A/N: Wow, I am truly amazed by the response to this. Thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, favorited and/or placed this on alert! You guys rock!

kyrenlover105: You're right; Danny does stutter too much. I had been trying to imply that the poor guy's mental processes are not what they could be and that he is having trouble articulating sentences, but there is a difference between re-wording after having already spoken and saying the same syllable three times. I will go back through and clean it up a bit. (Also note that a lot of what Mr. Lancer mistakes for nervousness is actually Danny trying to keep himself awake, hah.)

Perhaps getting his foot stuck in the floor—again—was a sign to Danny that second period would be humiliating, but if it was, he ignored it and kept walking.

When Danny stepped through the door, it was obvious that he had interrupted when Mrs. Kang was mid-sentence—which was a joke, really; if anything, she was probably telling an anecdote that was irrelevant to anything that might ever occur in the curriculum. He ducked his head and handed over Mr. Lancer's note, and he wondered why he had even bothered; it was only eight minutes until the end of class. What was one more truancy, anyway? Then, at the sudden pang of guilt he experienced, he recalled the reason: If it were not in an effort to protect others from ghosts, a killed insect would haunt him to his dying—oh, forget it. Hero complex, conscience of a guilty marshmallow, inability to use ghost idioms without drowning in irony… Welcome to the half-life of Danny Fenton.

As he stood there, waiting for Mrs. Kang to finish her inspection of the note, his classmates were whispering amongst themselves. They couldn't have known that Danny was half-ghost, much less that ghost-human hybrids had keener hearing than full humans and that, therefore, he could pick up much of what they were saying; but he still felt slightly resentful that they would speak of him so plainly, seemingly unheard or not, when he was right there.

"—passing love letters—"

"—that Goth dweeb—"

"Ugh, nerd love is so—"

"—loser—"

"—looks more terrible than usual—"

"—all-nighter playing video games or something—"

"—stinks."

"—no personal hygiene—"

"—really gross—"

"—such a loser."

Finally, Mrs. Kang seemed to decide that the excusal had not been forged. Danny thought the whole thing was stupid—it had been written on Mr. Lancer's personalized stationery, for goodness' sake!—but said nothing.

"Settle down, class. Daniel, return to your seat immediately."

Every eye turned on him. 'Return to your seat immediately'? Did she really have to treat him like he had left his seat without permission, only to commit some grievous misdeed of which his puny mind could only begin to fathom the severity? Maybe some of his annoyance had shown on his face, and that was why she was acting like he had killed her cat or something.

He walked to his desk, the one with the cracked chair and with so many carvings that it's impossible to write on, scowling. He slung his backpack over his shoulder—

—and its body tore from its strap, the momentum causing his books, along with months of incomplete homework assignments, to scatter down the aisle.

At that moment, the bell rang. In the natural attitude of teenage apathy, his peers filed out without sparing a second glance for him or his belongings. They certainly seemed to care a minute ago, when they were talking about him like it was any of their business…

"I expect you to clean this mess, Daniel," sniffed Mrs. Kang, and she was gone.

He handled his now-footprint-covered papers as though they had dealt him mortal injury.

He really, really disliked being called by his christian name. He was Danny and only Danny. Mr. Fenton, Fenton, Fentina, Fenturd, Fentoad, Fentoenail… There was a lot of names that he could deal with, but Daniel never failed to remind him of his arch-nemesis, Vlad. Why did teachers feel the need to call him that, anyway? His name on the roster was Danny Fenton; his family knew him as Danny Fenton; his friends knew him as Danny Fenton-sometimes-Phantom; heck, not even the most clueless of journalists or ghosts ever called him Daniel. It was always Danny.

If he didn't know any better, he might believe that school employees were actually omniscient and used their secret knowledge to play a giant game of spite. He only waited for the day that they would start using chess metaphors and calling things "quaint" just to inflict a personal, headache-inducing level of creeped-outness upon him. Well, maybe Mr. Lancer was an exception.

Mr. Lancer…Danny had really messed up. Super powers? Lancer had to know that Danny was not nearly imaginative enough to invent something like that on the spot, especially while half-asleep.

In the end, he decided that crumpled, dirty homework he would never do anyway was pointless to keep, so he threw it in the recycling bin (the blame for which he fully appointed to Sam) and was done with it. He gathered in his arms the books he had barely looked at and the backpack that was in dire need of replacement, and he left the Biology room in which he had learned nothing of Biology.

A/N: I do not plan for Mrs. Kang to make another appearance.

Don't worry; the plot kicks in at lunchtime. :)