it had seemed so familiar. So close to him, like he’d done that already.
“Haters. My friends are haters,” Tucker professed, and his words were only half-swallowed by the 3pm bell. The bump and shuffle of moving bodies swept around them, donned jackets, bags zippering, weekend chatter. Tucker stood and yanked his beret in a sort of defiant gesture. “Maybe I’ll walk home with my girlfriend instead of you guys so she can tell me again how great my ideas were for the pep rally.”
“Did she say yes?” Sam asked.
“Haven’t asked her yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”
Danny had tuned out again. But something about the balloon thing was still bothering him.
…
It didn’t really click until late that night, and not until after an embarrassingly long time spent trying to mentally map through birthday parties and school functions for any recollection of playing the balloon thing. It was just that watching each student grab the balloon, and brace themselves, and heave their breath into it, at the risk—the threat—the inevitability of it popping had felt so… so familiar. Like Danny had played it. Not just once, but a hundred times.
Midnight, sleepless eyes to the ceiling, Danny figured it out.
He realized, with something between annoyance and pride, that he finally kinda understood Lancer’s unenlightening lecture about metaphor.
Blowing up the balloon was the same as keeping a secret. Or his secret, at least. Lies stacked on lies and breath shoved against breath, each with the tense moment of uncertainty. Will it pop? Did they notice? Was that the last that this could take? Lies and breath and it builds, and the secret gets gnarly and the balloon gets bigger and the weight of it adds. Until it explodes. Until everything tears itself apart in a single moment, no saying how many shreds and how many ribbons it erupts into. A disaster, a shock to everyone. And Danny, at the center.
Sleepless eyes to the ceiling, Danny found himself wishing maybe his secret would finally burst. Because the tension, the fear, the anticipation, were taking their toll.
He was too tired for this, and too unnerved. Danny shut his eyes and smothered his head in his pillow. He found himself kind of bitter about the whole thing, because this felt like something that might finally impress Lancer, and Danny couldn’t even use it in an essay without popping the whole balloon.
…
Danny’s Saturday evening found him broadcast on the local news. He’d certainly been broadcast for worse things, but this one still made his bottom-five.
The news anchor was at least kind enough to paint him as the hero, but the tone was—what was that word Sam liked?—patronizing. Dramatic, really. An overproduction, as Danny viewed it, because headwounds just happen to bleed a lot. They just do. So the newsclip of him holding half his face together with a bloodied glove was theatrical. Is Phantom reaching his limit? Can he hold off the ghosts much longer? Will Amity Park survive his destruction? Blagh. It was Skulker, and a lucky hit. It didn’t deserve an anchor who was one contemplative sigh away from lapsing into Phantom’s obituary.
Danny had the displeasure of watching this through one eye on Sam’s bedroom television while she worked a needle and thread along the 7-inch crescent gouge spanning chin to hairline.
“At least they’re making you sound cool. Like some kind of Shakespearean hero,” Sam remarked, reading the tension in Danny’s shoulders. “Better than Inviso-Bill.”
“Sam, if you make me think about Shakespeare outside of Lancer’s class I’ll find a new person to stick a needle in my face a hundred times.”
“And what options do you have? Tucker? Not a chance.”
“Jazz.”
“You think she wouldn’t talk about Shakespeare and, I dunno, brain psychology while she has you captive?”
“Point taken.” Danny winced through another needle prick. He was used to it, but not as used to it as he’d like to be.
His eye caught the mirror across from Sam’s bed. She had a second, smaller vanity mirror pressed up against his face, bright with a caustic ring light. In the dresser mirror, he watched two of himself, gauntly lit, and the angry red seam holding half his face together. His expression soured. He gently touched his chin with his right hand.
“You know I really prefer when these things stay in ghost form.”
Sam pulled the thread through. Danny winced.
“…This isn’t gonna be healed by Monday, is it?” Danny continued, defeat in his voice.
Sam shrugged. “It might be. You frequently surprise me.” Sam aligned the needle for the next stitch. “Is this about going to school? Just skip Monday.”
“I’m all out of unexcused absences.”
“Yeesh, already?” Stitch. Pull. “Get a doctor’s note. Or overshadow your parents and have them call you out.”
Danny would have nodded, if his face didn’t feel like the lip of a hooked fish. “Uh-huh,” he said, non-committal.
The balloon had already been pumped so agonizingly full. Danny thought about the late-stage game, how each additional tense breath made the whole thing worse. Delayed the inevitable. Fed into an end result more disastrous than if it would simply offer the courtesy of exploding now.
His palms were slick with sweat. The idea made his throat dry. Danny was tired.
Maybe it would be nice to simply let the whole thing finally pop.
…
Danny had honed his ability for the discreet. Certain sleeves, certain jackets, certain sweaters were suited well for covering bruises and burns.
Monday, he wore nothing of the sort. Because, after a paltry few experiments that morning with hat, and scarf, and brushed down bangs, Danny accepted the reality that there was no means to discreetly conceal hairline to chin stitches.
He could fake a doctor’s note, as Sam suggested. He could overshadow his parents. He could skip the day. He could. He could he could.
He didn’t.
He showed up with his face on full display.
