Normalcy should be banned.
This wasn't normal.
First day of high school! Joy!
The rushing about, catching up with others, curses at new lockers and where all the classrooms were at, bemoaning made over summer being over, what kids were wearing or how much they'd changed, teachers trying to settle the students down and get them to behave.
The stares, the looks, the whispers, the condolences, the awkwardness, the insensitive askings about the details of it, the raging cold burning up in him at all of it. Students. Teachers. Everyone.
Tucker didn't want to be here. He didn't want everyone looking at him. Walking around all on his own, jaw clenched and powering through the hallways. All the eyes looking at him. At the kid who lost his entire world this summer. The kid whose best friends had died. In some freaky accident. That Tucker had been there.
He didn't want to be here.
"Tucker Foley?" The teacher paused in roll call, looking up from his clipboard. "Does anyone know where Tucker Foley is?"
Murmurings sounded across the classroom. No. He'd been here earlier. Maybe he was in the bathroom. Running late. Or had gone home.
The teacher, Mister Lancer, muttered to himself and ticked his pen on the clipboard.
"Settle down. Valerie Gray?"
A hand went up. "Here."
"Ashley Im?"
Up went another hand, Ashley not speaking, long hair draped around her face as she hunkered over her desk reading a book.
Confused, Tucker lowered his hand, which had remained up since his name was called, glancing around him.
He was here, wasn't he?
"Oh hey, Mister Lancer," boomed out a voice. Brody. One of the guys who was on the football team and part of the more popular crowd. His arm went up, a large hand jabbing a finger back, head half turned. "Foley's right back there."
"Ah. Thank you, Mister…?"
"Young. Brody. No probs Lancer."
"Mister Lancer if you would, Mister Young. Sorry I didn't see you back there, Mister Foley. And all of you, kindly speak up in the future if I don't see your hand up. I'm still putting all the new names with the new faces. Ashley Im?"
There was the briefest draw of a silence, then Ashley spoke up, reluctantly. "Here."
"Thank you. Kyla Johnson?"
"Here! I'm here!"
Tucker stared around the classroom. They'd all looked around the classroom. He'd been here in this seat the entire time. They couldn't have all missed him. Especially in how everyone knew what happened this summer and kept staring or avoiding to look directly at him.
Through test and trial over the remainder of the school day, especially in his last class of P.E., Tucker discovered he apparently had the ability…to go absolutely invisible. To go unseen. Walk right out of the school with everyone else. With no one staring.
Didn't stop anyone from bumping into him.
Which was annoying.
Until it stopped.
And then Tucker panicked, stopping any focus of the feeling of 'not being here', racing his way across the parking lot with the student drivers blasting their horns at him as he passed by.
Passed by.
Could avoid all the cars and honking if he just…passed right through them all.
He hit the diamond fence line, hysteric laughter bursting out of him at the thought, sliding down the fence ungracefully.
Freak accident.
With a portal.
A portal to a ghost zone.
He had a pulse! He breathed! Alive!
Not a ghost. Ghost…powers? Energy from the Portal did…something?
It'd been a month ago! Why now?
It did something.
But what?
You know what, he thought fiercely. Who knows and who cares?
Tucker was not going back to that hospital.
And if he died, if this was some slow death version of Danny and Sam being hit full blast, then he was fine with it.
Then he'd be…
The portal!
Superpowers like a ghost? The portal to the Ghost Zone worked! He could use it, go in, take advantage of his body maybe being more equipped to handle the Ghost Zone, and find Danny and Sam!
Why had he not thought of that before?
The Fenton Portal worked!
The Fenton Portal was fitted with a lock system.
Letting up on 'not getting touched by anything' or 'not wanting to be here'—the feeling focus thing he'd been doing for invisibility should maybe be renamed—Tucker slammed his hand on the console.
He couldn't just…walk into the Portal.
Well, he could, but it wasn't going to get the Portal turned on without someone to unlock it.
DNA lock.
Could Jazz maybe unlock it then? She was DNA related to both the ones who came up with this. But also a kid, so would it be set to not let Jazz to unlock it?
After what happened with Tucker and Sam and Danny, he doubted the Fenton parents were going to leave it at safety teachings Jazz and Danny grew up with.
And in 'not getting touched by anything' to exit the basement—he should rename that one too—Tucker finally noticed what he did not before in his haste to get to the Fenton Portal.
There was a DNA lock system set up to get into the basement.
Which meant Jazz likely couldn't get the Fenton Portal open and turned on for him either.
But a conversation with her gave him an idea of what her parents were up to. Jazz believed they were going into the Portal off of overheard conversations about traveling and doorways. They'd been taking the large Fenton decked out vehicle more often too. Searching around Amity for ghosts. Goal being to collect any in specially made thermoses.
Tucker just…borrowed a thermos. Or two.
The elder Fentons may have been work focusing at this time to take mind off of the grief, or maybe even up to the same thing he had in mind, but Tucker felt better having something in his hands about the situation. Since he couldn't use the Fenton Portal himself. At least at the moment.