The Princess, Dethroned

or alternatively: Back-to-School Scheming

"Did they have to choose now to start caring about our education?"

It was Wednesday, October 9th, ten days since hell on earth had been unleashed upon northeast-central Illinois, and Sam, Tucker, and Danny were at school.

When the news that schools were reopening had first reached the general public, the general response had been incredulous and dismissive. It was still green out, damn it! No one was sending their kids to school in this. However, by a few days later a good number of people had started to reconsider. Johnny's school served lunches, yeah? It'd keep him from pacing around the house, snapping at everyone and stepping on the salt lines. And anything that got Katie off the goddamn computer….

So Tucker's dad had picked them up from the Mansons'. (His mom was with Tristan and Aunt Lacey.) He'd wanted to take Tucker home after dropping off the others, and quite possibly take the others home as well, but the Foley household was closer to the epicenter and therefore probably less safe to concentrate three extra people in. Tucker had gotten out of it himself by taking his dad aside before the front steps of the school and, after a second long hug, saying he didn't want to leave Sam alone. (Or Danny, although Tucker was...fairly certain he could take care of himself at this point.) And Maurice had threatened him with codependency therapy after this whole thing was over, but he'd also reluctantly let him walk away across the white-grey concrete.

Gosh, it was cold today, wasn't it? Quite brisk. Tucker rubbed his arms and patted moisture from his eyes with one sweatshirt sleeve.

The source of the complaining was Sam, naturally. She stood beside Tucker on the top step, eyes darting around constantly like they had been the whole car ride over. Danny leaned against the railing, combing down his hair with his fingers to try to see his bangs.

"Well, I heard half the teachers didn't show up. So that really depends on who you mean by 'they,'" Tucker offered, smiling.

The bangs were apparently sweaty–or maybe there was some dried blood and ectoplasm there, who knew–since Danny made a grossed-out face and mussed them up haphazardly. Nasty. Tucker was grateful for his dreads. Hoarding water for the extremely localized End Times had somewhat derailed most Amityites' vigorous showering routines.

Inside the main building, the crowd was sparse. However, when Tucker stumbled into their first period English class several minutes late (he had taken a detour around That Particular Bathroom–which could actually refer to one of three locations now; wasn't Tucker's life great), he was surprised to find that there were only six or seven empty seats in a class of 30.

As soon as he and Sam had sat down, Mikey scooted his desk sideways toward Tucker's with a noise like a drowning tuba and leaned in, eyes wide. "Dude, are you, like, involved with this whole greenout thing? Do you know what it is?" he whispered feverishly.

Tucker's shock must have shown in his expression, because Mikey's eyes bugged out further against his pale, freckly face as Tucker hastened to answer. "Uh, no, haha what? Where did you hear that?!" The subsequent nervous laughter went on long enough to get Sam, seated on his left, to tune into the conversation and shoot him a look potent enough to break the compulsion.

Mikey twitched unconsciously away from her, back into his seat. "Dude, Paulina and Dash were telling a bunch of people about it on the front steps. They said you were investigating ghosts and supernatural stuff like, weeks ago and you asked Dash about it, and you called Paulina right when it first happened. She says you were the first ones who knew it was happening, and you were in the car coming from somewhere. And, uh. Well, also, the new kid's really weird." (Danny, sitting across the room, didn't seem to hear this. He probably would have thought it was funny.)

Tucker had to process for a minute. "What?! She–we were, uh–"

"–We were hanging out at, like, 3 am at Denny's when we got attacked by one of those things," Sam smoothly interjected. (Not very convincingly, but at least it was smooth.) "We heard from Dash that Paulina is into the supernatural, so when we were freaking out Tucker had the idea to call her and see if she had anything that could help. And she did–she actually knew a weird amount about warding off spirits. If you ask me, that makes her way more suspicious than us, but I dunno." She affected a shrug.

Mikey looked skeptical, even though Sam's pure force of personality usually scared him enough that he took her word as gospel. "Wait, why were you guys asking Dash about that stuff, then?" He paused, reconsidered his question. "Actually, why would you ever willingly talk to Dash, ever?"

Tucker agreed, that was a better question. Sam opened her mouth to reply and–paused. Glanced at Tucker with a question in the crook of her eyebrows.

What–oh. After they'd interviewed Dash, he'd asked her to consult him before taking risks in their investigation, hadn't he?

Huh. Well, he had no idea what to say, so she might as well. He hoped she would be cautious. He made a face that he hoped conveyed his utter lack of helpful ideas and the fact that he'd basically given up at this point, and was about to almost imperceptibly nod, when–wait.