He nudged open the school front doors, and he made himself a thing seen in the front foyer choked with the bluster of busy moving bodies. He hadn’t told Sam or Tucker his idea. He’d hardly thought it through himself.
He just appeared, 7 inches of gnarled clumsy stitching carving a flight path from jaw to temple, redder and more inflamed after his face spent the night bartering with the first ugly steps of healing. And he expected… something.
An accusation, really. A leading interrogation. A bursting balloon. Because Phantom’s face-gouge had been plastered in HD across the town’s televisions, a turkey slice to match his own ghastly face wound. And his absences and his oddities and his ghost-hunting parents and name and appearance all all all had to finally add up to someone. Everyone. His heart slammed out of his chest. This breath, it would burst.
Eyes found his. Eyes found his stitches. Eyebrows rose, and faces melted through a kaleidoscope of emotions until—each of them—turned away. Downcast. A nod here. A double-take there. An accusation…nowhere.
And Danny fell into his first period seat a bit stunned, a bit numb, a bit overstimulated from the promise of an exploding secret that went unmet for 10, 15, 20, 35 minutes…
Eyes found him. Eyes noticed. But they didn’t say. They wouldn’t say…
The most reaction he garnered came from Sam and Tucker themselves, not about the wound but about its brazen display. Tucker whispered sharply to him, as though warning Danny he left his pants at home. But nothing more. It would have been embarrassing, if it were not so agonizing. Like Danny were making some grand production over something really not that interesting. Ghost powers, so last year.
…
Worksheets were passed back with 15 minutes left of morning history, and Star turned to pass her stack to Danny. She hadn’t inoculated herself with an earlier glance to Danny, and she lifted her eyes to catch a face-full of gnarled head wound. In her surprise she recoiled. “Oh—woah—Jesus. What happened to your face?”
Silence. The kind which allowed for a pin to drop and echo through the room. All eyes were suddenly on him. All breaths held. And despite expecting this moment all morning, Danny found himself just as breathless.
“A um. Accident. In my parents’ lab.”
Star blinked. Star came back to herself. Her eyes widened and she nodded. “Oh. Yeah. Right, okay. Sorry about that. Like with a machine? Wow, sorry.”
She dropped the whole stack on his desk. The moment passed. The pressure held between Danny’s hands strained, unbearable. Another breath shoved inside. Another kick to his pounding heart. He could make it pop. He could kick his seat back and scream “I’m Phantom.”
But he couldn’t, actually. That was the thing about these games. It ran on the same rules as the instinct that kept you from applying enough pressure to bite your own finger off. He couldn’t bring himself to make it pop.
…
Second period passed in a haze. Stares followed him in the hallway, and he wasn’t crazy because Sam and Tucker flanking him acknowledged it too. Danny drew eyes, but nothing else. Sam had nothing, and Tucker had nothing, and Danny didn’t either.
There was a substitute for third period algebra. An old lady with glasses thicker than the bottom of a soda bottle. She hobbled down each row, insistent on passing papers out one by one. And when she got to Danny she sucked in air, magnified bug eyes honed in on him, rattling breath pulled in to ask, “Young man, are you okay? What happened to your face?”
Another breath in the balloon.
“Oh um, it was just like a little accident. His parents are scientists and they’ve got lab equipment and it was just like, some little accident,” someone answered, fast and just a little breathless.
Danny’s back straightened. A shiver racked his spine. He searched for the voice, searched among a sea of eyes all staring, and he found Hazel Parker leaning, straining, just a bit forward in her seat. Hazel’s eyes found Danny’s, and she was saying something with her stare Danny could not parse.
The substitute looked at Hazel too, and nodded at her words. “Ah, that’s frightful. I hope you’re okay, young man.”
She gave Danny the math sheet. Danny took it with palms too slick for words.
…
“You haven’t told her? Like, anything?”
“Dude, I don’t talk about you when I’m with Hazel. Why would I?” Tucker jogged up alongside Danny, keeping pace in the rush crowd heading for lunch. “She’s in history with us. She heard your excuse and she was being helpful. She’s literally just helpful.”
The lunch crowd swarmed in denser. Shoulders and elbows knocked Tucker and yet, Danny felt they never touched him. The line carried forward with the momentum of a millipede crawl, and in the sneezeguard of the salad bar Danny caught his own eyes. The reflection was a bit blurred, a bit marred by the backdrop of salad tongs and tomato slices, but the gash was unmistakable. Red and nasty and inflamed and so close to his eye, sweeping around his socket and just barely sparing anything vital to his vision. He touched a hand to the hot stitching, crusted with fluid and blood. The lunch lady was watching him, and when he looked at her, she looked away.
He was a sight to behold. He was unignorable.
The line moved. No one bothered him.
Something was wrong.
…
The bell rang. Lancer started his class with a pointed clearing of his throat, and a glance toward Danny which lingered for too long to not have noticed the mangled wound on Danny’s face. Lancer gave it no mind. He opened with a quote about Hamlet. Danny felt insane.
The opening quote was as far as Lancer got before ice crystals curled to a mist on Danny’s breath, and Danny swore dirtily along a whisper, and the whole classroom erupted seconds later with the kflatterflatckaltfltfhfllb of a hundred falling cardboard boxes.
