Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 13: Strange Chemistry

Memo from Principal Ishiyama, Tuesday, 7:30 AM: The counseling department has informed me of a sharp spike in student discontent. Many children had friends and family in the Green Bay area, and we as educators should be sensitive to this without allowing the classes to degenerate into chaos. Try to strike some kind of balance.

The next day began quietly. Ms. Lows taught for ten minutes and gave the rest of the class to the students so that they could work on homework or ask questions. The kids took out their books and notes, but nobody asked questions and few did their homework. A pervasive air of academic lethargy thwarted all attempts at anything approaching serious work, which was just fine with Danny. He glanced over a few brain-draining problems before joining a group of kids who were engaged in the far more productive task of ogling one of their desk-mate's new mini-game systems.

Danny had tennis in PE, the dodge ball unit being unexpectedly cut short. The PE teacher watched them all from the corner of her eye, but the class sensed her tolerance and played with its own rules, taunting one another over the 'love' scoring and generally acting as though she wasn't there.

In English they reviewed a book, kids still goofing around, not paying much attention to anything. Halfway through the class the teacher snapped and screamed at them all to shut up, but it was a mild kind of screaming, nothing anybody took too seriously. She calmed down and returned to her thankless job as babysitter easily enough. Next period, the history teacher was either too smart or too lazy to try to make anybody do anything, so he clicked on an old movie and told them all to watch it or not; there'd be a test the next day.

Danny couldn't help feeling that the adults were purposefully lulling him into a false sense of security.

Chaos was nice, once in a while. Danny knew he'd done his own share of chatting and goofing around, but he'd almost prefer it if somebody would come down on it. Watching the movie in the dark history classroom made him feel caged. Looking around the class, his classmates' faces thrown into patches of dark and soft white by the flickering glow of the television, the teacher messing around at the computer—nobody was in charge. Or rather, the TV was in charge, its chuckling actors playing out eternal roles in a deceptively cheerful plot.

But nobody else looked bothered. The faces around him-talking and chatting, chins wagging as they loudly discussed trends and recent gossip-Danny wondered how they could disregard the obvious awkwardness, the feeling that this time the bed has gotten up on the wrong side of you. This wasn't a matter of 'emotional awareness,' or whatever Jazz called it. It was just a sense, a scent: something was wrong, and he was the only one who knew it. Then again, he was also the only one who knew of Alex. Danny rattled his pen against his desk, eyes on the clock. He was the first one out the door when the bell rang.

Sweet normalcy returned at lunch. Danny spent the time discussing various theories with Sam and Tucker, none of which held up under scrutiny. The whole awkwardness problem reeked of Alex, but Alex was locked up with McKinley, so that didn't make much sense. Tucker pointed out that nothing supernatural had actually happened; Sam and Danny pointed out that everything felt supernaturally wrong, worse than yesterday, and that that couldn't just be written off to a normal quirk.

Tucker reluctantly agreed that Alex might be behind it, but even so, what were they supposed to do about it?

Sam shrugged. "Well, what about McKinley?"

They rehashed McKinley's probable competency. Sam was the only optimist on that point. Tucker and Danny both thought that McKinley was pretty cool-he'd even let Tuck have his gadgets back-but Alex wasn't exactly a normal ghost-thing. And McKinley was still a government man.

"My parents are working with him now." Danny mentioned. His mom and dad had announced it to him last night.

Sam laughed at that. "I'm sure your dad'll really spice things up for them."

Danny rolled his eyes. "At least he knows what he's doing. Kind of."

Tucker shook his head, grinning. "Kind of? Danny, half his inventions explode when you try to turn them on."

"Yes," Danny said. "But they're usually non-lethal explosions. And don't tell me that that doesn't take some skill."

