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Jazz looked at Danny with disapproval, her arms crossed. Danny grinned.
“So,” he said. “How do I look?”
“I know we don’t like Wes, Danny, and that’s completely valid, considering, but don’t you think this is going a little too far?”
“What are you talking about?” said Danny, twirling on one foot. Basketball shorts were much more breathable than jeans, and they were so loose they almost felt like a skirt. He wouldn’t want to wear them every day, but it wasn’t bad for a change. “I’m just changing my look.”
“So that you look exactly like Wes?”
“You’re the one who got me the orange hair dye,” pointed out Danny, “and it’s not my fault that his celebrity doppelganger is me.”
“I thought you were going to use it for significantly less nefarious purposes,” said Jazz. “How long have you been planning this, anyway? Have you been bringing that outfit with you to school every day? And the dye?”
“Nah, I stashed it in the walls ages ago. I’ve got supplies for all sorts of scenarios.”
“As if that isn’t even weirder.” She sighed. “This is going to have unintended consequences, and I want it on the record that I told you so.”
“Jazz, if I kept a record of all the times you ‘told me so,’ it’d reach the moon.”
“Yeah, and don’t you think that might mean something?”
Jazz shook her head and pushed away from the wall. “Break’s about to end. I’m going back to class. Try to not get the cops called on you. Or Wes.”
“No guarantees!”
.
William Lancer could admit, he didn’t always count his students one by one, focusing intently on every face and asking students to remove hoodies and glasses, before taking attendance. However, after reading that horror story about a woman sneaking into a school by pretending to be her own daughter, and only being found out through social media posts, he did more often than not. Such a thing would not happen on his watch. Such a thing would not happen at Casper High.
He hoped. The presence of the shapeshifting ghost made actually following through on that much more difficult.
Even so…
There was a tiny red circle next to Wesley Weston’s name on his attendance sheet for the day, a sign that the office had marked him absent. William looked up, scanned the classroom, found a red headed student sitting in Wesley Weston’s seat, wearing a basketball jersey and fiddling with a camera and everything. Just like Wes always did.
He looked back at the attendance sheet. Now, it was sometimes wrong. There was a reason teachers took attendance every period, not just during first. However… He looked at a name further up the list. Daniel Fenton. There was no red circle next to his name. William’s eyes slid away from his computer screen, back to the classroom. Daniel’s usual seat was empty. However, his friend Sam was sitting next to it, in her seat, staring at the back of Wesley’s head with a great deal of exasperation, and much less hostility than usual.
Once again, he looked at the red headed student, and noted that the way he held himself was just a little different than usual, that his fingernails were stained orange, and his freckles were out of place.
Another student approached the imposter. “Oh, hey, Wes! I thought you were absent today.”
“Dentist,” said ‘Wes.’ “I’ve got to be at school to go to practice, yeah?”
“Right on. So… What d’you think about Fenton being absent?”
“Well,” said ‘Wes,’ equally slyly, “I’ve actually got a brand new theory about that. Have you ever heard of ley lines?”
William looked back down at his attendance sheet, marked Daniel as ‘present’ and Wesley as ‘absent.’ More and more, he thought he wasn’t paid nearly enough to deal with this.
.
“Did you hear? Wes thinks Fenton is a fairy, now.”
“What kind?”
“Really? He told me he thought Fenton was a half-sasquatch. I mean, that’s nuts, but if you look at his dad, you can kind of see where he’s coming from.”
“Wes told me that he looked up the Fenton family tree, and apparently they were cursed by witches in Salem, and that’s the real reason Amity Park is haunted.”
“You know all the ‘witches’ there were just, like, normal, falsely accused people?”
“So they say.”
“I heard he thought that Fenton was a mermaid, and that’s why he never showers after PE.”
“I thought that was just because he has a stupid birthmark.”
“That’s got to be someone misshearing something. Wes told me he had proof Fenton was grown in a lab, to be, like, a perfectly annoying being.”
“What? Didn’t he say that Fenton was, like, a curly phonograph or something?”
“... Do you mean a Kirlian photograph?”
“Dude, how do you even know about that?”
“How do you know about it? We live in a haunted town.”
Leaning against her locker and eavesdropping on all the conversations in the hall was Sam Manson. “A Kirlian photograph? Really?”
Danny, standing next to her invisibly, snickered, “Okay, that one got warped by the rumor mill, but you’ve got to admit it’s funny.”
“What happens when Wes buys an actual Kirlian photography set or something?”