Wait. Okay.

He huffed out an uncomfortable laugh and assumed his best "reluctant" body language. No eye contact, slight self-deprecating smile. "Uh! So. Heh. Okay, that's...kind of a weird story."

Mikey laughed a little as well. "Yeah, I would think!"

"Uh...you know how my cousin almost got...um, you know? With the serial killer?"

Mikey's smile wavered, Tucker noted with satisfaction. He hunched his shoulders and examined the floor before continuing. As garnish. "So, uh. It scared him. Like, a lot. I mean, obviously! Hah. But so he thinks the killer is, like, involved with the supernatural, somehow. We didn't believe him, but he's...really worked up about it. So." He took a breath. "I promised to, like, ask around. I know, it's really dumb." He kicked the leg of his desk and peeked at Mikey out of the corner of his eye.

And sure enough, the reminder of Tucker's traumatic experience and badly injured family member did its good work by immediately making Mikey extremely uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to accept everything about their sketchy story at face value. Uncomfortable enough to blush and offer reassuring somethings in a slightly higher voice about how that made sense, totally, yeah, and return his desk to its earlier position, still blushing up his neck.

And, knowing how Mikey acted whenever he had any means to garner wide attention, Tucker and Sam's fabricated side of the story would be all over the school by the end of lunch.

Once she was sure Mikey wasn't looking, Sam raised an appraising eyebrow at Tucker and grinned. But just then a particularly haggard Lancer swept into the classroom, and Tucker, disaster averted, was already lost in the implications of this conversation.

Namely, the fact that it was Paulina who'd directed all the eyes he could now feel crawling on his back. Paulina, who was back at school and chatting with her friends when until recently he'd been pretty darn psychically certain she was most definitely not…well, at the very least not alright.

They needed to talk to her, he concluded, staring blindly past his symbolism notes. And they needed to bring Danny.

Because, to be honest, Tucker still wasn't quite convinced she was alive.

~(*0*)~

As soon as English ended, Tucker and Sam made a beeline for Danny, who instead of sitting with them had chosen the seat nearest the door. "In case anything comes in," he'd murmured when they'd split off, sizing up the hallway like a matador (or possibly a man about to tuck into a particularly tasty steak).

Sam's grip on Danny's elbow propelled him down the hall in the center of their tight arrowhead formation as she explained in a low voice what they'd learned from Mikey, and what Tucker had reluctantly recounted afterward in the hubbub of everyone packing up their things. They'd briefly debated the significance of the two-fox dream: It seemed to pretty transparently imply that the murderer had gotten Paulina, but clearly that wasn't the case. Probably. Best to keep an open mind.

Over the course of the trip to the cafeteria (Tucker and Sam had both been informed that their teachers for the next period were on the list of those who hadn't shown up today, and Danny just really didn't care), Tucker also became increasingly aware of how many people were staring and whispering as they passed. A girl with a pink backpack startled and looked away when he caught her eye; a senior with a buzz cut stared openly. Challenging, assessing, wary.

That was the moment it really hit Tucker that, intentions notwithstanding, Danny had, in fact, maybe, technically, okay undeniably caused the greenout. Caused the horrific cataclysm that had been terrorizing everyone for ten whole days. The unexplained disaster that had possibly left holes in a few of these kids' families.

And sure, there was no way anyone here knew the actual details. (Except maybe one particular person. ...Or two.) However, they knew that Tucker, Sam, and Danny knew something. They knew that Tucker, Sam, and Danny had very likely been doing something, out in the city at 3 a.m. And they knew that right after Tucker, Sam, and Danny had quite possibly done something, a blight had descended upon their homes.

The whispers stopped feeling wary, and started feeling very, very angry.

Oh, why hadn't Tucker just gone home with his dad that morning?

The oppressive feeling would likely have been diminished on the lawn between the main humanities building and the cafeteria, had the sky not been quite so overcast. And, y'know, unpleasantly tinted. Small, scattered groups of students scurried from place to place with their heads down and their shoulders raised defensively, checking furtively over their shoulders when they thought no one was looking.

And this body language was so pervasive that Tucker's stream of consciousness tripped over a stray glial cell and had to pick itself back up to recalculate when it noticed someone breaking that mold completely. The shockingly beautiful and eminently formidable (one time in third grade she'd thrown sand in his eye) Valerie Gray strode past him out the cafeteria doors with a new firmness to the set of her shoulders and a red hoodie tied around her waist.

