Author's Note: My deepest gratitude to Obi-Quiet and JH 24 for the beta reading, and to Mabaroshiwoou and gh0stg1rl for the advice. And thanks to Invader Johnny, Southernstarshadow and Esme Kali Phantom for the feedback. It means more to me than I could ever say.

Chapter 2 (of 2)

ooo0ooo

A few hours later Tucker found himself leaning sleepily against the cool glass of a school bus window, crowded into less than half of the seat by a tall sophomore and her french horn case. Throughout the twenty-minute ride he stared out the window and tried to figure out the best way to break the news to Valerie. He had weighed several different approaches, desperately wanting to let her down gently. She deserved that much.

He tore his attention away from the window when his PDA vibrated in his pocket. He closed his eyes briefly and sighed as he pulled it out, and then read:

u don’t need to apologize, i shouldn’t have yelled at u either. i just wish there was some other way, cuz this is about 500 different kinds of not fair 2 u. sometimes this whole ghost thing really sucks. — danny

Tucker read the message three times and then closed his eyes for a moment to let it sink in, before returning his attention to the school bus window. He needed a plan. The logical time for him to meet with Valerie and gently break it off with her would be at lunch, which they both had at the same time, but he was reluctant to let something so unpleasant spoil what was usually the best twenty minutes of the school day. He had study hall during first period (which had always struck him as a particularly cruel joke on the part of the scheduler) but Valerie had history first period and it certainly didn’t seem fair to make her miss a class for this. Her study period was fifth, when he had PE, and he had to admit that the thought of skipping out on forty-five minutes of flag football was particularly appealing.

But he needn’t have bothered worrying about it, because Valerie took matters into her own hands. She was waiting for him when he stepped off the bus, barely giving him enough time to register her presence before grabbing him by the hand and dragging him away from the main door of the school. Around the corner they ran, down the hill and across the football field, Valerie setting a demanding pace, Tucker fighting valiantly to keep up. He could feel a tingling, almost electric sensation where their hands touched as he drank in the thrill of the moment, Valerie’s silent, insistent pull crying, “I want to be with you!” as the they reached escape velocity together. Tucker laughed, breathless but triumphant, as they finally slowed at the foot of the visitors’ bleachers near the 20 yard line. He collapsed onto the bench when Val finally released his hand, but she paced a small circle to cool down and did a couple of light stretches to keep her muscles loose.

There’s something to be said for responsibility and resolve, but they don’t count for much when a fourteen-year-old boy gets grabbed by a beautiful girl who just wants to steal him away from school and run into the wind, leaving responsibility and order behind. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright; he sat on the bench entranced with admiration and longing as she bent over at the waist to stretch her hamstrings. He could no more have pushed her away at that moment as cut off his own hand.

She stood in front of him and placed one foot on the bench beside him, leaning forward conspiratorially. She licked her lips just before speaking, and Tucker nearly whimpered.

“What in the world do you think you were you doing there last night?”

It took a moment for Tucker to register her question, and another moment to recognize the tone of her voice. It was exasperation he heard, not affection, andhe had to struggle to make the mental adjustments necessary to answer. He cursed himself for not preparing his lies.

“Uh—I wanted to see you. I thought, maybe we could. . . uh, go over the notes for chemistry?” That was the only class they had together, though Sam and Danny were his lab partners. “I tried calling you at home, but nobody answered. And I thought. . . you know, maybe. . . you might be hanging out with your Dad at his job. So I went down there, and I saw him leave to go to the Burger Wizard across the street. So. . . I. . . slipped in the door before it closed.”

From her cold expression, Tucker guessed that wasn’t the answer she was hoping to hear. “And you got there just in time. . . to see. . . ?”

“I didn’t see anything. I swear!” Tucker scrambled for a safe, logical answer that could pass a smell test. “Okay, maybe I. . . heard some stuff. I heard you talking to somebody, arguing with somebody, and then you said something like, “Oh, no I can’t let my father see me like this!” And I heard your Dad coming down the hall behind me, and I thought. . . maybe. . . I could, you know, give you some cover. Like, distract him for a minute.”

Valerie peered at him through narrowed eyes, suspicious, anxious, cautious. She asked again, “But what did you see?”

“Nothing!” Tucker weighed his options. He just might be able to smooth this out with a touch of honesty, though he’d have to be careful not to go too far. “I didn’t see anything, but. . . well, I guessed a little from what I could hear.” He paused, afraid to take the first step toward disaster. “You were fighting with that ghost kid again, weren’t you?”

Valerie blinked twice as his words sank in. The apprehension in her eyes flickered briefly and then hardened into something desperate, like a wild animal trapped in a cage. Shekicked savagely at the bench beside Tucker, then spun around a stalked a few feet away. He was startled by her intensity; the illusion of enthusiasm, of carefree affection, dissipated like so many flimsy soap bubbles bursting on the ground. Something sharp clutched at his heart, and he turned away until he could compose his face and prepare to deal with her as she was, and not how he had imagined she’d be.

Before he was ready—not that he’d ever be ready—Valerie sat down beside him on the bench. Her temper in check for the moment, she stared at him as though she were trying to read his thoughts. When she spoke again, her voice was nearly a whisper.