A hundred cardboard boxes was good cover for transformation. A hundred cardboard boxes was good odds that Danny’s opponent was a bumbling idiot, and beatable with one fist behind Danny’s back, and that a handful of beware’s weren’t going to leave Danny with a matching pattern of stitches down the left side of his face.
Unfortunately, the Box Ghost came with a sort of cardboard box castle which, while not any real threat, definitely qualified as annoying. And by the time Danny had crushed down the last sentient box, the whole circus had shown up—police and fire and news truck and Fenton Assault Vehicle.
Danny found himself wishing his father respected even one traffic law as Danny sucked the Box Ghost into the thermos and immediately found himself on the receiving end of a high pitched whirrrrrrrrrrr spinning up in his ear.
Danny jerked to the side, and spun, and lunged, and got just lucky enough to evade a Fenton Projectile Rake to the heart. He instead received a Fenton Projectile Rake to either side of his neck, and through the palm of his right hand, knocking the thermos free, all very much pinning him to the classroom wall.
Danny swore dirty again, regretting only that he’d used his best swear already for the Box Ghost, who really didn’t call for the big guns all things considered.
Danny was staring into the beetle goggles of his father. Jack’s weight pressed behind the rake like a farmer who’d pinned down a vole.
“Thought you could slip outta this one, huh Ghost Boy? Well this baby’s refined with the latest in Fenton anti-ghost steel. No phasing clear of this until I’m done with you.”
Fuck, Danny thought, pulling out one of his less creative swears as he dedicated most of his brain power to thrashing and wriggling pathetically against his stupid dad’s stupid ghost rake.
“If you go quietly, I won’t promise to make it painless, but it will be easier for me, Ghost—”
“What are you doing?!”
Danny stiffened. Jack stiffened. And Jack found his monologue cut short by an utterance so raw in its panic that it caught both Danny and Jack unaware.
“What… are you doing?!”
Danny glanced sideways, as far as he could strain without slicing his neck on the rake spokes. His vision was half-marred with the edges of stitches poking through his orbital cavity. On the floor, amid a sea of scorched cardboard boxes stood Lancer, leaning forward with a burning urgency and a shock in his eyes so potent it left Danny at a loss for words.
Jack’s attention flickered back and forth between Danny and Lancer, losing a bit of momentum in his confusion. “Capturing the Ghost Boy.”
Danny’s eyes burned into Lancer, drowning in their attempt to pick apart what the horror on Lancer’s face meant. Terror, terror for Danny? And shock which had peeled some brand-new person right out of Lancer’s skin.
“Let him go. What are you doing?!” Lancer’s tongue fumbled. His eyes darted between the two. His mouth moved voicelessly, as if holding back something he shouldn’t say, like Santa Claus isn’t real. “He’s—"
Jack’s shoulders loosened a little bit as he stared Lancer up and down. “Hey, aren’t you Danny’s teacher? From the parent teacher conference? Oh, we’ve got another one coming up, don’t we?” Jack turned a fraction to Lancer, eased a fraction of his weight off the rake. “Danny hasn’t been skipping school again has he?”
Danny took his chance. He yanked the rake out. In a flash, he was gone. In his wake he left Jack, unhappily inspecting the rake still dripping ecto-green on one spoke, and Lancer, at a loss for words.
…
Because ghost attacks were common, and Casper High was parody-amounts of used to their frequency, Lancer’s class resumed with 15 minutes to spare—once the janitor had claimed all the extra cardboard boxes.
But something about Lancer hadn’t fully returned. He stood at the front of the room, and his eyes roved over the class in a so-very-deliberate way. Evenly. Not staring at any one student. Not staring at any one student who might be Danny.
“The um… the activity I had scheduled today will not fit in 15 minutes so we will… do that tomorrow I suppose,” Lancer said, with a weird tautness to his words. “Instead, please write a paragraph of your thoughts on Hamlet so far and hand it in at the end of class.” He looked at Danny, this time, as much as he pretended not to. “You can use either hand to write with, or… neither. If you’re not feeling up to the assignment, you can take a pass. This is just extra credit.”
Danny kept his pierced hand beneath the desk. His mind felt like a constant misfire. He gripped a pen with his left hand and stared at a blank sheet of paper until the bell rang.
…
Danny had taken to the sky to clear his head. A once-around the park became a lap of the town, and another and another, until the sun bled pinks and oranges into the horizon and tucked itself in under a blanket of night. He flew until the darkness masked him from the waves and the “Hey Phantom!”s that found their way aimed at him, which Danny was still clumsy with returning, as he was more used to being aimed at by the likes of ectoweaponry.
Danny knew this was all a bad idea to waste so much energy doing so much nothing, as nights tended to hit heavier with ghost attacks lately, but he’d have gone crazy sitting home. The icy whipping wind was calming, at least. And now snowfall crept in around him.
The snow was polite, sharing the same curling winds and finding its way to the ground before Danny even thought of touching a foot down. It was nice in a way. It made things quieter. It let Danny think.
He pressed his heel down to the crest of a golf hill, half-inch of snow crunching beneath his foot. Lights like a stadium poured down from the surrounding lampposts, hunched over like willows. He liked it here. He crouched onto his haunches and stared forward.
What are you doing?!