Four classes down, two to go, and the next trial was chemistry. Nevers could be a real jerk, and from what Danny saw when he pushed open the door, it didn't look as though Nevers was slackening up on that habit anytime soon. The teacher sat at his desk, nerves wire-taught, slitted eyes washing around the classroom as kids streamed through the doors. Some notes sprinkled the whiteboard, various equations and problems left over from the last class. None of the kids liked the look of that; but by the time a half-hour had passed, it was clear that the equations were the least of their problems.

Nevers reached a break in the lesson, pausing after demonstrating a new formula on the finer points of chemical equilibrium. He'd been wound like a spring all through class, his relatively small frame filled with a subtle kind of malice that expressed itself as excessive laxity. Usually this was funny, since Nevers generally wasn't smart enough to be too cruel, but something was different today. The moment had arrived to go over last night's problem set, and Danny wondered if it was too late to get a bathroom pass.

Nevers slapped his ruler across his palm, strolling around the class, surveying his captive audience. What he was doing was no more secret to the other kids than it was to Danny. Usually Nevers' pranks were more pathetic than mean, and even the unlucky student who took the punishment could usually find humor in it, mocking Nevers in the hallways over passing period. Not today. A nasty curtness marked Nevers' motion; a sadistic little smile rippling onto his face as he paced the rows, slapping that wooden, metal-edged ruler against his palm.

Everybody knew his game, and the rules were simple. If the teacher called on you, then you lost. To look alert without looking up, that was the trick. Whoever met his eyes would get the ax for sure. Most kids opted to stare at their open binders, following the direction of his gaze through the motion of his body as he turned and by the snapping click-click of his black shoes.

Nevers stopped his pacing and took a breath to speak; the class held its own.

"Hanna."

Exhale.

Hanna was a nice girl. Very shy, but nice, although she didn't do so well at chemistry. Danny sneaked a glance at Nevers. The teacher lounged up to the center of the room, his back to the girl. "Did you do the problem set last night?"

Hanna fiddled with her hands, looking down at her desk. "Yes."

"Perhaps you'd like to show us a demonstration on the board?"

"I didn't get very far-"

"I didn't ask how far you got." Nevers spun on his heel, facing her. "I asked you to show us how to do problem number... five," he said, after a short look at the open folder on his desk. "Do it."

Hanna flipped open her binder, its pages rustling loudly under her fingers. She unclipped a page and padded up to the board, jaw clenched. She turned again to Nevers. "I didn't get..." She caught his look and, sighing, picked up a marker. Glancing between her paper and the board, she began marking up figures and numbers, erroneous coefficients, unbalanced equations and insensible math. Her hand shook; her writing spooled small and wavered from her hand.

"Why Hanna, I don't think you got it right."

Hanna didn't say a word. From his seat off to the side, Danny could see her shoulders drawn up, her back to the class, head lowered. Anybody else would have mouthed off by now, but not Hanna. Not shy, well-meaning Hanna, who was brilliant at her painting but horrible at her sciences.

Nevers paced around the teacher's desk, standing right behind her. The ruler, its rhythm interrupted during her work, resumed its sharp slapping once again. "Tell me what's wrong with it."

Hanna turned her head, her eyes pink. "I, I um..."

Nevers had that smile, that sadistic little smile, in full bloom across his face. The class was stuck tight. Somebody should do something. To permit this was a borderline sin, but to interrupt it would be suicide. And half the kids wouldn't have been able to solve that problem anyway.

"She knows exactly what went wrong." The class shifted, turning itself just enough to see who had spoken. Chris, one of the smartest kids in the sophomore class. He stood up from his seat, his face tightened with something tactfully inscrutable. "There should be a two in front of the 'H,'" Chris continued. "And carbon dioxide should be in the reactants. The reaction is endothermic, so delta 'H' is positive, and it's spontaneous, so delta 'G' is negative. The sign on delta 'S' is positive, too, otherwise the signs would get mixed up and the equation wouldn't work." Chris broke into a grin of frenzied triumph and took a shallow breath. "Isn't that what you meant to write, Hanna?"

