I was released from the hospital a week after Danny died, four days after sitting through his funeral and fighting the urge to just lose what little was left of my sanity, and the day after it finally fully hit me that he was really dead. Danny was dead.

Tuck and I spent the first month after my release searching every corner of the Ghost Zone for him, but we couldn't find him and even the Box Ghost and Skulker hadn't seen him anywhere. With that news, what little hope I had of just talking to him again left me as it shattered on the cold, unforgiving ground. If Skulker and the Box Ghost, the two people who could always seem to find him, no matter what the circumstances, couldn't find him, then he was really gone. The most I could hope for was that he was still around, just trapped in a state where he could watch but not interact or be seen. I really was going to have find of way of living without him, but was it really worth it?

When I was forced to go back to school, I expected to find just a little bit if sympathy coming from my classmates since they all knew just how close Danny and I had been, but there was none to be found. They were nice enough at the funeral, but once I entered the building that contained the hell they called highschool, they lost what little humanity I thought they just might have.

I had one day where no one bothered me, then all hell broke lose. The damned jocks weren't happy that they'd lost their favorite punching bag and instead of going after Tucker, they sunk to a new low. I became their new target. I never thought they'd stoop so low as to hit a girl but they did, and at that time, I was still too weak to kick their sorry asses.

Salt was added to the wound when Paulina and the rest of the popular bitches attacked. As soon as I managed to escape the clutches if those damned jocks, Paulina and her little bitch squad would appear to added mental abuse to the physical.

I used to think after years of ghost fighting, I'd be impervious to that sort of shit, but I just couldn't handle it. My life was hell when Danny died, but this was worse and I didn't have anyone to share it with to get it out of my system.

Only Valerie showed me any mercy, and part of that was because she was still trying to come to terms with Danny's secret. She was there when he went down and she saw his final transformation. Valerie was still trying to get over the fact that she'd hunted him for the past two and a half years. I think only his parents had it worse than she did in that aspect of it all.

Two weeks into my stay in hell, I realized I'd lost the main thing that let me think I had any form of a social life. Sure, I could be a sarcastic little bitch when I wanted to be, and maybe that did tend to steer people away from me, but that didn't mean I wanted to feel abandoned as I sat on the long bench in the hall, eating my lunch day after day all alone. Tucker tried to keep our close friendship, but he started to drift away. I'll take most if the blame for that one, I was pretty depressed all the time, well beyond what my usual demeanor called for. The number of times I walked home silently moping to the world could not be counted by the end of the third week.

That had become my life, I was bullied by all the assholes and grade-A bitches the popular crowd had to offer and even when I managed to escape them, I was all alone and depressed as hell. A combination of those things is probably what started it.

By the middle of my second month back at school, I was losing the will to give a damn about anything. Most of my classes had always bored me, being way too easy for me, but now I didn't even have someone to outsmart, someone to at least try to give me a challenge. I knew Danny did have a brain up there, and when we were put side by side inteligence wise, we were probably at the same level. It wasn't fair that ghost hunting had taken away his chance at actually achieving a decent clas rank because he could no longer keep up. I have to agree with him on that one, kicking ghost ass was more important than schoolwork.

But I guess none of that really mattered anymore, did it? He was gone. God damnit, he was gone. The rock in my life was gone. I was all alone as I watched more and more people start to care less and less about him. It didn't take long for the jocks to forget I merely a replacement for their favorite punching bag, and by the time I finally broke down all together, even Valerie and Tucker were starting to move on.

Why the hell was I the only one that still gave a damn about him?

Every fucking night, I fell asleep curled up around that little rose he'd made for me, I'm pretty sure it was only the ghostly energy it was made from that was keeping it from cracking night after night. I cried myself to sleep several nights a week, and even though I knew everyone else in the world was silently telling me to just move the hell on, I couldn't let go. I tried, god knows I tried, but I couldn't do it. Either I was reminded of him by something so small, no one else would have caught it, or I was dreaming about him.

I kept my feelings and emotions hidden at school and everywhere else behind a carefully constructed mask. The funny thing? The fact that people only seemed to realize there was something wrong when I was actually having one of my few good days. Even then, it was always the people I barely knew, the fellow "nerds" and "losers" that sat around me. Life just loves to mess with me, doesn't it?

Then one day, on a whim, I found myself sitting up n my roof, a place I'd never been before Danny got his powers. We used to sit up here all the time, talking, joking, or even just staring at the stars in the night sky. It was so easy in those days, I wasn't alone, I wasn't the jocks damn punching bag, and most importantly, it didn't hurt to actually give a damn about anything, about him.

I looked at my phone, half for the time and half because of the impossible hope that there would be some message to tell me they'd found Danny in the Ghost Zone, that I could talk to him again.

There was no such message, but it was well past midnight – it was about time for me to go to bed and cry myself to sleep, it could already tell this night was going to end in tears.

Then, as I got up, my foot slipped, and the next thing I knew I was falling and sliding down the roof. Part of me was screaming to high hell as I reached the edge of the roof and started the three story fall to the ground but the rest of me wondered if maybe this would be better. I wouldn't have to worry about my shitty, fucked up life anymore if I died right here, and if I was lucky, I might be able to find Danny again.

"SAM!" I thought I was hallucinating as I heard his voice scream out from somewhere near me. I didn't know where it came from, whether it was real or in my head, all I knew was that it was his voice.

Then, I saw the ground approaching fast and that thought fled my mind. I couldn't have been more than two feet from the ground when I felt something grab me, saving me from my collision with the ground.

And here ends the second to last chapter of this. I have decided I will be doing a sequel, you'll probably be getting the title for that in the last chapter of this. :)

Comments and feedback are as welcome as always! :D

Invisible One