Danny shivered. The sight of Mr. Lancer never exactly evoked positive feelings in Danny, but this one had left him so very unsettled. Danny had seen his teacher’s face a half-dozen times mid ghost attack. He knew what shrieking scared Lancer looked like. This was different. This was so very else.
An actor breaking character. Staring at the stage-murderer holding the stage-victim by the throat with a real knife.
Was that it, and Danny had missed it…? Was that the balloon popping? Lancer had put two and two together, and Danny had simply been too busy with a rake spoke through the hand to notice?
No, the weirdness had started before. The weirdness followed after. The weirdness clung to him the whole day like a sticky film of pond scum. He’d bathed in it from the moment he entered the front doors.
Danny sat cross-legged. He thought about balloons, and he thought about secrets, and the cold wind whistled his ears, the only noise in the artificially-still snowy night.
Maybe Danny had gotten metaphors all wrong. That at least made sense. His English grade was in the toilet. Maybe the violent bursting of a balloon never made any sense. That happens only when a balloon is packed to exploding all at once.
Maybe his was a balloon tied off and set adrift. Set to endure for days, and weeks, and months, in the wind and the cold and it leaked, slowly, ever so slowly. One clumsy transformation against Spectra had been all it took to clue Jazz in. A leak. Vlad too. Another little leak. A balloon left poorly tended deflates all on its own. There is no final heave which can explode it. There’s nothing a tear can do to rip forth that which has already unceremoniously exhaled on its own.
Danny’s breath was cold in his chest.
Hazel to his defense. Star smoothing over her question. Lancer pleading on Danny’s behalf, aghast, aghast to find that Jack… didn’t know…
“Oh.”
The word made him dizzy. He stood, shakily, to his feet. His head was light. The idea wormed into his chest and squeezed. Invasive, twistingly uncomfortable. It wasn’t supposed to be their secret. Not yet. How long…? When…?
When was the last time Dash had tried to bother him? When was the last time Lancer had given him a hard time over a mediocre test? The cool kids were nicer to him. Danny had assumed maybe Valerie had convinced them to give him a chance. Oh god, Valerie. Valerie.
“Oh,” Danny repeated.
Adrenaline shook him, like he was web silk strummed by a spider. His cold numb hands curled as if to do something, grab something, clutching at nothing. He felt more than a little sick, because no one had given him any warning.
“Oh.”
Danny’s knees folded. He sat back down in the snow, arms curled around his shins. Cold wind whistled through his threaded arms. He hugged himself tighter, and he tried to understand the feeling eating like a worm through his heart.
…
Danny woke up without ever sleeping. And he met the morning enamored with the idea of maybe never going to school ever again. Who needed school, really? And it wasn’t like it was fair to expect him to go to school. Not when he’d gotten his lumbrical muscles impaled there literally yesterday.
Danny kicked himself out of bed and dragged his cold feet across cold floor to cold shower, grumbling, because he already knew Jazz’s lecture about “avoidant tendencies.” He twisted the nozzle and stood under the battering water and kept his bandaged hand held outside the shower, hailing a taxi, while he scrubbed his hair one-handed. Danny was good at keeping injured body parts out of the shower. Danny was less good at figuring out what the fuck he was supposed to say when he walked into school.
And he did, in fact, walk. Because the school bus was a stressful idea, and he didn’t really want to talk to Jazz yet until he knew what he knew for certain. So he walked. His damp hair frosted over stiff and icy with the wind. Gray clouds made themselves into a quiet canopy overhead. Danny’s breath curled to mist in a way he really wasn’t in the mood for, even if it was just the cold doing that.
Halfway through his walk, his annoyance started going by its real name. Anxiety was the thing wrapping his heart, making his breath short and his pulse race.
How was this his secret, and yet he was the last one to know?
And for the hundredth time since the previous night, Danny oscillated back onto the notion that maybe he was imagining things. Overthinking things. People ignoring Fenton made sense. He was the weird kid with ghost-hunting parents. People defending Phantom made sense. He was the ghost kid keeping them safe.
But if not—Danny thought, his mind swinging back the other direction, left foot over right foot, nearly stumbling in his own preoccupation—if he was right. If everyone did know his secret, what did that mean? What did that make him in their eyes? What were the thousand silent opinions of him waiting at school, which had stacked up against him when he wasn’t paying attention?
The front steps of Casper High climbed into view. Danny pushed the doors open with a sweep of cold air rushing against his back. A few remaining dead leaves scattered into the foyer with him, and the zero sets of eyes on him were in fact every set of eyes.
He walked cold through a crowd of people focusing so hard on staring past him. Danny couldn’t help but notice it now, as he hunched himself small and shouldered through the bodies and backpacks. When he looked at everyone deliberately, it was impossible to deny the gazes that were watching him first, and which each scattered at his glance like cockroaches caught under a sudden flashlight beam.
…
“Because being a half ghost makes him an absolute freak” was of course the easiest and most anxiety-inducing explanation for everyone’s avoidance of him. It was easiest because it was the most anxiety-inducing, which lit all his nerves up like a Christmas tree, and which Danny had been robbed of the chance to ask outright, since neither yesterday nor today yielded him any definitive, shocking, cards-on-the-table reveal.
