It took Sam all of Friday to rest after the events of the previous night. When she finally woke late in the day, it felt like she hadn't moved a muscle in all that time. Apparently, her muscles had decided they quite disliked this neglectful treatment and had staged a minor mutiny.
Every movement a torture, it took her a moment to realize that the terrible pressure near her stomach was not, in fact, her abs shouting at her in protest but rather a much more earthy complaint.
Standing as quickly as her defiant muscles would allow she limped quickly for her door…
And found it locked. Which was odd, because her door didn't have a lock. She twisted hard on the handle, but it wouldn't budge. Shaking the door, nothing happened.
She leaned over carefully, the enormous pressure trying to escape, and looked at the latch. It didn't move at all when she turned the handle.
Then an idea came to her. She hurriedly waddled back over to her nightstand and picked up her phone, dialing a number rapidly.
"Hello?" a voice said tiredly.
"Danny, did you do something to my door?" Sam asked immediately.
"Oh," he replied, slightly more awake. "Yeah, I put a quarter in it. To keep people from waking you up; I thought-"
"Yeah, yeah, very thoughtful, sensitive, considerate," Sam interrupted impatiently. "But there's a problem…"
"I CAN'T GET TO THE BATHROOM!" She shouted, holding her phone in front of her.
"Oh crap!" he said. "I'm so sorry, I didn't think-"
"Stop apologizing and get over here!" Sam interrupted.
"On my way!" Danny said, his voice already sounding slightly distant.
After they'd both rapidly lost about ten pounds, Danny and Sam left for the cliff in the mountains they'd found the previous month. They both liked to study there when the park was too full or too dark. The unobstructed moon usually cast enough light for them to read by, and when it didn't they brought an old camping lamp Danny's dad had "lost" several months ago.
Because something about using a duplicate of Danny as a lantern had just seemed disrespectful.
On their (conventional) way out of the dorm, they hadn't seen anyone, but they'd heard loud music coming from one of the floors and guessed that somebody was throwing a pre-finals party; a party that had evidently either drawn people out of or driven them further into their dorm rooms.
"What's the name of that literary thing that's like explaining what a car sounds like by comparing it to a thunderstorm?" Danny asked, flipping through his notes.
"Simile," Sam replied, still staring at her biology textbook.
"What about the one where you say one thing and mean another?" He asked, still furiously flipping through his notes.
"Irony," she replied. "Also, sarcasm, but Katsuo tells me we Americans use the two interchangeably when we shouldn't."
"What about the one that's like-"
"Metaphor," Sam replied. She leaned over and looked at his notebook. "Did you even take notes?" she asked. His notebook was full of doodles of ghosts they'd fought and new maneuvers he'd thought up. More than half of the latter had been crossed out.
"A little," Danny said, defensively. "I told you what my professor's like."
Sam sighed. Reaching into her bag, she grabbed her own notebook, "Here. Use mine; I probably won't need it for a bit."
"Also, what was the First Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, again?" he asked, flipping to a different textbook.
Sam threw her notebook at him.
Sam and Danny spent all of Sunday and Monday trading time between their secluded clifftop study hall, various good but largely unvisited restaurants, and Wulf's cavern complex, where Sam managed to discover several interesting rock formations and sketch out several fungi she'd never seen before.
From their high vantage point, the two also occasionally watched students milling about between the cafeteria, football stadium, library, and the dorms. It made for a nice break from the otherwise relentless studying.
Because of this near constant time away from the main campus, Sam was wholly unprepared for the reactions she got on Tuesday.
Reaching into her bag to double check she had the tests, cold, early-morning winter air following her into the building, Sam walked through the short hallway leading to the Professor's entrance of her lecture hall.
She opened the door, trying to count the tests one-handed, and immediately flinched toward the back wall as a deafening sound cascaded from the tiers in front of her. "Son of a—" she said as she looked up in confusion.
It was her class, clapping and cheering. Caleb in the back stood, his hands clapping furiously, and the class followed. Brianna next to him looked entirely conflicted about the situation, and would periodically stop clapping and adopt a face that one would expect from someone who had just forgotten their own name, then start clapping again.
Kat and Alex openly cheered, along with almost a dozen others, and even Katsuo was clapping loudly.
Sam looked back, bewildered. Putting her hands up for quiet, she received it almost immediately.
"Anyone wanna tell me," Sam said, somewhat startled by the immediate quiet, "what this is about?"
Interestingly, it was Katsuo who responded. Quite concisely, in fact. "The ghost shelters had televisions with news coverage. Almost everyone in the school watched you and Mr. Phantom catch that ghost."
Sam looked back at him for a long, long second. Finally, she opened her mouth, looked quickly around the room, and said, "Crud."
As she'd dreaded, her finals were worse. She could barely get into her biology classroom and, once she was finally inside, her class swarmed her. Even the professor was too busy congratulating her in-between asking his own questions to hand out the final.
She'd actually had to shout over them and demand (in the form of a relatively respectful question) that the professor hand out the tests.
She suspected (what with all the glances she got while taking her final) that the rest of her class weren't going to do well on theirs. Sam struggled and spectacularly failed to muster any sympathy for their GPAs.
Her English and math finals were much the same, except there were more proposals to get lunch or coffee or catch a movie.
Sam actually liked those; they made her laugh. The boys (and at least one girl) making the offers didn't tend to see the humor in it.
One (debatably) good thing about the near constant harassing was that it took her mind off the finals themselves. She spent so much time finding shortcuts and planning unseen routes to her classes that it felt like no time at all before she was turning in her history final and speeding out of the classroom for the nearby campus café.
There were tons of people taking pictures of themselves with her in the background, while others tried to get their friends to take their picture with Sam as the main attraction. There were even several intimidated-looking students, some of whom were at least twice as big as her, who diverted around her as she walked.
