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it has been a great honor and privilege to love you
it has been a great honor and privilege to eat cold pizza on your steps at dawn
— Hera Lindsay Bird, “Pyramid Scheme”
“I’m only here to establish an alibi,” Danny says in a rush.
It’s a hot night, not even a whisper of a breeze. Amity Park gets like this in the summertime, keeping absolutely still, never quite letting daylight go. The sky overhead is not dark, but dusty, absorbing the halogen glow of the streetlamps. Sam opens her window all the way, leaning on the sill with her elbows.
“Pretty sure we sold the last one yesterday,” she drawls, “but I can check in the back.”
Danny, who’s floating between the maple tree and the same bedroom window he’d have had to conjure up a ladder to reach a year ago, gives her an imploring look. Sam might pride herself on having a heart of impact grade titanium, but even impact grade titanium has its limits. Probably. And they’re directly correlated to that look.
Which glows.
“Ugh, fine,” she sighs, stepping aside. “But just because keeping this window open is a waste of A/C.”
Danny claps his hands gratefully and slips in past her, trailing cold air over her bare shoulder. He’s switched back out of ghost mode before his feet hit the floor—quietly, without weight, more attuned to the responses of her floorboards even than she is. They’ve gotten good at this: silencing their footsteps, speaking in whispers; it’s second nature by now. The National Park Service would be proud. Leave no trace, and all.
“What’s the story this time?” Sam asks dryly. “I’m helping you study for P.E.?”
“Very funny,” Danny mutters, kneeling to untie his sneakers. His voice has a tired, stung quality to it. “Look, with Tucker out of town, my ghost-fighting cover rotation is down by half. If you didn’t wanna let me in, you could’ve said so.” Quieter, he says, “Wouldn’t blame you.”
Sam slides the window closed, hoping her full-body wince isn’t obvious. It’s been a solid month since The Whole Circus Gothica Thing, which she and Danny had happily and tacitly retitled The Circus Gothica Thing They Would Not Talk About, but things still feel pretty rough between them, not quite glued back together right.
Well, more specifically, they feel like this. Like she keeps kicking a bruise on him without realizing it.
“Come on, Danny, I’ll always let you in.” Oh, nice. “You know that. I’ll get the air mattress.”
A little of the tension fades from Danny’s face. As Sam goes to dig the air mattress out of her closet, he kicks his sneakers aside and plops down on her bed, leaning back on his hands. There’s a hole in his right sock, revealing the tip of his second toe. He lets out a long, unwinding sigh, like he’s just hiked ten miles to get here. When Sam turns to face him again, he’s dropped his head limply back, opening his throat up to the world.
“How come you couldn’t go home?” she asks, folding the air mattress over her arm.
“Mom and Dad installed some new ghost alarm tech after, uh, Inviso-Bill’s crime spree. It’s hyper-sensitive to even, like, the tiniest ecto-energy readings.” Danny groans, sticking out his tongue for emphasis. “Just coming home from school sent the whole place into lockdown… ugh… I’ll figure out a way to glitch it this weekend, but I just got done busting Skulker and I am so not in the mood.”
Sam squats on the floor at his feet to unroll the air mattress. She’s already mentally rehearsing the story she’ll feed her parents in the morning: English test, Danny came over after dinner, up late studying, can he have some breakfast. When the Fentons call the Mansons it’ll all line up; yes, their unholy anarchist son stayed over, and yes, he was here all night. Sam has told him probably fifty times that she could just as easily lie for him without involving her parents, that lying is practically her hobby, but Danny tends to feel better about everything if he’s got corroborating witnesses. He’s not like her. Dishonesty doesn’t come naturally.
“You do the chem homework?” she asks, for want of something to talk about.
“No.”
“You can copy mine.”
“It’s fine.”
Sam scowls, hurt. Since when does Danny talk to her like she’s a school counselor and he can’t get out of the appointment?
She moves to reach under the bed for the old manual hand pump—her parents would for sure hear the electric one—and Danny obligingly lifts his feet to give her room. He’s totally silent as she pulls it out, hooks it up to the valve, and stands up to grip the handlebars.
“Look, at the risk of sounding so totally neurotic—” She arches her voice, trying to sound lighter. “Are you mad at me about something, or what?”
“Mad at you?” Danny looks up at her with honest bewilderment, his eyes wide. “N-No, I… no?”
“Really? So treating your friends like they’re radioactive is the new love language?”
That manages to get a cringe out of him, at least. “Sam…”
Sam blows her bangs out of her face, already starting to sweat from the effort of pumping. Running from ghosts on the regular has done wonders for her cardio but her upper body strength leaves plenty to be desired. God, the presidential fitness test is soon, isn’t it? She should do this every night.
Actually—probably best not to think about Danny sleeping in her room every night.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she says, straining, “but you only ever come here anymore if you need to dodge your parents.” The mattress is starting to take shape, rising tiredly off of the floorboards. “I mean, how could a girl not be flattered by that, but it does kind of kill the mood when you’ll only give me half a sentence at a time.”