Danny instead just got to wander through the halls, half inside his own head and yet painfully outside of it, as he fixated on how every single movement and step and noise of his might look from the outside perspective of someone who knew he was a weird little ghost boy, and didn’t feel like mentioning it to him.
“Dash!” Danny said, because his brain had not clocked in for its ‘think before you speak’ shift, being that it was in an 18-car-pile-up in the mental crash-out which Danny was barely holding at bay.
Dash straightened at the sound of his name. He broke off his conversation with Kwan in search of the voice.
When his eyes settled on Danny, they did not settle right away. They stared for too long at the stitches embroidering Danny’s face. He did this until he seemed to remember Danny had eyes and he should be looking at those instead.
“What?” Dash asked.
When was the last time Danny had spoken directly to Dash? Months, probably, which Danny had taken as a silent blessing and sign that Dash had moved on to other targets. Now it left Danny feeling unmoored, unable to even guess at how this should go.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how long have you known I’m Phantom and also what do you think of me and also what has everyone been saying about me all this time?
Danny did not pronounce the question like that. He instead pronounced it, “Can I borrow a pencil?”
Dash stared at him, perhaps as surprised by the question as Danny was. And all Danny’s stored impressions of Dash filled out Dash’s answer with “Buzz off,” and “Why would I give anything to a dweeb?” paired with a helpful shoulder-clip into the lockers while walking away.
Instead Dash pronounced his answer like, “Oh. Yeah.” And then fumbled a little awkwardly to unzip his sparse backpack and dig around for too long in its guts as Danny came to the realization that it would be entirely within character for Dash Baxter to simply not have a pencil.
“Here.” Dash pulled his hand out of his bag. “It’s… chewed on.”
He dropped the chewed-on pencil into Danny’s hand.
“Thanks,” Danny said, which was how he pronounced the uninterrupted screaming in his head.
…
Danny threw his tray table down with enough force to spill his milk.
“What if everyone knows?” he asked like the question had been burning a hole through his pocket all morning—as well as a hole through his thigh and muscle and femur and marrow for all the distress and pain it seemed to cause him.
“What?” Tucker asked, sipping on his own juice while Sam lifted her lunch bag away from the crawling puddle of spilled milk.
“You spilled your milk,” Sam said.
Danny fell into his seat, and his sleepless eyes were alert in the way that jumper cables might keep someone alert. His frenetic movements were not far off from someone being actively electrocuted. “Dash was nice to me! He doesn’t do that! Why did Lancer save me from my dad?”
“How’s your hand by the way?” Tucker asked between sips.
“Impaled!” Danny threw both arms wide, slightly-unraveled bandage on his right hand swaying its loose loop before settling. “With a rake! Thanks for asking!” His hands grabbed into his hair roots. At least his left hand did, because his right hand was too impaled for that. “And then for no reason at all Lancer said we could do the assignment with either hand. Total coincidence!”
“I did mine with my left hand,” Tucker said, nodding. “Looked really bad.”
“Can we focus?” Danny asked. His hands, still wrapped in his hair, pressed his head to the table. His chin was in his milk.
“So it’s likely Lancer knows,” Sam said. She placed her lunch down on the open seat to her right, since no one was cleaning up the milk. “You wanted that, right? That’s why your face is… out.” Sam motioned, and Danny felt her eyes tracing over his stitch line when he raised his head back up.
“I don’t… ‘want’ anything. It’s that I can’t keep hiding this kind of thing. I thought I was getting it over with!”
“And Lancer is… half over with,” Sam continued, carefully. “Were you expecting him to confront you? He’s probably just shocked. You are kind of shocking.”
“No, the problem is he’s not shocked,” Danny enunciated. He unraveled his hands from his hair and pressed them to the lunch table, leaning in. “He wasn’t shocked. I didn’t shock him. The only thing that shocked him was my dad attacking me! A ghost hunter attacking a ghost isn’t shocking! Unless maybe you think that hunter should already know he’s attacking his own son!”
“You’re being kind of loud,” Tucker said.
“I can be loud!” Danny said, louder. “This isn’t news to anyone! Apparently!”
“Danny, calm down a second.” Sam snaked her hands across the table, grabbing his left palm in her grip and cradling it. “Deep breaths. Just—walk me through this. So you think Lancer already knew?”
“Yes,” Danny answered.
“And—”
“And everyone else,” Danny filled in, like the words were chipping his teeth. “I think we are the last people to know Danny Phantom’s identity is an open secret at Casper High.”
The rhythm Sam’s thumb rubbed in Danny’s palm faltered.
“…No,” Tucker said. “No, that’s not possible. We’d have realized.”
“Are our alibis really that good, Tucker? Do my absences actually fly under the radar? When I show up with the same face tattoo as myself—” Danny used his free bandaged hand to point to the stitches marring his face, “—and haircut and voice and stupid gadgets and last name off by like two letters, have I really been doing that great a job of having a secret identity? Or am I just actually very stupid!”
“You’re tired, Danny, and you’re making a huge leap,” Sam said.
“Sam’s right. And if everyone knew your identity this whole time, then someone would have said something to you by now, yeah?”
“That’s exactly the thing though,” Danny said, head jerking higher, “—why haven’t they? I’m a freak, obviously, that’s obvious.”
“It could be for a nice reason,” Tucker said.