“He has already, but there’s no way I’m going to stay still for him to hook me up to voltage, so it’s not doing him much good.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, uh, that’s how Kirlian photography works? You need more than a camera.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that. So, what are you going to do, now that everyone in the school thinks Wes is losing his marbles? Wash up and pretend this didn’t happen?”
“Eventually, yeah, but I figured I’d go to basketball practice. Don’t want Wes to lose his place on the team.”
“Danny, you’ve never played basketball before.”
“Sure I have, in PE!”
“Doesn’t count.”
Danny laughed again. “I’ll let the team be the judge of that. And I’d better head out before people start to think you’re just as crazy as Wes.”
Sam, obviously, didn’t see Danny go, but she felt the air around her get a little… emptier.
“Oh, man, he’s going to wind up in so much trouble. I can’t wait to tell Tucker.”
.
Danny didn’t know what Sam was worried about. Danny knew the rules for basketball. And, because he was playing someone actually athletic, and not wimpy Fenton, he could actually, like, do well. As a bonus, it’d help sell the act.
He strode into the locker room and made a beeline for Wes’s locker. Thanks to Dash, Danny knew all the lockers in the school intimately.
Okay, not all of them, but he knew whose was which, and he opened up Wes’s locker before making the clothes he was carrying himself visible inside it. Verisimilitude or not, he wasn’t wearing Wes’s clothing. That’d be gross. Who knew when he’d last washed them?
He got dressed and followed the other team members out into the gym, copying them as they started their warm ups. Ms. Tetslaff was there, with a clipboard, having the dubious honor of coaching almost every sport Casper High had. She looked at Danny, then at her clipboard, then at Danny again. She sighed, heavily.
“Weston, give me fifty.”
“Uh… Situps?”
“Laps.”
That seemed a little excessive, compared to PE, but the sports teams were supposed to be more athletic in general, so whatever. Danny took off running.
The practice continued like that, with Tetslaff shouting out instructions every once in a while. ‘Wes’ was the target of them more often than not, and Danny had to wonder if Wes had gotten on her bad side last week, or something like that. It couldn’t’ve been Danny’s fault.
Eventually, when all the other players had finished their warm ups, Tetslaff called Danny over from where she’d told him to do wall squats.
“Alright,” she said. “We’re gonna run a few games. I’ll count you off, got it? Two teams play, one rests.”
Everyone bobbed their heads, apparently already exhausted by the warm ups.
Danny (number two) wound up on a team with Dash (zero), Dale (four), Devonte (eleven), and Delmar (three), squaring off against Derek (five), Dylan (six), Dwight (eight), Dominic (one), and DeShawn (twelve).
… Did all the kids on the basketball team except Wes have names that started with D? No, wait, there was Kwan. Thank goodness. That could’ve been a bad sign.
Bleh, he sounded like Sam. Nothing bad was going to happen! To him. Hopefully, Wes would have some kind of breakdown and stop trying to expose him, because that was getting old (not to mention dangerous) really fast.
It wasn’t the nicest thing to wish on another person, but Wes was trying to expose Danny’s secret identity when there were genuine government agents running around threatening to carry out ‘lots and lots of painful experiments’ (direct quote) on his person.
But! Danny wasn’t going to focus on that right now. He was having fun. This was, like, an elite prank. One that he could only do because Wes and he had, like, the exact same face shape.
But. Dash. Dale. Not the teammates Danny would’ve chosen. But Wes had, so he’d work on them.
.
“Alright! I’m shuffling the teams,” declared Tetslaff, sounding… strangely frustrated.
“But I like this team,” said Devonte.
“Yeah! We’re winning,” agreed Delmar.
“That’s right,” said Derek, “you’re hogging the wins!”
“SHUT UP! I’m the coach, so what I say goes. NO WHINING! Weston! Switch with Dwight. Your team is up next.”
“Uh,” said Danny, when no other changes were made, “did I do something wrong?”
“NO WHINING! PLAY BALL!”
… Wasn’t that, like, a baseball thing? Oh, well, whatever. Not Danny’s problem if she got her sports idioms mixed up.
.
Danny had just gotten the ball. Well, he’d gotten the ball a whole bunch, actually. Compared to ghosts, these basketball players were practically standing still, and even Danny barely believed the sheer variety of things he’d had to steal from ghosts. A large, bright orange ball was nothing.
But unlike every other time, there wasn’t an easy pass to another player, which was the main thing he’d been going for so far, because that seemed like something that’d annoy Wes. Not getting any baskets himself.
That’d probably be secondary to the identity theft, but Danny was hoping for a matryoshka of annoyance, where Wes would find progressively more to be annoyed about the more he investigated.