Danny doesn’t seem to have a response for that, which shouldn’t disappoint her but does anyway. She grits her teeth and finishes inflating the mattress in a burst of speed, panting and leaning on the handlebars when she’s done.
Danny stays silent as she puts the pump away. She sticks it back under the bed and comes back to stand in front of him, arms crossed at her chest.
He isn’t looking at her. His blue eyes are on his thumbs, bending stiffly against each other in his lap. Sam’s eyes check the scabs on his knuckles, his raw red palms.
The Whole Circus Gothica Thing—it’s not like they signed a contract.
She softens her voice. “You’re not still wigged about Freakshow, are you?”
Danny’s scoff is immediate, and too loud.
“So not wigged. Not within ten miles of wigged. He’s got a prison sentence, his crystal ball’s mosaic fodder, and apparently being dead exempts me from going to juvie for grand larceny.” With a sigh, he falls back on the bed, his arms spread wide. “Everybody goes home happy. I am beyond over it.”
He’s gotten pretty good, Sam thinks with a touch of surprise, at lying. If it were somebody else hearing that—Jazz or Lancer or, on the right day, maybe even Tucker—they might actually buy it.
She lowers herself onto the bed beside him. He doesn’t react other than to tuck in his right arm so it doesn’t end up cradling her neck. Sam’s greedy heart laments this: Would that really be so bad?
They lie like that for a while, side by side, their bare feet just brushing the floor. Sam remembers being nine, when the distance to that floor had seemed like a twenty-foot drop. She tentatively nudges Danny’s bare ankle with her own.
“It wasn’t your fault, Danny,” she says.
Danny laughs bitterly. “Right. I can phase through walls, but some freak waves a souped-up walking stick at me and the next thing you know I’m blasting cop cars left and right.”
He points a pair of finger-guns at the ceiling, firing off at nothing. Pow, pow.
“Dude, blasting cop cars is always morally correct. Have I taught you nothing?”
“I just mean…” Tiredly, he drapes his arm over his eyes—obscuring the part of him that Sam can read the best. “It’s all fun and games kicking Box Ghost’s butt back into the Ghost Zone every week, but what good did any of that do me when…”
His voice is quiet, gutted by guilt. Sam has to strain to hear it.
“When he made me hurt you.”
Sam’s heart twinges like he’s stuck a bone in it. She has no idea what to say. There’s no comfort for that, no soothing word she can imagine: sorry some stranger stuck their hand into your brain and dug too deep, sorry their fingerprints will be there forever, sorry you were scared and nobody could help you—at least it’s not the first time?
She wants to be brave enough to reach for his hand, but she’s only brave enough to touch her ankle to his again, bone to bone—no force, no lingering; a calculated accident. It feels useless.
“I mean—” His voice wobbles in a way she hasn’t heard since they were twelve, and he broke his arm falling off his scooter, and she and Tucker saw the bone sticking out under his skin, all wrong. “You matter to me more than anything, you know? You and Tucker and. And what if it was Jazz, or Mom or Dad—”
“Or Mr. Lancer,” Sam says gravely.
It’s the kind of thing that would at least get her a pity laugh under normal circumstances, but all Danny does is breathe unevenly out and run his hands over his face. Sam lets herself notice his hands, just for a little while. She forgets, sometimes, what they look like when they’re only skin and veins—no white Tyvek, no ghostly haze; just Danny, soft and plain. His wrists, she thinks, not for the first time, are so small.
“I just mean,” she goes on, trying to move past the miraculous smallness of Danny’s wrists, “you can’t beat yourself up about it. A., every spectral being in the universe already does that for you like it’s their full-time job. And B., I don’t want to harsh your vibe here, but literally any of us could die at any time, with or without you. You really wanna take that on? You didn’t even do the Chem homework.”
That doesn’t get her a pity laugh, either—but Danny does roll his head to one side, facing her, and look her in the eye. Sam sucks in a breath, a poorly disguised gasp. Her cheeks prickle with heat. Danny doesn’t seem affected, because of course he doesn’t. Why would he?
“I cut the rope,” he murmurs.
Sam approximates a shrug. “And then you caught me.”
“I watched,” Danny says,
“And then you caught me.”
“What does that matter? What if I hadn’t? What if I had just—”
“What if an asteroid obliterates the earth tomorrow?” Sam scoffs. “What if my my mom wakes up and decides she likes Nine Inch Nails?”
“Sam—” The only word that she can think of to describe his voice is tortured. Or maybe he’s just calling her bluff—maybe he knows exactly how terrified she was on the tightrope, looking pleadingly into his eyes and seeing nothing, nothing she could recognize. Maybe her posturing doesn’t amount to much when it’s him watching it. “It’s not the same. You know it’s not the same!”
Anger has sucked up the pain, now. Sam bristles. “You don’t need to yell at me.”