“Or it could be not nice! I mean, I’m dead—and that’s scary! Maybe no one wants to deal with that. I’m a magnet for trouble. Bad things happen around me all the time. It’s a better idea to ignore me, that’s obvious. And they’ve been doing that for who knows how long—no one wants to look me in the eyes—everyone has to have an opinion about me and this and my whole deal but no one is even willing to talk to me.”
“I just don’t think this is what is happening,” Sam cut in, trying to reground the conversation. “There is a simple explanation here, Danny. And it’s that a lot of people just don’t notice things. Humans aren’t actually observant. We’re too stuck inside our own heads to pay any attention to what other people are doing. Could you tell me what shoes Star was wearing today? Or what shirt Valerie was wearing?”
Tucker raised his hand. “I could tell you what shirt Valerie was wearing. It’s got the low neckline—”
“Could you tell me what headband Valerie was wearing?” Sam amended with an acid glare to Tucker. “And don’t you have a girlfriend now?”
“Sam, let’s try to focus on Danny’s problem here,” Tucker said as a non-answer.
“My point is, you’re stressed Danny—understandably. And I think that’s making you read way too far into the …non-ways people are interacting with you. You told everyone your stitches are from a lab accident. They believed you. Is that so impossible?”
“Also—” Tucker chimed in, “—Lancer did like, watch Phantom get hand-impaled by a rake. That is kind of shocking, if you didn’t know. Maybe he just got uncomfortable thinking about impaled hands when he was giving his instructions. Which weren’t specifically Danny Fenton’s impaled hands, necessarily.”
Danny lowered a bit in his seat. He noticed the taut-to-snapping tension in his muscles and made an effort to relax them. He tried remembering how to breathe normally next, and then think normally, after that.
“Okay,” Danny said, half swallowing the word. His eyes fell to his pants beneath the table. “There’s milk dripping on my pants.”
“Yeah that’s from when you spilled your milk,” Tucker said unhelpfully.
And for the first moment in at least 48 hours, Danny felt a hopeful twinge of normalcy in his chest. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe things were normal. Maybe nothing was changing. Maybe he could breathe, and tomorrow would be normal too. And he could focus on dealing with normal things right now, like trying to wipe the milk off his jeans.
“I’m going to go get some napkins,” Danny said.
And his hopeful glimmer of normalcy lasted just as long as it took to cross half the cafeteria, when he stepped a fraction out of the way to let Paulina pass him.
Paulina did not pass him. She looked at him, and she looked at his stitched face in a way which was both exactly the same and yet the total opposite of how Dash had stared at him.
“Sorry. I’m getting napkins,” Danny said, pointing across the cafeteria, hoping and failing to recapture the same magical spark of normalcy those words had granted him moments ago.
Paulina did not move. Instead her eyes dropped across his body, finding and settling on the milk stains just above his knees.
“Oh, that’s awful! Hold on.” Paulina thrust her tray to the side, right into the face of some 10th grade boy seated at the nearest table, who with equal confusion and willingness took Paulina’s food tray to hold. He sat passively by as Paulina grabbed his stack of napkins from his table and put herself entirely in Danny’s way.
She bent, and dabbed the napkins against Danny’s wet knees, and then looked up at him with a smile that restarted Danny’s uninterrupted internal screaming with all the power and verve of a chainsaw.
…
Danny walked into Mr. Lancer’s English class with a gash down his cheek and bandages on his impaled hand and milk stains on his knees. And Mr. Lancer did an absolutely wonderful job of looking at Danny just not enough to plausibly seem like he wasn’t looking at Danny.
Or maybe Danny was imagining that. And Danny was just insane now.
Danny sat down. Danny listened to the chatter that filled his ears. He listened to all the conversations that weren’t about him and looked at all the people not looking at him. And it was true that they were not talking about him and not looking at him, and people ignoring him was completely normal. Or it wasn’t.
Oh. No he was wrong. Paulina was waving at him.
Danny waved back with his bandaged hand. Because fuck it.
He stopped waving once Mr. Lancer ordered the class to attention with three quick taps of his ruler against his desk. The chatter died and Danny looked forward again, but he did not lower the hand he’d used to wave back to Paulina. Instead he kept it up, and he succeeded in his Venus flytrap scheme to keep his hand up for as long as it took for Lancer to look at his bandages.
“Question, Danny?” Lancer asked, and then proceeded to say exactly nothing about the bandages.
“No,” Danny said, putting his bandaged hand down. This was fine. Danny was going to take all his skin off before the end of class.
Lancer cleared his throat and opened with the same line of Hamlet he’d tried to open class with yesterday. And that was fine. And this was all fine. Danny took his notebook out. Either everyone or no one in class was thinking about him. And if they were thinking about him, it could be with every single opinion under the sun. They’d watched him get impaled with a rake yesterday, which suddenly seemed much too embarrassing. He should have dodged. His dad happened to get a cheap shot in. Danny wanted to explain that.
Maybe no one was saying anything because they were all too embarrassed for him. For the hand-rake thing. Christ.
Danny stared forward, pen performatively gripped in his left hand while he wrote exactly nothing. He was glaze-eyed and cotton-eared and Lancer was saying something about Guildenstern from very very very very far away. For a few seconds, Danny was certain he was about to throw up. He didn’t. He just kept existing, visibly wounded and broadly ignored and writing down exactly 0 notes.
