-- Author's Note -- This is what you get when I sit in an airport for 16 hours straight. Anyway, I am home now and posting the new chapter. Yey! All right, this is going to be a fairly short A/N because I need to get some sleep (it's very hard to sleep in airports, and I haven't gotten more than a random hour of sleep since Tuesday night), and because I need to get up fairly early to start backing up my stuff. While on vacation some stuff was going weird with my laptop, and I have decided that it would be best to take it into Apple and make them fix it. I'm not sure what they're going to do with it, but there's quite a few things that are acting up. So I am taking precautions as to if they say they need to take it in for a while. This doesn't mean that the fic will stop, it just means that updates might go down to once a week since I don't like using my dad's computer that much. So, here's the new chapter, and I'll let you know what happens in my next update, or you can probably find out on my Live Journal. My homepage link on my info page will take you there, or you can search for the user 'reggiesgirl.' Thanks again for all your reviews, and don't worry, Sam's not gone. Just... well, you'll see. Enjoy!
Chapter 5 Missing In Action
By the end of the night it seemed like Tucker and Danny had gotten through to Jessica. Not that she fully understands the situation, Danny thought to himself. No, she would have to see how it really went down if she was to really to get it. That was something Danny hoped to avoid at all costs.
Danny tried calling Sam at least five more times that afternoon and evening, but she never answered her phone or called him back. While Danny was getting worried that something might have happened, he knew that she wouldn't avoid him on purpose.
As he climbed into bed that night he told himself that she had had to spend the day with her parents and didn't have a chance to call him back. But as he fell into a restless sleep he missed her more than ever.
--------------
The next morning Danny awoke early and took a shower, hoping it would wake him up. It didn't help. After his cereal had turned to mush as he stirred it with his spoon, he decided that he would head over to Sam's and to pick her up for school. It was a normal thing to do, if Danny was able to get out of bed early enough he would often pick her up on the way to school, but really he only wanted to see her sooner.
Once he had dumped the mush turned cereal down the drain and grabbed his backpack, Danny headed out the door. The walk to Sam's house was almost eerily quiet. There were a couple birds in the trees, but it seemed like no one else was awake. Maybe it's a bit too early to pick Sam up, he thought.
Part of him said that he didn't care. He had to see Sam now. As her house came into view Danny picked up his pace. After walking up the stairs he knocked on the door.
It was a moment before the butler answered. "Good morning young sir. Young Miss Manson has already left for school today."
"Oh," Danny said sounding slightly rejected. "Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you." With that he turned and walked slowly to school.
He entered Casper High and headed to his locker. Maybe Sam was waiting for him there, he hoped. She wasn't. His mood saddened even more as he emptied his backpack of the books he didn't need and grabbed the ones he did.
As Danny was wondering if Sam could still be at her locker, or maybe even talking with a teacher, Tucker and Jessica came up to him.
"Good morning Danny!" Jessica chirped happily.
"Hey Danny," was Tucker's greeting.
"Morning," he said trying to sound more cheerful than he felt.
"What's wrong Danny?" Jessica asked at once. This is the problem with having another girl around, Danny thought. They always know when something's going on.
"It's no big deal."
"Did you ever get a hold of Sam?" Tucker asked now.
Danny shook his head. "No, she never called me back either."
"I'm sure she was just busy. I don't think she'd avoid you," Jessica offered.
"I know that, but I went to pick her up this morning."
"That's good. Where is she?" Tucker wondered looking around the hallway. More students were filing in for the day.
"No idea. She wasn't home. Said that she had already left for school."
"How odd," Jessica said.
"Weren't you guys having trouble with your English presentation?"
"A bit, why?" Danny answered Tucker.
"Well, maybe she's talking with the English teacher about it."
"Yeah, maybe," Danny said brightening up.
"I'm sure that's it. You'll see her in class," Jessica said sounding very confident.
This made Danny feel quite a bit better. At least for the time being.
"Come on, let's get to class or we'll be late."
-----------------
Lunch came slowly and Danny was nearly heartbroken as he sat with his two friends. Sam had yet to show up for any class that morning. Dash had noticed right away and was using every chance he had to taunt Danny about it.
"Aww... Did your little girlfriend dump you, Fenton?"
"Leave him alone Dash," Jessica told the football player sternly.
Danny only sunk lower into his chair. He wished that he could just turn invisible so that no one noticed him. Oh yeah, he thought, I can.
Just as he was considering changing himself, Danny got an evil look from Tucker. His friend knew exactly what was on the Halfa's mind, and that look told him to think otherwise.
"Oh, so she did, didn't she?" Dash egged on.
"No," Tucker told him firmly. "Sam's just sick today. And since when is it any of your business?"
Dash shrugged and walked away. Why couldn't he have thought of anything like that to say, Danny wondered. He dropped his head onto the table and groaned to himself.