…Interesting. Perhaps Tucker would keep this particular observation to himself.

The gym-slash-cafeteria was teeming with students, so crowded that upon entering Tucker was immediately jostled bodily to the side from one direction and then elbowed in the head from another. He was glad they'd left their backpacks in a pile against the exterior wall; navigating this would be difficult enough without them. Students, faculty, and the occasional staff member could be seen sitting on tables, crouching on chairs, standing to loudly argue at the people near them, or just ambling around quietly with no particular goal evident on their faces. A good number of kids sat slumped along the walls with their heads pillowed on their arms, listening to music or pretending to be. The dull patter of conversation ebbed and flowed, building to a crescendo as some table's discussion grew particularly heated and then rapidly dwindling back to a low anxious hum.

At the center of it all was Paulina, along with about a third of the rest of their friend group. Dash was there, as were Kwan, the girl with the box braids, and the guy who always wore button-downs with tiny plants and animals printed across them. Star, her cousin Mikayla, the younger blonde guy with the weirdly square chin, and the two twitchy but amiable senior boys with the barest beginnings of coke nose were among the missing.

Tucker, Sam, and Danny had made it to about 15 feet away when Paulina, halfway through an expansive gesture, caught sight of them over the heads of some shorter sophomores. Tucker got to witness in profile how her face reacted. The smile faltered, mouth still slightly open, and her visible eye widened slightly and froze in place for a heartbeat before her mouth did some sort of complicated gymnastic routine conveying–no, that can't be it. Nervousness? Regret? What was that? It had been so quick–and then she turned back to her friends with a whip of her hair, said something inaudible, laughed, and was already in motion toward the other side of the cafeteria. In the opposite direction of her approaching supplicants.

A glance at Sam told Tucker she had seen Paulina see them as well. (Wait, seen her–seen them–yeah.) A moment passed, and then she growled and grabbed Tucker's hand. "What is she–? We're cutting her off."

Tucker was still mulling over that reaction as Sam marched him around Paulina's lingering friends and toward the gym's other door, speeding up to a reasonable intercept pace. What was Paulina thinking? Did she want to talk to them privately, as well? Tucker caught a glimpse of Paulina's long hair and white sweatshirt once, twice in the crowd, and then they ceased to appear. It didn't help that the crowd had, from what he'd seen, parted to let Paulina through, while people were still startling when they noticed him, Danny, and Sam and then eyeing them with suspicion rather than politely getting out of the way. It was getting less creepy and more frustrating as time went on.

It took suffering two more thrown elbows and inelegantly stepping over a few of the kids sitting against the wall for them to finally make it to the double doors. Sam used her forearm to push down the big horizontal metal button thing on the right-side door and put her whole weight into swinging it outward, with an expression reminiscent of an Austen villain on the verge of ruining the heroine's reputation.

And then stopped, puzzled, still holding the heavy door open, because the heroine waiting on the other side wasn't Paulina.

Kwan crossed his arms, scowling. "Why are you people following Paulie? She doesn't want to talk to you."

Tucker couldn't think of a response for a minute. He'd never minded Kwan all that much–sure, he wasn't all that nice, but he wasn't nearly as much of an asshole as, say, Dash. He'd always struck Tucker as just kind of living his own life, not going out of his way to make a scene or meet new people. Not the first guy you remembered when you thought about Paulina and Dash's group, but not the last one either. Very beefy. A side-character type. That is, until his mom had died.

Tucker shook himself mentally and recovered his wits. "Uh. I mean, sorry? We were just hoping to talk to her for a second. It's important." The polite route seemed most appropriate here, so Tucker hoped Sam could keep her mouth shut. A glance confirmed that she seemed to understand that. Or maybe she was just concentrating on fighting the door.

Kwan scowled harder, shifting his weight to his back foot. The back of the cafeteria gave onto a path of small grey concrete paving stones about eight feet across, which in turn gave onto a strip of slightly overgrown grass of the same width with some thin, pale-trunked trees growing out of it, which ended in yellow-green sprays of leaves a bit higher than the opaque seven-foot fence. The whole space was shadowed by the cafeteria building. Kwan was standing in the middle of the path, awkwardly front and center and out in the open, and clearly self-conscious because of it. The guy was not made for the stage. He tried his best to project, however, which ended up making his volume a little wonky. "What do you even have to talk to Paulina about? I don't think I've seen you willingly talking to each other since, like, eighth grade."