40 minutes passed in the span of 5 minutes. And because Danny had not slept properly in at least three days, he was falling asleep with his eyes open. He would have, at least, had it not been for the thing more powerful than Lancer’s lecture, or the rap of a ruler to desk, or a tap on the shoulder which jarred Danny back to full shivering awareness.
And that was the rasp of icy mist that curled from his mouth.
Tucker noticed too, a quick side-glance at Danny’s quiet gasp, and Tucker stuck his hand in the air. Mr. Lancer did not call on him, but he inserted himself at the next break in Lancer’s sentences.
“Mr. Lancer! Um I think me and Danny left our science textbooks in the cafeteria. Can we go look for them?”
And before Mr. Lancer could tell him ‘No’, something else very helpfully told him no first. It came in the form of a brick-rattling eruption, and a guttural screech from somewhere down by the cafeteria, and a really embarrassingly cliché ‘You mortals cannot defeat me!’ from something that wasn’t quite hitting the enunciation on the right syllables.
Danny was awake-awake now. And so was Lancer. And so was the whole class. And Danny heard Tucker swear quietly under his breath, because the opportunity for a subtle exit was now missed. The Casper High protocol for students not immediately under attack was to stay seated in their classrooms. And that was now fully in effect for Lancer’s classroom.
“I meant can we go to the bathroom. It’s in the opposite direction from the ghost yelling. Can we go?” Tucker still tried asking.
“Mr. Foley, I—”
The rumbling slammed louder, crawling and clawing and shaking its way down the hall. And from the speed and direction of the building cacophony of malicious cackles clambering closer to Mr. Lancer’s classroom, there was not about to be any direction opposite of the ghost yelling.
Danny looked forward. And happily, he’d decided Lancer had now lost. Because Lancer now was staring at Danny. And for all the masterful strategy he’d been playing of not looking at Danny, Lancer’s hand had now thoroughly folded. Eye to eye, Lancer was seeing him.
And at that moment, a very precarious string inside Danny snapped. A limit surpassed. A balloon which either was or was not there, but which Danny now had a full mind to throw himself at with an ice pick in hand.
Danny kicked his chair back with enough force to draw every head. He stood to full height, rounded his desk, fingertips of his bandaged hand trailing over the surface of his empty notebook.
“Thanks, Tuck. But you can sit this one out,” Danny said, loud, because he was saying it for the whole room. “Watch my bag. I’m going ghost.”
“Wait,” Tucker tried to say.
Danny made the leap before he could decide not to. Cold pool. Full plunge. Ice pick stabbed into the balloon.
He’d forgotten the rings made sound when they spun out from his chest—he’d gotten used to it, background noise, filtered out from his awareness—but he heard it now, because he was more aware than he’d ever been of what it was like to watch himself transform.
“Dude…” Tucker whispered, next, a little breathless.
The ring noise was like ecto-machinery firing up. And he was ecto-machinery firing up, Danny supposed. They split across each other, black suit beneath glowing with death’s fluorescent pallor. The rings took his left arm. His right. Bloody glove snapped back in place which he hadn’t had the time to wash or sew. The upper ring swept past his hair, powerful enough to lift the bangs from his eyes and display the face gouge—crusty green now—that framed his glowing eyes.
Then it was over, and Danny Fenton was now someone else in front of his captive audience.
Every set of eyes was on him, because how could they not be? He could feel them now with absolute certainty. Every student in every seat, ringing him like he was the epicenter of an explosion which had demanded so thoroughly to be seen. Danny twisted in place. He evaluated face after face, and he found ‘shocked’ was the correct descriptor for Sam and Tucker alone.
And that was not to say there wasn’t surprise in any of the eyes watching him. But something still felt clawingly wrong as Danny stood pierced at the center of every expression. The surprise that bore into him read more like actors surprised to be cued in too early for their scene, and not at all like ‘Holy fuck, Danny Fenton is dead?’
Danny twisted more. Looked more. Looked again. Eyes and eyes and eyes and eyes as his blood pressure rose. The surprise wasn’t his focus actually. He was looking for more. For worse. Was there fear? Anger? Disgust? Annoyance? Embarrassment for Danny, maybe, because MAYBE this was an entirely cringey thing to do, Danny realized with a horrible drop of his heart.
Paulina was glowing, at least. Hands balled near her face and shaking with a barely restrained glee. Dash was watching with fascination. Kwan, Star, and Mikey watched him with expressions Danny felt reasonably confident weren’t hatred. Valerie’s desk sat empty, and Danny realized in the moment that maybe the Red Huntress had slipped out at an earlier sign of ghost activity, which Danny had missed in his absolute haze, and which maybe meant she was the “mortal” out there attempting to defeat the ghost.
It took Danny a moment to understand his legs would not move. It took him a moment more to realize air was not reaching his brain, and static had taken the place of his legs, and a tremor seized total control of his arms. He was breathing too shallowly. His heart was beating too fast. There were too many eyes, Danny realized. And too much silence. And too much uncertainty over whether he’d just dug his own grave, sealed his fate, done something impossible to take back to a sea of people who could crucify him at the altar of high school. There were eyes, and no words, and no confirmation or denial of any of the fears slicing like dental floss around his heart. Danny was back to being just about certain he was going to throw up.
