Chapter Three
A pre-algebra textbook sat open to page 93 on Tucker's desk, a cold bottle of root beer leaving a new ring among the Venn diagrams. But Tucker's attention was divided between slogging his way through level two of Doomed and a question that had been nagging at him for weeks: why did the secret passage behind the Shaolin Temple in level three lead to a Mega-Mart? He had already searched every aisle of that virtual store for hidden Easter Eggs, dodging the warrior monks all the way, but had only succeeded in getting himself wasted by the heavily armed man behind the deli counter.
On the screen, Friar Tuck crouched behind some bushes while the first two semis roared across the Bridge of Doom. The timing here was tricky, but it was an old, familiar path for him. He counted silently, "Three, two, one," then tossed one of his precious grenades into the grille of the next truck, which skidded to a stop halfway across the bridge. He quickly dashed left, left, right... right, right, right... and jumped! The supply of power points he had saved up from previous rounds of play enabled him to leap to the top of the truck with ease, saving precious seconds and doubling his score as he snatched another power point from the clouds. Lesser players had to settle for darting between the mammoth trucks on the ground, a slower route that required a lot more skill.
It was a little frustrating, though, not being able to execute some of the more elaborate two-man moves he and Danny had worked out over the last few months of playing Doomed as a team. Still, there was something to be said for the sense of accomplishment one gets from playing solo—
The phone rang just as Tucker was preparing to make his next leap, startling him just enough to throw off his timing by a fraction of a second. He still managed to reach the other side of the river of boiling lava, but he couldn't swing his weapon around fast enough to avoid being smoked by some pink-suited amateur with the username HappyPonyGrrrrl. Friar Tuck disappeared in a fizzle of static as the words "GAME OVER" flashed on the screen; Tucker quickly switched off the sound so he wouldn't have to listen to his opponent's annoying electronic giggle.
He pulled out his phone and glared at it, but it stubbornly kept ringing with Danny's distinctive ring tone. He changed his mind at least six times before the voice mail kicked in— answer it, don't answer, answer, don't answer, talk to him, never talk to him ever again... At the last second he changed his mind one more time and took the call.
"Yeah."
"Tucker?"
"Yeah."
"It's Danny."
"Yeah."
There was a brief silence, as though Danny were waiting for Tucker to say something more, something significant, something helpful. Eventually he gave up, cleared his throat and continued, "Where are you? Are you home right now? I need— I need to see you. I want to apologize, if you'll just let me."
"I'm home." His statement was flat and noncommittal; his voice offered no invitation, no welcome. He might as well have been reporting the price of canned peaches at the grocery store or the number of pens in his desk. There was another pregnant pause while Tucker stubbornly waited for Danny to say something.
"Are you in your room?"
"Yeah." He wondered how long he could keep this up. There was just a little bit of satisfaction in making these abrupt, inconsiderate answers. And he couldn't help but notice that ghostly echo in Danny's voice. Figures, he thought.
"Can I come in?"
There was something in the way he phrased that question that raised suspicion in Tucker's mind. He crossed over to the window and looked out into the backyard, knowing all too well what he would probably see there. And he was right: Danny was right outside in ghost form, floating among the branches of the old sycamore tree. He was about ten feet away from the house and level with the second floor, where he could be easily seen from Tucker's window while being shielded by dense foliage from anybody on the ground. Danny raised his eyebrows and tried to look sheepish, then spoke again into the phone.
"Can I come in?"
"Don't you mean, 'may I'?"
"Huh?"
Tucker snorted. "Of course you CAN come in, you always CAN come in, there's nothing I can do to stop you from coming in, is there? The question is, 'MAY I come in?' which you would know if you had been paying attention in English last week." Tucker continued the conversation by phone, even though he easily could have opened the window and just talked to his friend face-to-face. He left the window shut, but remained standing right where Danny could see him.
The young ghost rolled his eyes. "Right. Okay, then MAY I come in?"
"So when did you start asking permission?" Tucker glared at Danny through the glass, and was perversely glad to see him flinch. "That's not how it works. If I said 'no' you'd just come in anyway, wouldn't you? Like the whole world is your personal playground."
Danny bit back a retort and took a calming breath instead. "Look. I'm trying to apologize, here. I'll do it over the phone if you insist, but I'd much rather do it with both of us in the same room."
Tucker turned his back, but he didn't put down the phone.
"Okay, okay. May I come in... please?"
There was another long pause as Tucker silently argued with himself. He had to admit, there was something at least slightly satisfying in knowing that Danny was waiting outside, pretending for once to be constrained by the rules of etiquette instead of just barging in. 'May I come in, please?' was just too dainty to be believed. He savored the experience of making Danny wait and stew for a few more moments, and then sighed, resigned. "Yes. You may come in."