This was every single flavor of awkward. Tucker leaned against the doorframe to his left and resisted the impulse to fiddle with his beret. "I mean, okay, it's kind of complicated. Um." He tried a self-deprecating smile to show he also found this conversation completely weird. "Could you just, like, tell her? That we'd like to talk? We're just confused about a few things."

Kwan was quiet for a moment.

His eyeline was somewhere between the three of them and the backup salt line on the cafeteria's threshold when he finally spoke. "Look, I. I know you guys think you're, like, helping? But you need to leave it alone. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

Huh? Tucker was confused, but he managed to respond eloquently. "Um."

Silence. Wind rifled through the leaves of the skinny trees, disturbing them slightly, and Kwan hunched his broad shoulders and put his hands in his pockets. He was at least a head taller than Tucker, the asshole, but with this posture it wasn't apparent. "Anyway, stop stalking Paulie. Stalkers," he muttered with an air of finality as he edged past Tucker and back into the cafeteria.

Oh. ...Wait, what?

"Okay, Paulina's definitely evil." Sam said it quietly but with an air of finality as she let the door swing shut on a discomfiting number of perked ears and furtive glances.

"She's definitely hiding something," Danny contributed absently, having slid out of the cafeteria as the door was closing. He winced a little and shook out one hand like he'd just gotten a mild shock from a metal handle, and used the side of his foot to slide some loose threshold salt back into place. His eyes were fixed on the buildings a good distance to their right in a way that inspired Tucker to very casually start them walking to the left. Sam caught up to him as they ambled down the path between the cafeteria and the tree-lined fence, while Danny remained a few steps behind.

Tucker mustered a laugh. "'Definitely evil?' Sam, please never investigate my murder. You'd have, like, 18 people who acted kind of shifty in jail by Tuesday."

"What? She's totally in league with the killer! If she isn't herself the killer. She's deliberately attacking us, Tuck! And obstructing our investigation. And also she's always been evil, so it makes sense." Knowing Sam, she was approximately 40-45% joking.

Tucker almost tripped over a loose paving stone but caught himself and kept walking. They rounded the edge of the building and emerged from its shadow, though on such a cloudy day it didn't make much difference. At least the green was filtered by the grey-white cloud cover, to the point where you could almost forget about it. The small, fast-moving bundles of kids had presumably all made it to their classes or back into the cafeteria-gym, so the lawn was once again deserted. Tucker kept silent for a minute, mulling over the alternatives to Sam's proposal. Was Paulina being threatened? Was she mad about the greenout too, somehow? Try as he might, however, he couldn't concentrate on the possibilities behind Paulina's bizarre behavior; this new facet was bothering him even more.

"So wait, did Paulina tell Kwan?" he brought up finally, and somewhat abruptly.

"Tell him what?" Sam responded, one eyebrow raised. "Tell him what she told everyone else?"

"Tell him we were looking into his mom's killer."

"Ooh." Danny hissed through his teeth from just behind them. "Haha, that would make sense, and also makes things way more awkward."

But unlike Danny, Sam had fully caught his drift. "You're right, that's weird. She told the whole school we were looking into the supernatural, but she didn't tell them why. And if she told him why, then…wouldn't he, like, fully support that? More than anyone?"

"The way he said we think we're helping, I mean…."

"I was confused for a second thinking he was talking about the greenout. I didn't even consider he could be talking about the murders."

"Yeah, me too." Tucker frowned. "But that's the only thing that makes sense."

They had to pause the conversation as they rounded to the front of the building again: a group of freshmen had just exited, and they needed to pick up their abandoned backpacks from one of the many piles near the doorway. In retrospect, leaving their stuff there may not have been the greatest idea, with half the school holding some vague, pervasive ill-will toward the three of them, but neither Sam nor Danny had brought a laptop and Tucker of course kept his precious PDA concealed on his person, so all that would've been lost in the case of theft were a few sparsely populated notebooks and Sam's two-year planner with "The Raven" copied onto the inside cover in squiggly "calligraphy" by a ballpoint pen.

Sam put off making her next point, crossing her arms over the straps of her backpack, until the cafeteria doors were closed again and the freshmen were out of hearing range. "Well, wait, okay. Kwan could've been talking about Danny's…cleanup efforts."

Like, maybe, but– "But how would he know about that? And why wouldn't he want him to be doing it? That doesn't make any sense."

She crooked one elbow to chew absently on a purple thumbnail. "True."

"And, like, if anyone has a right to know, Kwan does, and he's one of her closest friends. So if he does know, he's acting weird. And if he doesn't know, then she's acting even weirder than we thought."