The clack of a drawer snapped him back to himself. Danny spun, expecting a threat, and finding instead just Mr. Lancer, left hand pressed against the top drawer of his desk, right hand clasping the foot-long plank of wood with a key dangling off the end which was the English class bathroom pass.
“Can someone… pass this to Mr. Fenton?”
Danny stared dumbfounded. The pass was painted black, save for a white stripe down its center, and his Phantom logo painted in white above that. Someone had done that on a craft day a few weeks back. Danny no longer remembered who. Just some classmate who thought Phantom’s logo was cool, and who had enough passive support from Lancer to be handed the bathroom pass for its ad hoc makeover.
Mikey in the front row took it, passed it to Star, passed it to Kwan, passed it to Sam who hesitated a moment before passing it to Hazel, who presented it to Danny with a smile she was trying just a little bit to hide.
Danny looked at the pass, and at Hazel, and there was nothing hateful in her eyes.
“Try to keep your bathroom break to 10 minutes… Mr. Fenton. And uh… good luck,” Mr. Lancer said. Danny looked up. “—with, finding the bathroom that is. I believe it’s that way,” Mr. Lancer said, pointing in the direction of ghostly snarling and gun fire.
Danny took the bathroom pass from Hazel. Its key clattered in his grip.
“Good luck,” Hazel said, in echo of Lancer.
“With finding the bathroom?” Danny asked quietly.
“Yeah. I hear there’s a ghost that moves them.”
“Right,” Danny said, because a ghost moving bathrooms was actually very normal for Casper High.
Suddenly Danny realized there was a pair of eyes not watching him, and that was Sam, leaning back in her chair and staring so hard at the ceiling she maybe looked like she was trying to burn a hole through it.
Sam threw both her hands out, and still addressing the ceiling she asked, “Did you all know?!”
No one said anything immediately.
“I don’t… think I know anything unusual about Daniel Fenton,” Mr. Lancer said, tapping his fingers together, looking and not looking at Danny.
“I don’t know anything!” Dash shouted eagerly with his hand raised.
“Duh you don’t. Look at your grades,” Kwan said, and Dash turned around immediately to start smacking Kwan, who giggled under the assault. “Me too! Me too! I’m too stupid. I don’t know anything!”
Danny would have maybe sunk down to the floor, were it not for the shrieks and rumbles outside keeping him potently aware of the impending threat. But he was also aware of the sharp sounds of ecto-blasts, which were definitely Valerie’s gun, and which probably definitely meant Valerie had this under control for at least a few minutes.
Danny’s heart rate came down from its painful sputter. He looked across the sea of eyes again, and found no hatred, no accusation, no malice. He thought about Jazz. He thought about how long she’d known his secret before he was aware. She’d held her silence, because this was Danny’s secret, and she wanted to wait until he was ready to share it with her.
“Okay. Okay. I get it now. Well luckily, I’m stupid too. So stupid that I almost left without the bathroom pass,” Danny answered, and he hitched the pass to his utility belt. It matched.
“10 minutes, remember,” Lancer said. “Faster, if you can. I’d like to get through this lesson at least once this week.”
Danny smiled. “Five minutes,” he said, and he shot like a rocket through the still-sealed door, no bit of evidence left behind of the ghost nor his bathroom pass who’d been standing there moments ago.
Sam sighed. She dragged herself up out of her seat. She dragged an absurdly long bazooka out of her backpack, and hefted it over her shoulder, and looked at Lancer.
“Sure. Alright. Whatever. Mr. Lancer, I’m also going to the bathroom.”
“You don’t have the bathroom pass,” Tucker said. “Danny does.”
“YOU are coming to the bathroom with me,” Sam said, and she reached back into her bag and tossed an equally large bazooka into Tucker’s surprised hands.
“Sam, no, I have a girlfriend—”
“Then GIVE her a bazooka too.” A roar, and eruption, exploded from the halls. And only Tucker flinched.
“That’s okay,” Hazel said, hand half-raised. “I’m good in here. But good luck with—okay, the bathroom thing feels a little weird now. Go blast its brains out, Tuck.”
Tucker straightened, a glow entering his face. He brandished his bazooka. “So you KNEW I was cool! I didn’t need to do the pep rally at all.”
“Hand off the trigger,” Sam corrected him. “Come on. Danny’s down one rake-impaled hand, so we’re gonna lend him one.”
“Watch Danny’s bag for me!” Tucker instructed Hazel as Sam dragged him out the door.
The door slammed shut behind them. And for a moment, the roaring and blasting and screaming in the hall almost felt like silence in Lancer’s classroom.
“They’re so obvious,” Paulina remarked, stretching her arms in front of her, then straightening. “Does this mean we finally get to tell them they’re obvious?”
A blast rattled the door, and Lancer flinched at the same time as the screams of ‘This isn’t your fight, Phantom!’ ‘Nice to see you too, Ms. Huntress.’ bounced down the hall
Lancer sighed, and the exasperation was not hard to read from his face. “Maybe once Ms. Gray is back.” And the hallway rattled again, which was enough to prompt Lancer to add, “If she doesn’t kill him first.”