By the time she arrived at the café where she was supposed to meet Danny, no less than thirty students had stopped her to ask for a photo, or spew some random question about ghosts, or Danny's left hand grip strength or one of the many, many other questions she'd simply stopped letting into her ears.
By the time she'd gotten close to the café, the finals-induced stress that had barely started to lift had been wholly replaced by harassment-fatigue. Her temper was one small match away from going up in flames. Fighting to maintain her indifferent calm, she walked into the busy café.
Her eye twitched as the room immediately became silent.
The long line leading to the counter turned to face her as one. When one of the boys in the back tried to give her his spot in line, the match fell.
"ALRIGHT, THAT'S ENOUGH!" Sam bellowed. "I'm TIRED of getting asked to be in a photo, I'm TIRED of being the background to everyone's selfies, I'm TIRED of getting asked a hundred stupid questions an hour, and I'm TIRED of you guys treating me like I'm some sort of saint!
"All I want," she continued at a slightly lower volume, the many people in the café looking back, stunned, "Is to order my coffee, go sit down outside, and wait for my friend. I planned for the line; I don't want anybody's place. I just want to get my coffee and drink it in peace. And not have my every sip recorded and uploaded onto the internet!"
"Do you think you could maybe just give me that much?" she asked, almost pleading, looking around the room for anyone that looked receptive. "Can I just have that much?"
A moment of dead silence greeted this brief tirade. Stunned looks cemented on every face, all of them looking at her, and Sam actually started to worry they might not have gotten the hint.
Then, as one, the whole room nodded dumbly. Sighing in relief, she said, "Thank you."
Sam got in line at the back. Those in front of her now seemed to be determinedly not paying attention to her, which was such a vast improvement that Sam didn't bother to stress over the irony of her big, black combat boots, heavy black eyeliner, black and purple t-shirt, and tight black pants suddenly going completely unnoticed.
"Uh, Sam? What's going on?" Danny said as he leaned in for a kiss and sat down. He looked around at the people lined up out the door, turning in their seats to look at them, and the ones hovering near the small iron fence enclosing the café's outdoor patio.
Just then, Sam though she heard Alex and Kat somewhere nearby, but she didn't bother to look for them.
She lowered her head again and, ignoring the people around her, pointed up at a sign hanging from the fence.
"'Paying Customer Seating Only,'" Danny read off. He looked back at the line. "Ok…"
"Apparently the ghost shelters have cable," Sam said miserably. "The whole school saw Danny Phantom and his 'unnamed female companion' beat up that ghost on Thursday."
"Wait," Danny said, looking around at all the people again, "Are you saying…"
"Yeah. Secret's out," Sam said, "Well, mine is."
"Crud," Danny said.
"Yep," Sam replied.
"Professor Manson!" Kat's voice called from outside the fence.
Sam looked toward the noise and saw Kat, Alex, and Katsuo standing next to the fence. "What?" she said.
"You dropped your thermos!" Kat screamed, holding a silver thermos over her head. Sam looked down at her bag and could just see the edge of her Fenton Thermos next to her laptop.
She looked up and said, "That's not—"
Danny was struck with an idea. "Toss it here!" he shouted back. "I just got a call from the police in Greenrock!"
Confused, Kat hesitated. Katsuo took the thermos from her and handed it up to Alex, who tossed it over the iron fence where Danny caught it. The surrounding crowd followed its path through the air.
"What are you doing?" Sam asked.
Danny stood and pulled Sam to her feet. The crowd around them started to buzz excitedly as it watched. "What kind of boyfriend would I be if I made you deal with this," he waved around at the crowd, "on your own?"
"No Danny, don't—" Sam tried to say. But at that instant, Danny stood up straight and changed. A blue ring of light sprang from his chest, and as it split and travelled in either direction, it transformed his appearance from a white shirt and jeans to a black jump suit, a stark white "D" on the front.
"I knew it!" Sam heard Kat squeal. "I knew they were dating! This is so going on the internet!"
"Dang it, Danny!" Sam shouted over the erupting cries of the crowd. "You shouldn't have done that!"
"C'mon, Sam," Danny said, picking her up, legs changing into a wispy tail, "We have a ghost to 'deal' with in the mountains."
"Well Sam," Karen Vandenberg said. "What will it be?"
The two of them were sitting in Karen's office. Karen had brought in a cushy red-leather chair for Sam, a gesture Sam thought was probably both respectful and pleading. Probably more of the latter.
"Your class enrollment numbers are the highest I've ever seen," Karen continued. "The waitlist alone is several hundred names long. If even a quarter of them are actually interested in the subject, this may be the single-most popular new subject in our university's history."
Sam snorted. "It's not the subject, Karen," she said, her voice mostly flat with just a hint of sadness.
"True," Karen replied. "I think most of them are less interested in the class and more interested in you; and by extension your boyfriend. However, many of them are likely genuinely interested in the subject. It seems a waste—"
"Karen, I get swarmed all over campus," Sam said. "I can't even go to the bathroom without a crowd of girls coming in after me."
"I understand your concern," Karen said frowning. "I've been discussing this subject at length with the Board and the other Deans and we are working on a solution. Such distractions are a detriment to everyone; though of course it's hardest on yourself and Mr. Fenton."
"You think you'll be able to come up with something?" Sam asked, letting a tinge of hope slip into her flat voice.
"Yes, I believe so," Karen replied kindly.
Sam stared down at her hands for several minutes. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Karen watching her patiently. Finally, Sam sighed. "I'm going to regret this," she whispered to herself.
"Fine," she said louder, "I'll teach the classes next semester. But I want a raise."
Karen laughed and shook her hand.