"I dunno. It seems reasonable to me not to want these random classmates nosing around about, like, your mom's case. Closure is a thing, you know," Danny contributed from behind. (His eyes were still absently roaming the rooftops of the nearest buildings in an exceedingly nerve-racking way.)

Oh. Well…okay, yeah… Hot, guilty blood pooled in Tucker's gut. That was true. He didn't know anything about grief, so who was he to say Kwan wasn't grieving normally? First the guy had lost his mom, and then in the same year he'd been plunged into a viridian hellscape that whispered and giggled when you didn't watch the corners. Everyone was on edge. Everyone was acting irrationally. Guiltily, Tucker dropped the issue.

They tried twice more to talk to Paulina that day and twice more were intercepted and rebuffed, first by Dash and then by Star. Star even went so far as to accuse them in front of witnesses of bringing a curse down on Amity Park. Where before all this the witnesses would have laughed and left to tell everyone how Star McCrary literally thought there was a curse on the town, now they muttered ominously among themselves and went to tell everyone that Tucker, Sam, and Danny hadn't managed to come up with a good response.

Mrs. Foley picked them up at the steps from amidst a prickly mass communicating mainly through whispers and hostile body language.

In the end, Sam and Danny refused the Foleys' pleas and entreaties that they come back to Tucker's for the night. Danny just wasn't super human right now (heh) and Mr. Foley remained unaware of his condition. Sam didn't want to leave him alone, and she was honestly probably safer with him than with them. She almost reconsidered, though, when they pulled up in front of the Manson mansion.

There were people outside of Sam's house. Two men and a woman with greasy hair loitered on the sidewalk, while some kids gathered on the corner trying to look casual. Goddamned school directory.

~(*0*)~

That night, as he lay in bed waiting for sleep at around 2 am (desk lamp on, obviously), Tucker brooded over his questions and suspicions. One of the main things on his mind was a pet theory he'd become more and more certain of over the last few days, and was planning on floating to Sam the next morning: Tucker was pretty sure the greenout was a mistake.

It just didn't make sense from what they knew of the second killer. He (or she, but as they'd already concluded, probably a he) seemed to choose his victims carefully, based on some sort of perceived guilt or personal antipathy. He then used them in one very specific ritual, which seemed to have a very specific goal. It would seriously break pattern for him to suddenly carry out a ritual aimed at unleashing something completely unrelated like the greenout (Danny's still being as alive as he ever was, was evidence enough that the ritual was different), and Tucker doubted this had been the long-term goal of the killings. It was too random, and too likely to backfire and leave the killer dead himself, since anyone who carried out a hypothetical greenout ritual would presumably be at the epicenter when it happened. The fact that the killer had apparently just left halfway through could indicate that he had known this would happen and deliberately gotten out of the way, but, especially when Tucker looked back on the relative clumsiness of the failed attack on Tristan, it seemed more likely that the killer had messed up, panicked, and run, not knowing what effect his mistake would have soon after he left.

The best evidence for this theory was what Danny had said when he first woke up about the pentagram, and how that didn't make sense for a ghost summoning, or really any summoning using Danny as the portal. If the killer had used fully the wrong type of summoning circle, it would make sense that the ritual had gone haywire in a big, unpredictable way.

What this implied, Tucker wasn't sure. That their killer wasn't as smart or good with the supernatural as they'd assumed, definitely. Using the wrong circle seemed like a really stupid mistake for an expert. It also reassuringly suggested that perhaps the killer did have scruples and wouldn't voluntarily escalate to mass murder unprovoked. However, it also meant that he must be reckless enough to set all that lethal chaos in motion regardless of his personal principles.

It also implied that the ritual he'd been trying to do had been somehow related to the killings—probably some sort of culmination of that process given the rule of three—and he was almost definitely going to try again.

Great.

In addition to mulling over this theory, Tucker couldn't help circling back to the smallest but arguably most pressing unsolved mystery of the day: Paulina's reaction to seeing them. It had been so quick, only half of her face, and he couldn't even remember what it had looked like now, but he could remember his first split-second interpretation.

Discomfort. She'd seemed unsure of herself.

And it had taken his shocked mind a moment to process, because the one thing Tucker had always grudgingly admired about Paulina was that, no matter what she was doing or who she was hurting, she was never, ever unsure of herself. Wouldn't be caught dead with anything less than a perfectly lipsticked smirk and all the stubborn poise of a princess in exile.

And yet, in that brief moment, she'd lost her footing. So the real question was, if she wouldn't be caught dead without her confidence, then who'd managed to catch her alive?