Hanna had stood open-mouthed as he'd spoken, but now she whirled to the blackboard-her pen humming and squeaking as she made the corrections, Chris nudging her along from time to time, but Chris wasn't paying much attention to her, only enough to make sure Hanna got it right. Chris was watching Nevers, who stared dully back. Hanna finished up the last lines of the problem and scuttled back to her seat.

And Nevers started in again. "Good job, Hanna." Nevers didn't look at Hanna, either. "Hey Chris, how good are you at math?" Chris didn't respond. Those behind him noticed that the knuckles of his hands, currently clasped behind his back, had begun to turn white. "Because I'm pretty good at math," Nevers added, inspecting a spot on his desk.

"Thirteen squared minus your current score, one hundred, is sixty-nine. You know what that means for you, Chris? That's your new grade. Mouthing off costs points in this class." The quivering student kept his hands in his lap. Veins stood out in his neck. Nevers smiled. "Sixty-nine percent not enough? How about twenty percent. You know I'm not kidding."

"I'll get you fired for this." The others had to strain to hear him. Chris' voice had sunk low and soft. "I'll see you out for this."

Nevers laughed. "There's this fantastic thing teachers have." He bent to look directly into his averted face. "It's called, 'Tenure.'"

Chris' hands swept from behind his back and balled themselves tightyly at his sides. "You!" he shouted. "You are so INCOMPETENT! You don't know a thing about what you teach. I know more chemistry than you! You teach inaccuracies and you test on inaccuracies and you're just brainwashing everyone with your flagrant stupidity!" Chris faced the class. "Oh yeah. Maybe you guys don't notice or care, but I sure as hell do. This weasel-" He pointed a finger like a dagger at Nevers. "Teaches us LIES! Chemistry! A beautiful physical science, and this MORON just screws it all up." Chris hated Nevers, seething, fuming, accusing. "You hear me? You FUCK UP my beautiful science!"

Nevers gave Chris the finger and made a smooching sound.

And Chris punched him in the stomach.

The thin teacher jackknifed, holding his abdomen and stumbling back against the desk. Chris stood over him, breathing hard, took one fear-filled look around the class and bolted out the door. Nevers straightened himself enough to shout obscenities after him while the rest of the class sat paralyzed and open-mouthed in their seats, all except Danny.

Danny took advantage of the situation to sneak off to the bathroom, because before Chris had delivered the blow and just before they had begun to argue, Danny had seen a thin black wisp dancing, dancing, dancing in the shadow of Nevers' desk.

XXX

A search of the school turned up exactly nothing. A search of the sky above the school turned up more of the same, and even the dirty, filthy, creepy meat-mouse-and-cockroach-filled basement was clear. Danny found nothing he could put his finger on, but once when he coasted, just closed his eyes and let himself feel the gentle pressure of his intangible form passing through earthly materials, a familiar pressure squeezed in on him, a sinking, taunting feeling that didn't need physical manifestation to be felt.

Danny opened his eyes, bringing his mind back to his work. He took the feeling in context, storing it away for future reference, softly mulling it over as he drifted to his pottery class, the passing bell droning through the halls. Danny zapped back to normal in the bathroom, still thinking. This stuff wasn't going to come out and attack him. No, he thought, slinging on his backpack. This thing was going to wait. It was going to sneak around infecting people until... Until what?

Until that snake thing came. The snake thing that Alex had shown him.Danny shouldcall McKinley later, after he'd seen Sam and Tucker.

Class passed in a flurry of wet clay and hurried instruction, the pottery teacher worn-thin after five periods. Ms. Tray's bouncy enthusiasm had turned to stern anxiety, but the students worked quietly along, the loud kids for once silent in concentration. Work was better than thought for all involved, the way the wet clay could be bent and molded according to one's will, smoothing it out with thumbs or tools or winding and stretching it according to taste, and if you messed up, you just squashed the whole mess flat and started over again.

