Chapter 5

My heart was pounding in my chest, my stomach churned with anxiety and I thought I just might hurl. If I hadn't been so stubborn, if I wasn't so absolutely certain that this was necessary, I'd have bailed. But I often find that I'm capable of doing whatever I have to do even while my brain is screaming, 'Stop! Don't! You're gonna DIE!'

"I know about the dog, because. . . I'm the Ghost Boy."

She stared at me, blank-faced, which is pretty much what I expected at this point. I gazed right back at her, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down my forehead. Keep it calm, get her past it. . . .

"Well, half-ghost, actually."

She tightened her face in an expression of sarcastic disbelief, and said, "That's not funny."

"It's not meant to be funny."

Silence. Her eyes narrowed.

"Uh. . . Danny Phantom? Danny Fenton? Get it? It's sort of a pun. . . ."

She gave a barely discernable shake of the head, and whispered, "You're lying."

"You know, the ghost you've been trying to destroy for the last year? I'm sitting right here in front of– "

"Prove it."

"–you. Huh?"

She exploded up from the bench, somersaulted across the table and, in one fluid motion, twisted and pivoted over my right shoulder, knocking me face-first into the table and pinning me down with a hand on my left shoulder and a knee in my back. I heard the Thermos tip over and roll down the table behind my head. In the next heartbeat she had my right wrist in a vice-grip, pulling it sharply up my back in a move that brought tears to my eyes. "Prove it! If this isn't some kind of sick, twisted joke, then prove it!"

She wanted me to transform. She wanted to see solid proof of my ridiculous claim. Since the accident I'd grown to realize that there is some kind of vague difference between my human appearance and my ghost appearance, a difference I can't see when I look in the mirror (except for the obvious stuff, like the white hair) but which effectively prevents people from recognizing me as a ghost. Sam and Tucker insist that my face looks exactly the same both ways, but I don't believe it–my own mother once stared at me from just a few feet away, and saw nothing but a manifestation of ectoplasmic energy and post-human consciousness. I knew it must be the same way for Valerie: and now she was being asked to reconcile the creature she hated with the boy she once dated.

"Prove it!"

"Ow! Um… you and me. . . in the Ghost Zone, handcuffed together by Skulker so he could hunt us, and I couldn't move and you were trying to get us out of there on your rocket sled, and I said you should try to open one of the doors and you picked one and opened it but there was a train—ow!"

She cut me off by leaning down with her knee on my back and yanking on my arm again. "He could have told you that," she spat.

"Why would I tell anybody about that?"

"I don't know, and I don't care—I want proof!"

Okay, she wanted proof. What was I willing to give her? What could I say to her, what information could I give that would convince her? My plan called for me to stay in my human form until she could accept that Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom are one and the same, and that I meant her no harm. Until that happened, I had to trust her not to harm a human. I had to trust her good sense not to murder a classmate.

But here we were, frozen at an impasse. I tried to stay still and look unthreatening; but she continued to pull my arm upwards until I worried that my shoulder joint just might pop out. As a human, I was at her mercy. As a ghost, I could break free. . . .

No! That wasn't part of the plan!

I compromised. I took three slow breaths, then made my right arm intangible. I felt it disappear— physically only, as I did not choose to make it invisible as well— and heard Valerie gasp and curse with frustration as she lost her hold on my wrist. I clenched my teeth and forced myself to hold my arm in that same, uncomfortable position, so she would see and comprehend what she saw. Then I slowly phased it down into my back, through my chest (suppressing a shudder as my ghostly fingers passed through my beating heart) and out through the picnic table under me. It would have been so easy to phase my whole body out from under her, but I wasn't trying to escape— I was only trying to prove my claim.

I lay still, my intangible right arm still hanging down through the table. Trust her, I told myself.

Her left hand and knee still pinning me down, Valerie picked up the shiny, new Fenton Thermos from the table and swung it down in an arc, slamming it into the back of my head behind my right ear. As I slipped into unconsciousness, I thought I heard footsteps running away through the grass.

She didn't say another word.