Suds
Sam

Ever notice how when you really dread something, it gets so built up in your mind that when it actually does happen, it turns out nothing like you thought it would? My biggest fear in life was someone finding out Danny's secret. Not for the same reasons Danny was afraid of that happening. He just didn't want everyone to think he was a freak. I didn't care about that, but ever since that ghost warden, Walker, had made sure that Amity Park hated ghosts in general and Danny Phantom in particular, I worried about what people would do if they found out who he really was. People with irrational fears did irrational things, and people were irrationally afraid of anything that was different. That Danny Phantom was a ghost was different enough for them to hate him. But if they knew he was ghost and human? Then, he wouldn't only be a freak, he'd be a vulnerable freak, and visions of mobs with pitchforks and torches gathering outside of FentonWorks plagued me.

So when the nightmare was realized and someone found out the truth, I prepared to do everything in my power to protect him from the masses. Only, as it turns out, it wasn't the masses he needed protecting from. It was a single, teenaged fangirl. Paulina, to be specific.

Personally, I would've preferred the pitchfork-toting masses.

It happened at Floody Waters water park. Danny had just fought off a ghost, and when it was over and he found me and Tucker again, he was half crazed from panic. "Paulina saw! She knows I'm half ghost! I finally get to see her in a bathing suit, and I can't even enjoy it!"

I could've done without that last part. Grimacing in disgust, I spat out her name. "Paulina. I just had a nasty run-in with her in the bathroom. She's the rudest little—"

"Danny!"

Speak of the she-devil, and she will appear—waving and smiling like we were her BFFs. "Sam! Whatever-your-name-is!" That would be Tucker. "Hi!"

I jumped in front of Danny, stretching out my arms to shield him behind my bat-cloak bathing suit cover-up. "Listen, you..." None of the descriptors that popped into my head utilized language appropriate for a family-friendly water park, so I left them unspoken. "I don't know what you think you saw, but if you do or say anything to hurt Danny..." What I would do to her was best left unspoken, too.

Paulina scoffed at me, her hands on her hips. "Oh, don't get your bat wings in a bundle." Then, she was all smiles again as she waved at Danny over my shoulder. "Danny? Why'd you run? I know it freaked you out that I discovered your secret, but I won't tell."

She was oozing with enough honey to make even a bee wanna hurl, but Danny was a sucker for a sweet smile and batting eyelashes. He stepped out from behind me. "Really?"

At least Tucker saw through the act. "Oh, come on! How can we trust you?"

"You can trust me, because it's my secret now, too." She leaned in towards Danny, brushing his nose with her finger like he was a little baby she was cooing over.

"Oh, great," I groaned when Danny's face lit up at the attention. As far as I was concerned, bring on the pitchforks. I was outta there. "Excuse me while I find a nice dark place to throw up."

It got worse. At school, she announced that they were dating, and suddenly Danny was on the so-called "A-List," with Tucker and I shoved off to the side. Again. But somehow seeing him together with her made this time so much worse.

"Are you okay?" Tucker asked me after Paulina dragged a bedazzled Danny off to the cafeteria.

Oh, yeah, just peachy, thanks. "Of course I am. Why would I not be okay?" I gritted my teeth together to force out the rest. "Look how happy he is." And just to prove how okay I was, I punched a locker.

The thing was, while I'd managed to prepare myself for rioting mobs going after him, somehow it never occurred to me to prepare for the inevitable time when Danny started dating someone. Even though I hadn't fooled myself into thinking we would ever be anything more than friends, watching him with someone else—with her—was hard. The abstract knowledge that he didn't like me that way was worlds away from actually having the reality of it shoved in my face every time I saw her draped all over him.

And it wasn't just the jealousy, either. Whenever I saw them together, I would hear her snooty voice in my head from our other infamous bathroom run-in at the dance. What a bummer! I only agreed to go out with him because I thought I was stealing him from you! I'm going back inside to dump your dorky friend. I knew whatever she felt for him was shallow and fleeting, based only on an image of a hero with special powers. She would never appreciate his sense of humor, or the way he would stammer whenever he was nervous, or how his eyes lit up whenever he talked about NASA, or the new Morbid Anti-Social Youth single, or even something stupid like his latest score on Doomed. No, she only wanted a hero, and when she realized that was just a small part of who Danny really was, she'd get bored and move on, crushing his heart under her heel in the process.

There was a part of me—a small, petty part that I didn't like to admit existed—that took some grim satisfaction in that knowledge. It wouldn't last, and Danny would maybe learn to dig a little deeper than a pretty face and batting eyelashes. Only, it didn't exactly end like I thought it would. Oh, it ended, but not because Paulina got bored and dumped him but, rather, because she wasn't Paulina at all. She was a ghost named Kitty who was overshadowing Paulina to use Danny to make her boyfriend jealous. Talk about your soap operas. It was a regular Days of Our Afterlives for a while there.

But, as these things tend to go with us, when it was over, everything went back to normal. Paulina not only didn't know Danny's secret, she barely recognized his existence. She had developed a crush on "The Ghost Boy," however, which was nauseating in its own right, but Danny didn't seem inclined to capitalize on that. Maybe he'd figured out that a girlfriend was only worth having if she liked him for him. So it was all good.

Right?

Except... the whole thing made me realize something. One day, he'd get bored of crushing on the girl who was all looks and no substance, and then what? I wasn't stupid enough to even entertain the fantasy that he'd turn to me, so who would he turn to next? And what if she wasn't shallow like Paulina? What if the next girl was the one who did appreciate him for who he was? The one who didn't care about ghost powers and dramatic rescues, but just liked the way he made her smile? What if the next girl actually made him happy?

What then?