School let out, and Danny raced to meet Sam and Tuck on the lawn. Sam was already there, her face lighting up as she spotted him in the crowds. Before Danny knew it he was at her side and they were kissing, a deep, engrossing, thankful kiss that made the heavy chains of worry fall away from him, the feel of her soft lips, the curves of her soft skin as he ran his hand up her back-

"Tough day?" she breathed.

Danny broke the kiss and touched his forehead to hers. "Yup."

A hand clapped on his shoulder, and Danny jumped a mile in the air.

"Danny!"

Danny rolled his eyes. "Wow. Real nice, Tuck. What is it?"

Tucker was bug-eyed and panting. Danny's antagonism flew right over his head. "Chris! Chris got-"

"What? What did he get?" Danny shouted. "Caught? A year's detention? Imprisoned!" He crossed his arms. "Wouldn't surprise me."

Sam stepped away from Danny. "Um, Danny? Are you OK?"

"I was there." Danny explained what he had seen, the little twisting shadows and Never's unusual behavior. "Nevers had it coming." Danny kicked at the dirt, hands in his pockets. "But Chris was acting nuts."

"You know, he was probably driven nuts." Sam glanced back toward the school.

"Well you didn't have to snap at me about it," Tucker grumbled.

Danny sighed. "Yeah, I know." He stretched his arms overhead, feeling like he needed a bath. "Sorry about that, Tucker. But you were kind of, y'know, interrupting."

Tucker clasped his hands in penitence. "Oh excuse me. I forgot that I was supposed to let you two make out, and THEN we'd go and save the world."

Sam forced a strained chuckle, enough to diffuse Danny, who opted to make a snooty face at Tucker rather than continue the argument. Sam touched his fingers, letting him know it wasn't a big deal. "You guys probably want to consider the fact that whatever has gotten into the school is probably affecting us, too." She cleared her throat. "That might help things, a little."

Danny frowned. "Well Tucker DID-"

"I think we should go somewhere and hang out for a while." Sam looked between the two of them. "Then we can talk about it."

"That's a good idea." Danny gave Tucker a sneaky sidelong glance. "Where do you think we should go?"

Tucker grinned. "I think we should go to Sam's house."

Sam shook her head. "You are such a mooch."

"Well then let's go to my apartment and play video games until our eyes dry out!" Tucker held up an appeasing hi-five for Danny, who took it after an instant's hesitation. Sam breathed a quiet sigh of relief as the two of them fell back into their standard goofball routine.

"Oh, wait..." Danny scratched his head, pretending to think. "If we do that then Sam will kick both our butts."

"We could cheat!"

"Tie back her thumbs!"

Sam laughed and laughed. "You guys are ridiculous. Alright, let's go to my house."

At Sam's house, there was much playing of video games and more laughing and hand-slapping, much slurping of soda and munching of pizza. They plugged in a battle game and battled communists, Nazis, and Viet Cong, scoring many victories over their digital enemies. They bowled a game or two and perused the TV stations, played a couple more video games. The impromptu party went on for much longer than any of them had consciously intended, and by the time somebody deemed it necessary to announce the time, it was nine o'clock.

Danny dropped his controller. "My curfew's at ten! And we didn't even do anything!"

Tucker shrugged, freezing the racing game in progress on Sam's big-screen. "That's not necessarily true. We de-stressed you."

"Which was nice while it lasted, but now I'm behind."

"Don't worry about it." Tucker reached over and clicked off the game. "I don't think it's Alex."

Danny stared at the blank screen, sitting back on his haunches. "That's almost worse."

"Hey, what was that?" Tucker asked. Sam watched Danny closely.

He smiled and waved it off. "Nothing. I was just thinking."

"Has that McKinley guy told you anything yet?" Tucker asked.

"Nope." Danny stood up and stretched, grabbing his backpack off the floor. "McKinley hasn't said anything, and neither have my parents. I'll see what's going on; talk to you guys tomorrow."