Danny phased through the wall just a few feet to Tucker's left. No sooner had his boots touched the floor than the brilliant-white spectral rings flashed out around his waist. Tucker felt, as he so often did, a fleeting sensation of intense curiosity mixed with secret envy as he watched his friend transform with the same casual ease that he might apply to combing his hair or tying his shoes. Human. Ghost. Human. Ghost. Danny's new, dual existence was a deeply private mystery, an elusive, tantalizing treasure belonging to him alone. Tucker could only watch, and wonder, and endure.
Of course, none of this fruitless stream of thought intruded on Danny's preoccupied mind. He simply released his unearthly nature and stood in the middle of Tucker's room in his human form, momentarily bound by gravity, to all outward appearances a normal fourteen-year-old kid. He plopped down on the edge of the bed, averting his eyes from Tucker's gaze and biting his lower lip as he tried to appear humble and contrite. Tucker returned to his own chair, stalling for time by shutting down his computer, closing the math book and tidying up his desk a little more than was his usual practice. Danny squirmed silently as he waited for Tucker to finish, trying to remember everything he wanted to say.
Steeling his face, trying to remain calm and expressionless, Tucker brushed a few cookie crumbs into his wastebasket and then slowly turned his chair to face his friend.
"Okay. Go ahead, I'm listening."
Danny briefly made contact with Tucker's eyes, but quickly looked away. There was a coldness there, a solid wall of resentment and distrust that he could hardly bear to see. He cleared his throat nervously, then began.
"What happened last night—what I did to you—'I'm sorry' doesn't even begin to cover it."
Tucker hesitated for a moment, then replied coldly, "No, it doesn't."
Danny nodded, eyes downcast. "But I am sorry. What else can I say? I realize that I was way out of line, that what I did was wrong, that I shouldn't have done it. And I won't do it again."
Tucker listened gravely to his friend's recitation, but he wasn't ready to let go of his anger. The apology was proper in form, but it was too pat, too easy, too little and quite possibly too late. His mind reeled as he tried to come up with a suitably scathing retort, but the right words simply wouldn't come.
And while he scrambled to form a reply, Danny sat quietly on the bed and endured the silence. Finally he spoke again, desperate to bridge the harsh, bitterly cold void between them. "I've been thinking about this all day, ever since... I mean, when I ran into you this morning, at the Nasty Burger, I admit it—I didn't even realize there was a problem. I was thinking about how much it stinks that things didn't work out with Paulina, and about how glad I was that Sam made it to the dance after all, and how ironic it was that she ended up turning into a dragon, and I never, ever gave a moment's thought to how any of that affected you. And when you started yelling at me, I was totally blindsided."
"Well, excuse me for harshing your mellow," Tucker snapped.
"Will you let me finish!?"
"Right," he said, with a mockingly gracious wave of his hand. "Sorry. By all means, continue."
"Look. Like I said, I've been thinking about this ever since. And it's barely begun to sink in yet how wrong I was. That what I did to you... I just never thought... I mean, ever since I learned how to do this thing, I never even thought about whether it was right or fair to the people I was possessing—"
Tucker jumped in. "Overshadowing."
"Huh?"
"The preferred term for a ghost taking control of the body of a human is 'overshadow.'" He spoke patiently, as though he were quoting from a textbook. "People who study the paranormal stopped using the word 'possession' after TheExorcist came out back in 1973. Too many religious overtones."
Danny's eyes grew wide. "Oh."
"I did some research, I could provide references if you don't believe me. I even found an article your mom wrote back in 1995, and she used that term. Overshadow," he repeated with slight emphasis, poking at the sore spot as if he were checking to see whether the ache was still as bad as he remembered. "I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that there's no known defense against it," he added dryly.
Danny tried to ignore the sarcasm. "To be honest, it might be better if there was a way to defend against it. It shouldn't be that easy to do something like that to another person," he said glumly. "Now that I look back on it...it just shouldn't be so easy. When I... uh, overshadow somebody, it's like, totally effortless. It's just as easy as phasing through a wall. In fact, when I took over Dash, back on Wednesday, it was almost like I was pulled in as soon as I touched him—like this is how it's supposed to work. Like it's the most natural thing in…."
His voice drifted away in mid-sentence, as he realized what he was saying. For a moment, he just let the thought hang there in the air between them, unfinished and unwanted, wishing he could take the words back. Tucker hesitated as well, too horrified to reply.
Finally, after an interminable silence, Danny whispered, "I didn't mean to say that."
Tucker swallowed, hard. "'Like it's the most natural thing in the world.' You are a ghost, after all. And that's what ghosts do."
"No. No! That's not what I meant. I just meant that it was just so easy to do that I wish there was some way for the other person to resist, to fight back. Because if there was, I might not have been so eager to do it. I might have slowed down and thought about what I was doing... thought that maybe the other person was fighting back for a reason. But it all seemed so harmless..."
"Didn't seem so harmless to me."