"Come on Danny. It's not that bad," Jessica offered.
"No, of course not. Maybe something just came up. You never know with Sam's family," Tucker tried now.
This was true, Danny thought. The Mansons were almost as strange as his family. Almost. However, not even his parents would just pull him away from school without letting him tell Sam and Tucker where they were going. And besides that if he had a butler, he would not have said butler tell his friends that he had gone to school when he had in fact not.
Something was going on and Danny didn't like it one bit. He tried Sam's cell before lunch was over, but again she didn't answer.
"Do you think she's mad at me?" Danny asked giving Jessica and Tucker a pair of puppy dog eyes.
"Of course not Danny!" she said sweeping across the table to give him a hug. "If she's mad at anymore, it's probably me. Unless you did something after you guys left. Did you?"
Danny let out a small gasp. Jessica released him. "Sorry," she said blushing. "I guess my hugs tend to be a bit like Starfire's when I get emotional."
"Uhh... sure," Danny said not understanding what the girl was getting at. Was there something that he could have done to upset Sam, he wondered for a moment. Finally it hit him. "Maybe."
"What do you mean 'maybe?'" Tucker asked looking up from his hamburger.
"Well, after we left we went back to Sam's house and talked for a bit, and listened to her new CD."
"What did you guys talk about?"
"Stuff," Danny said simply. He didn't want to upset Jessica by telling her that they had been talking about her.
"Danny," the girl said. It sounded like her patience was getting tested. "Look, I'm sure you guys were talking about what happened at the theater. Tucker and I are both aware of that. What else did you talk about?"
"It's kind of embarrassing."
"If it could have upset her then you should tell us," Tucker offered.
The Halfa cleared his throat. "Well, I kinda almost told her that I loved her. But she stopped me."
Jessica's eyes narrowed. "Did you mean it?"
"I think so, but I'm not sure."
"And what did she say to you after that?" the girl asked now, trying to figure out the full story.
"That she didn't want me to say I loved her if I thought that's what she wanted to hear or would make her feel better. She wanted me to be sure when I said it."
"Is that all?"
Danny nodded, "Yeah, that's everything."
The brown-hared girl laughed for a moment. The two boys just watched her until she calmed down. "Oh, Danny. Of course she's not mad at you for that. In fact I'm surprised she didn't call me to tell me what happened."
"What are you babbling about?" Tucker asked giving her a strange look.
"Whenever a girl gets upset, or something really juicy happens the first thing they do is call their best friend. If she was upset at Danny for that I'm sure that I would have heard about it."
Danny wondered to himself if Jessica was really Sam's best friend. He almost got the impression that she told more to Mandy than she did to Jessica. Of course it could be the whole stuck-on-a-ghost-pirate-ship-and-nearly-died-together thing. But he was just guessing.
"Feel better?"
"Yeah," Danny told her, but really he was thinking about e-mailing Mandy after school. He knew that if Sam hadn't told Jessica, that she surely would have told the Dark Slayer. After all, Mandy was there from the beginning. Well, sort of.
--------------
After school Danny rushed off, yelling something to Jessica and Tucker about needing to get some information for the English presentation.
He decided to take a short cut through the park, in hopes of getting home sooner. However that wasn't to be the case. As Danny jumped over the bottom of one of the slides he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. It was a small goblin-like ghost.
"I'm going ghost!"
Before he had even landed, Danny had transformed himself into his ghostly alter ego. He leaped towards the goblin, which hadn't seemed to notice him.
"I've got you now!" a voice yelled and someone tackled the ghost before Danny had a chance to get near. What in the world was that, he wondered and he floated in the air.
He watched as the figure wrestled with the ghost and then he noticed something. It was Sam Spectre!
She shot a plasma blast at it and burned it to a crisp. "Sam!"
The ghost girl spun around and looked around for a moment before noticed the voice had come from above her.
"Sam are you okay?"
"Me? Of course I'm fine. Now, you on the other hand." She pushed off of the ground and floated at eye level with Danny.
"I tried calling you, but you didn't answer your cell phone, and you weren't at school today."
"The great Sam Spectre doesn't have a cell phone, and goes to school when she feels like it. Now, you on the other hand, are a lowly ghost who cannot tell me what to do."
"Sam, it's me. Danny, remember?"
She made a show of pretending to consider what he was thinking. "Nope, sorry. I don't know any Danny's," she said. "Doesn't matter though. Prepare to be fried," and with that she shot a plasma blast at him.
Danny quickly dodged it, but his leg managed to get grazed by the beam. "Sam, what is your problem?"
"My problem?" she asked chasing after him. "My problem is all you dumb ghosts coming out here, acting like you're the bomb. But you're not, and this is my world, the Halfa's world."