They said goodbye, and Danny left Sam and Tucker to clean up games. The maids could handle the food scraps. Tucker finished up and Sam walked with him to the door. Tucker turned on the threshold and looked at her. "I'm telling you, nothing's going on. We're stressing over NOTHING."

Sam saw the fear in his eyes and bowed her head. "Yeah. Probably."

XXX

Danny parked his scooter in the garage, leaning it up against some old tool boxes before pushing through the door into his house, which was completely quiet. Not creepy-quiet, but dormant-quiet. His parents were probably working late. Danny hadn't seen them since yesterday. He hefted his backpack up the stairs, which wasn't as difficult as it usually was because usually there were ten or twenty pounds of textbooks in there, but nobody had assigned him any homework so it really wasn't a problem. Danny walked up to his room, tossed his backpack on the floor. He caught sight of that old poster of the Horsehead nebula, towering and majestic in all its colors.

He would have liked to say a little more to Sam, back on Friday. Like how he loved her with every cell in his body.

Memories of last Friday brought back memories of the unpleasant business last Saturday, and speaking of cells, his sister had turned into a certifiable hermit. Danny peered out of his room to her door down the hall, which was closed. Danny knew she didn't have much of a social life, but the glances he'd caught of her in the halls during school had her looking harried, panicked, and sick. So either she was in danger of getting a B+ on her progress report or something important was bugging her.

Danny knocked on her door. Jazz grumbled something inaudible, so he turned the knob and stuck his head in. "Jazz?"

She was hunched over a stack of notes, a mug of coffee on her desk and a few hundred thousand journals scattered around. Probably not the B+ scenario. "Are you, um, okay, Jazz?"

She made a final scribble and gestured for him to come in. She looked... confused. The almighty know-it-all Jazz looked confused, and mildly desperate.

"Hey, Chris is in your chemistry class, right?"

"Yeah. Why?" He came in and shut the door behind him. Hopefully his parents weren't coming home any time soon. "Is today's panic session over Chris?"

"In a way." She shuffled through her journals for a second. Danny recognized them as the logs she kept of her counseling sessions. "Ah-hah. Here it is." She held up an older journal, the edges of its hard-bound backing slightly bent and scratched. "These," she said, opening it for him. "Are my observations of Casper High's alleged Smart Kids. Just notes on the more intelligent sophomores, junior, and seniors. Some graduates.

"A lot of these kids didn't have the times of their lives in high school, but none of them has ever reacted violently."

Danny got the feeling she was speaking more to herself than to him. "Except Chris, apparently." He looked at the book with renewed interest, taking it from Jazz and flipping lightly through it. "So?"

"So something is wrong, Danny. Chris likes to talk, and he's certainly candid with his opinions, but he's not a violent person. Intelligent kids don't lash out like that because they have too much at stake, and they know it. They might complain to other intelligent kids, and if things get unbearable they'll complain to the administration and transfer out of the class, but they don't physically strike back unless something has gone horribly, obviously wrong with them." Jazz bit her lip, shooting a glance at her notes. "Chris was perfectly healthy."

Danny couldn't make much of the journal. Just a bunch of notes written in Jazz's shorthand, scattered here and there with psychological terms. He handed it back to her. "So he's an exception to the rule, maybe. Didn't get enough sleep, or something like that."

"Not likely. Something is wrong. And it's not just with Chris, either. The counseling department has been receiving three times its normal load, and today was worse than yesterday. Kids are nervous, Danny. I don't know if the sophomore class has caught it yet, but the senior and junior classes are really jumpy." Jazz turned back to her journals. Danny looked over her shoulder. Venn diagrams, bubbles, outlines... Alex's name popped up a lot.

Jazz touched his shoulder, catching his eyes as Danny looked up. "Be careful at school tomorrow, Danny, because people have extremely short tempers these days."

Danny swallowed. "You mean I'll get cussed out or something?"

"We hear things in the counseling department. If someone like Chris can get worked up enough to punch Nevers, then there are a whole lot of other kids who might do something a lot worse." She glared at the floor. "If it were up to me, you'd stay home for the rest of the week."