“Maybe I do! Maybe that’s the only way to get you to listen! You sure seem to think it solves everything!”
“Ugh!” Sam sits forcefully up, palms flat on the mattress, and glares straight ahead so as not to see him, not even in her peripheral vision. “Great strategy, man. Show up at my house in the middle of the night like I don’t have a life outside of you, then jump down my throat? Screw you, Danny!”
They both seethe in the silence. Sam has half a mind to kick him out.
“If I could get rid of these stupid powers,” Danny says fiercely, “I would.”
Sam’s frustration crumbles, just like that. What is wrong with her? Can’t go five steps into a conversation without picking up a weapon, and who cares who it gets pointed at, just so long as it’s somebody else first?
She turns her head back slightly, eyes skimming his bent knees. Her jaw is stiff. “Don’t say that.” Don’t say you wish it hadn’t happened. Don’t say you wish I wasn’t there, pushing you towards death because it was a Saturday and we were bored. Don’t say you wish I hadn’t made you.
“I mean it. There was a part of me right then that—that would’ve watched you die. And you’re just telling me to, what, blow it off? No big deal? You shouldn’t even want to touch me.”
Sam almost laughs. Almost. As if half of the things she wants, these days, don’t amount in some way or another to touching him.
She misses being nine.
“How am I supposed to get past that, Sam? In what world is it okay for me to get past that?”
Sam closes her eyes, throwing her hands up at either side of her head like she can pull the right words out of her skull. She is so out of her depth here. They both are—Tucker, too. They have been since that brilliant, boring Saturday afternoon.
“I’m not telling you to get past it. I’m telling you that I get to forgive you, okay? And I get to hate you if I want to.” Before she can restrain herself, she’s punched him lightly in the leg, her knuckles checking his kneecap through the denim. “You don’t get to forgive you, and you don’t get to hate you. And I forgive you. And I don’t hate you. And I’m sorry, Danny, but you’re just going to have to live with that.”
Her face is hot by the time she finishes. Danny’s silence grows behind her, gradually expanding, until she can almost feel its weight between her shoulder blades—until she can pretend it’s him, flush against her, setting down every single thing he’s carrying for just a few minutes, letting her prop him up.
In that silence, heavy, body-shaped, Sam hears a muffled buzz. She can feel the faint vibration through the mattress they’re sharing. Danny rummages around in his pocket and pulls out his Nokia.
“It’s Tucker,” he says.
Sam sighs and scoots back to meet him when he sits up. He cradles his phone in his lap so that they can both read the screen.
dude u know they got a bigass twineball in kansas? dad is full of facts abt this. sending pix from earlier 2day
A new message pops up. Danny opens it—it’s a blurry photo of a huge brown ball of twine. Tucker’s forehead is just visible at the bottom of the picture, his eyes staring up into the camera like he’s hoping it’s a tunnel to anywhere but where he currently is. It’s a comically unflattering angle. His parents are behind him, beholding the twine ball, with their arms around each other.
guess if u live in kansas u don’t got a lot of options. 37 hours til fryertuck is back on the grid. miss u man!
Danny laughs weakly, shaking his head. He thumbs back a response: lols. miss u 2.
“Wow, and look at that,” Sam says, gently bumping his shoulder with hers, “despite the myriad unforgivable evils you’ve committed, one humble techno-geek still wants to make sure you see a picture of the world’s largest ball of twine.”
Danny chokes back an almost inaudible noise. Sam steals a glance at his face. It’s raw with emotion.
“You guys are—” The word seems to get lost. He sets his jaw, lips folding in tight. Sam prepares herself for another argument, some fresh claim that he’s beyond forgiving, beyond wanting or knowing. But he just switches off his phone and slips it back into his pocket.
“I’m really tired,” he mumbles, defeated.
Sam chews her lip, not quite ready to let him go, not quite ready to watch the conversation recede into another Thing They Will Not Talk About. She could give him a way out, too: an offhanded comment about how Trinity of Doom is out in a few weeks, and he and Tucker had better not bail on her; another nag about the Chem homework, a smart remark about twineballs. She’s got options.
But instead she breathes in. She doesn’t get up.
“Danny?”
Danny lifts his head in answer. Their eyes meet across the dim and easy inches between them. She is so gross for complicating this, so gross for not wanting the distance to be easy.
“I will never give up on you,” she tells him.
Year by year, Sam has learned each one of Danny’s expressions—every fragile shift and variation—but right then his face does something she can’t describe. He gazes at her in the aftermath, utterly open, like he finally understands that she’s in the room. It’s piercing.
“Okay,” he says, very softly. “Would it sound totally stupid if I said thanks?”
Sam grins, getting to her feet. She won’t get too caught up in what the moment means, or what it doesn’t. She’s trying to quit wondering. For now, Danny seems okay. She wouldn’t ask for anything more than that. Not in a million years.
“You could stand to say it more,” she jokes.
And finally, finally, he smiles. “Thanks, Sam.”