On the other hand… He’d started to get just a little… competitive. There was no value in winning the game, and Danny felt like the annoyance value would be higher if his team lost a few games…
However.
It would very easy to win.
All he had to do was
… toss…
… the…
… ball…
The ball swished through the net. The gym went silent. Which was a weird, because the gym was very echoey. Silence in the gym was practically impossible.
“Where the hell did you throw that from?” demanded Dash, waving his hands.
“Here?” said Danny.
“From the other side of the court? What the f–”
“LANGUAGE, BAXTER.”
.
When Danny got home, he stopped in the bathroom to wash the dye out of his hair and remove the rest of his disguise. Then, he popped by Jazz’s room to let her know he was home.
“How was it?”
“Pretty good!” said Danny. “Kind of wild that no one called me out, though. It’s almost like Wes’s delusional and repugnant behavior drove away all his friends.”
“I do have to point out that he is right.”
“Sure,” agreed Danny. “But he’s also a massive jerk. The delusional part is more about thinking I won’t retaliate.”
“Ah, that’s fair, then.” Jazz looked at her book. “Let me know when the unintended consequences of your actions reach you. I want to add the results to my thesis.”
“Which thesis?”
“The one about the need for effective methods of stress relief for teenagers with unusual responsibilities. You’re my first case study.”
“I’m, like, your case study for all of your theses.”
“Untrue! I’m also studying Mom and Dad.”
“Plus, isn’t it super unethical to study your friends and family members?” He’d read that somewhere recently, but he wasn’t going to tell Jazz that. She’d make him read even more psychology stuff.
“Has ethical science ever been practiced in this house?” asked Jazz.
They both thought about it for a while. “We’ve done some science projects here. Like, my radiotelescope project.”
“That Mom and Dad launched on a super illegal satellite?”
“Hey, illegal doesn’t mean unethical.”
“Which was powered by ectoplasm sourced from where, exactly.”
Danny made a face. “You’re not any better with your ant torment nexus.” It hadn’t really tormented any ants, as far as he could tell, but the intention had been there.
“I acknowledge my flaws and try to move past them.”
“So stop studying me.”
“Denied.”
Danny rolled his eyes and went back to his room. Sisters were so annoying.
.
Everything was normal up until he made it to homeroom. Then, he was surrounded by the basketball team.
“Fenton,” said Dash, sounding regretful, “you’re joining the basketball team.”
“Uh,” said Danny. “No?”
“There’s no way we’re letting someone with the talent you showed yesterday scrape by wimping it up as a muscleless nerd.”
“First off, I do have muscles, secondly, I didn’t play any basketball yesterday, so I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, man,” said Kwan. “You might be able to fool Wes’s…” He stopped, staring into the air for several seconds. “Dash, bro, does Wes have any friends?”
“Presumably he has teammates,” said Danny.
“Not anymore,” sneered Dash. “He’s getting bumped to JV, now that you’re on the varsity team.”
“I’m not, though.” Danny looked at Sam, hoping for help. She shrugged. He glared at her. Tucker would back him up. It sucked that he’d caught the same bug as Wes.
“You joined practice yesterday, that means you are. Coach Tetslaff already got your parents to sign the permission forms.”
Danny squaked. “Since when?”
“Dunno. Coach is like magic. She does everything for the team.” Dash dropped a bundle of papers on Danny’s desk. “You’ve gotta fill these out, though. Or else.”
The entire basketball team nodded.
“Are you guys serious? Even you, Dwight?”
“Victory is everything,” said Dwight.
Danny looked at the papers. His parents had signed them. Traitors.
“How did you know, anyway?” said Danny. His disguise hadn’t been impenetrable, by any means, but he’d thought it was pretty good. He’d even gotten color contacts!
“If Wes had to do all those warm up exercises before he even got on the court, he would’ve been whining like a baby,” said Dominic.
“Your conspiracy theories were better put together, honestly,” said Dale. “Way too logical.”
“Also,” piped up Devonte, “you play way better than he does. You pass the ball a lot more.”
“And I’ve shoved you in lockers so much that I know the exact dimensions of your body. Wes is half an inch taller than you.”
“Okay, that’s creepy,” said Danny.
“If it helps, I think, like, most everyone else believed you were Wes,” added Dwight.
It didn’t help. “You know I’m not going to sign this. I’m not going to be on your team.”
“Coach said that us chasing you down can be our warm up.”
There was no way they’d catch Danny if he didn’t want to be caught, but that sounded so tedious. He turned to Sam. “If I don’t make it home, tell Jazz that the unintended consequences caught up with me.”