Danny knew that was impossible. He couldn't leave Sam and Tucker in the lurch like that, and besides, the school was his territory, and Alex was partly his responsibility. He'd beaten Walker's minor invasion, and he'd kept Spectra from turning the school's happiness into anti-aging cream. He would have to be there for the school, even if half of them hated him. "I'll be careful," he told Jazz.

XXX

Jazz watched Danny leave, the door clicking lightly shut behind him. She returned to her papers, scribbled down some more notes, accomplishing nothing more than filling space, really. McKinley hadn't given either her or Danny his number, and Jazz wondered if that hadn't been purposeful. If Danny couldn't find Alex, then there would be less risk that they'd start fighting again and make things worse. Of course, if either Danny or Jazz herself could elicit a beneficial reaction from Alex, then they'd also be losing that advantage. Unless Alex had too much brain damage from whatever he did to make that crater to speak anything but nonsense.

Jazz tore out a full page of her notes and stared dismally at the fresh sheet. Chris had been in the top five of his class, maybe the top three, and now he'd be lucky to get off without jail time. McKinley might know why people were being nasty, but he was running silent, apparently. Heaven forbid Jazz ask her parents, who had been known to eat and sleep in the labs when they were working on something exciting and had a knack for making the easiest sciences utterly inscrutable.

Until then, she'd better start on that English essay. She also had some pre-calculus work that required an iota of her attention. Jazz relocated her journals from her desk to her bed and dragged out the school work, burying herself in that rather than her frustration.

She threw herself into it, drafting, editing, editing again, rewriting, more editing. The essay dealt with Hamlet, and Jazz wanted to make it a good one. Hamlet required a good deal of concentration to discuss cogently, and as she worked the time flew by. The whoosh of traffic disappeared from her mind, the night sounds fading into virtual silence as she concentrated. Jazz almost didn't hear the phone ringing downstairs.

She gasped and jumped up from her seat, racing down the steps and snatching up the receiver. "Hello?" Jazz checked the time. It was nearly eleven thirty.

"Hi, this is Director McKinley. Am I speaking to Jazz?"

"Yes. This is Jazz." Bastard, Jazz thought. I've been dying of information starvation all day and you ring me up at midnight for a news flash.

"Yes. Your parents asked me to call and let you know they'd be staying overnight at the labs."

"Okay." But one of McKinley's lackeys could have done that. She waited for the point.

"How are you and Danny doing over there, Jazz?"

"Terrible. Our school's a mess. Danny's dealing okay, but he's not feeling too hot about any of it. Neither am I. What have you guys been doing? Where's Alex, and has he been talking about any of this?"

McKinley made a noise that might have been a groan. "Oh yeah, he's been talking alright, but he doesn't say a damn thing." There was a silence as Jazz waited for him to elaborate. "Sorry. We're under some pressure over here, too, and there are limits to what I can say over the phone. I assure you that we have made some progress. Your parents have designed a top-notch containment structure for him, and we're working on analyzing some fascinating lab results."

Jazz knew too much about scientific weaselry to be thrown off by that. "So you have him in a good cage and you're stuck with a lot of inscrutable data."

"Trust me. We're working on it, and we're doing well."

Filthy liar. "Just try to keep me in the loop, alright?"

"Will do."

Jazz hung up the phone and returned to her work. In her room, she settled back in her chair before her mangled essay, thumbing the pages distractedly. At least they'd told her something. Not much, but it was better than nothing. She spent another hour or two on her work and made it into bed around 1:00. Four hours later McKinley called again, and Jazz scribbled a fast note to Danny before jumping into her car and jetting off into the dim morning light.

A/N: Thanks much to my awesome reviewers, Sakura Scout and Cheerin4danny. Poor Chris… And what's up with Jazz? Will I finally begin to update more than once a month? And when does the butt-kicking start! Tune in next time for the answers to these pressing questions (maybe)!