"Yeah." He hung his head, defeated. "I get that now."
"Even before you ... overshadowed me, I was resisting. Jeez, Danny, I said 'no,' didn't you hear me? I said 'no' a whole bunch of times, but you had already made up your mind."
For a moment Danny tried to remember exactly what had happened the night before. To be honest, he couldn't remember anything that Tucker had said once he made up his mind to use his new power. He remembered the sudden moment of clarity when he recognized the bitter longing in Sam's voice, knowing with absolute certainty that she wanted to be asked to the dance. He remembered the brief consideration he had given to standing up Paulina, quicky discarded because he knew that she must be kept happy at all costs as long as she wore the Amulet of Aragon. And then there was the simple, logical decision that Tucker would have to do what Danny himself could not.
But he couldn't remember hearing Tucker say 'no.'
"You know that old saying," Danny said with a sigh, "that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything else starts to look like a nail?"
Tucker kept his eyes averted, with a fixed expression of grim resentment, but said nothing.
Danny continued, "Well… this 'overshadow' thing isn't the only tool I have, but it's new, and it's shiny, and… I hate to say it, but it's kind of fun to use. And it's as easy as breathing. Once I figured out how well it worked, I guess I was pretty eager to find some nails to use it on."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"No, of course not! I'm not trying to excuse what I did, I'm just trying to... I don't know. I'm trying to explain what happened. Because every time something happened for the last few days, my first thought was always, like, 'Let's see whether I can use my new power to solve this problem!' And most of the time it worked— well no, that's not really true." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I thought I was fixing problems, but the truth is, I was just creating more."
"You got that right."
Danny flopped down backwards on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then he continued, "Like with my dad. I thought I was making things easier for both of us by not telling him about the parent-teacher conference. So I took him over to the school, and the next thing I know he's signed up to chaperone the dance. But he doesn't remember volunteering, much less having a conference with Lancer. And it just snowballed from there. Every time I overshadowed him, I ended up having to overshadow him again just to cover up what I'd done before."
"And instead of focusing your attention on fighting the dragon, you had to come rushing back to the dance to keep him away from Lancer." Tucker looked at him reproachfully. "You know, you can't keep this up until graduation. Sooner or later, he's going to have to meet him."
Danny rolled over onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow, chuckling with bitter irony. "Yeah, I know. And believe it or not, it gets worse. When I came down to breakfast this morning, my parents were trying to decide whether Dad should go to the emergency room right away, or if he could wait to see his regular doctor on Monday."
"What for?"
"Oh, nothing! Just the honking big gaps in his memories over the last couple of days. Like the fact that he can't even remember dancing with Mom last night. Or agreeing to be a chaperone. Or going to a parent-teacher conference. He's going nuts with worry about it, and Mom is trying to stay calm but Jazz isn't being any help at all."
"Jazz...?"
"... is sitting there at the table with a medical reference book, listing all the possible causes for intermittent short-term amnesia. Epilepsy. Blunt-force trauma. Early-onset Alzheimer's. Brain tumor, for Pete's sake! And Dad's too upset to eat his chocolate-chip banana pancakes, and Mom's so distracted she sliced her finger trying to cut a cantaloupe, and Jazz is just prattling on and on about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and Multiple Personality Disorder, and all I can do is sit there and try to figure out how in the world I can fix this!?"
"First suggestion?" Tucker prompted. "Don't overshadow him any more. You've done enough damage already."
Danny sighed. "Yeah, I know. I'd just make things worse. And maybe if it doesn't happen again, and the doctor can't find anything wrong... Well, maybe it'll just blow over."
"That's probably the best you can hope for." Tucker chewed his lip for a moment, hesitating, but finally couldn't hold the thought to himself any more. "What I can't figure out, though is... why is it that I can remember everything, but he can't?"
Danny sat up, startled. "You... you can remember?"
"I can remember now. But I didn't at first. After you left me standing outside Sam's house, I was angry for a minute, but pretty much right away I started to feel confused about what had happened. Like I didn't know how I got there, but I knew I had to deal with the new reality even if it didn't quite make sense." He paused for a moment to close his eyes and gently rub his temples with his fingertips, as if banishing a mild headache. "But then this morning, when I talked to Valerie, the contradictions started to erupt all over the place. And when I saw you, suddenly I could remember all of it."
"All of it?"
"All of it." He shot his friend a reproachful glare. "Every awful, nauseating, interminable second of it."
Tucker's cold, judgmental words left Danny in a cold sweat. All along, he had thought that his overshadowing power was just a matter of leaving his hosts with a few minutes missing from their day and an odd blank spot in their memories. A frisson of horror crawled down his spine as he whispered, "Tell me."
ooooo0ooooo
Author's Note: This is the third chapter of four, with an epilogue to follow. Feedback, both kind and critical, is deeply welcome.
Many thanks to my beta readers, Obi-Quiet and JH24!