“You didn’t see. . . anything at all?”

“Last night. . . no, nothing. But before. . . .” He watched her wince, and he knew he would do anything to ease her mind. Anything. “Come on, Val. Maybe nobody else noticed how you disappeared at the basketball game, but I was your date. And despite what you might think, I’m not stupid. You’re the one who was fighting with the ghost kid at the basketball game, the one who—”

“The one who ended up stuffed in a basketball hoop” she prompted, bitterly. Before he could reply, she slumped forward and buried her head in her arms, which were resting on her knees, her bountiful hair falling all around like a protective curtain. It suddenly dawned on him how these last few days must have been an unrelenting string of failures and humiliations for her, that losing her place among the popular crowd was only the beginning of her shame.

After Danny flew away from the basketball game in pursuit of Cujo, Tucker had been the one to run off in search of the school janitor while Val dangled from the basketball hoop. When he returned about five minutes later she was still there, and the players from both schools were milling around on the court below while the referees debated how to proceed. Apparently a delay-of-game technical foul had already been called against the Ravens and the refs were contemplating calling it a forfeit, which left Dash and his teammates fuming and yelling insults at the strange girl in the red armor who hung helplessly above the court.

The janitor had finally arrived with a stepladder, but he was a fat, middle-aged man and despite his best efforts he couldn’t get enough leverage to lift Valerie out of the hoop. By the time Mr. Lancer arrived with his pair of long-handled bolt cutters, the ones he used when it was necessary to break into a student’s locker, most of the students had returned to their seats in the bleachers and were chanting, “You’re not worth two points!” at her. The bolt cutters did the job; with a sickening CRACK the hoop was severed and Valerie slipped out and fell ten feet to the floor. Tucker was impressed that she had managed to collect herself and escape before somebody could unmask her, and he longed to be able to tell her so as she sat there beside him, slumped over in an attitude of utter misery. He wanted to touch her, to comfort her, but he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. Should he put his hand on her back? Rest it gently on her shoulder? Stroke her hair? His hand hovered, hesitant and useless as the seconds ticked by. He didn’t know what to do.

She sat up again before he could figure it out. Her hair was mussed, standing out in a wild halo around her face. He had never seen her look so vulnerable. Her voice came out in a tremulous whisper, “You— that thing you did last night, when you came into the lab and got caught?”

“Was on purpose,” he said, gently. He did a pretty good job at sounding modest, though in truth he was bursting with pride. “I heard you, you sounded so scared, and your Dad was coming down the hall, and so. . . I tripped the security system to distract him. I know it wasn’t much, but I—”

“You let yourself get caught. On purpose.” Her voice was soft with wonder. “For me.”

He shrugged, and felt his face flush. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

She bit her lip, a slight frown making a crease between her eyes. “You know, I don’t think any of my so-called friends would have bothered to do something like that for me.”

“Well,” he said quietly, “as a very wise person once told me—maybe you need better friends.”

That made her laugh a little, despite herself. She gazed at him for a moment, as if seeing him for the first time, then flung her arms around him. She held him tight, and after a few seconds of stunned confusion, his heart pounding, he held her, too. Her hair was soft and smelled of strawberries.

When she pulled away from the embrace, she sat up straight and put her hand on his shoulder, keeping him close but not too close. She took a deep breath and released it before speaking with an air of solemn formality, “You have to swear to me, Tucker. Swear on everything you care about, everything that’s important to you that you will never, ever tell a living soul about me.”

Tucker hesitated. Technically speaking, it was Danny and Sam who had told him about Valerie’s secret identity, not the other way around.

“Swear!” she repeated, but it was more a plea than a demand.

“Oh, I swear!”

“On what?”

He raised his right hand, the way he had seen people do on television, and placed his left hand on his pocket. “I swear on my PDA. If I should ever breathe a word to a living soul that you’re a ghost hunter, I should never, ever have another PDA, or cell phone, or I-Pod or laptop or even an electric toothbrush as long as I shall live.” He paused and swallowed nervously before adding, “So help me, God.”

She sighed. “How do I know I can trust you?”

Tucker thought about that for a moment, but he couldn’t come up with any proof better than what he had already promised. Finally he said, “What choice do you have?”

That silenced her for a moment. She bit her lip and stared at him, as though she were weighing what little she knew about his character against her own fears. Tucker could only hope that she would take into account the way he’d been there for these last few days, after her A-List friends had pushed her away.

“But I promise you this,” he added, “what I just swore—that goes for everything. I’ll never betray your trust, not ever. And no matter what people say, I’m really, really good at keeping secrets.”

That seemed to satisfy her, at least for the time being. She shrugged, probably resigned to the fact that the only way she would ever know whether she could trust him was to go ahead and trust him. They sat together quietly on the bench for several moments, a pregnant pause that left Tucker squirming.

“Valerie, I—”

“Tucker, do you—”

They both laughed. Tucker graciously gestured that she should go first.

“Do you remember, a couple of days ago, when we bumped into each other in the hallway at school?” she asked. Tucker nodded gravely, and she continued, “You said you knew some stuff about ghosts, and— well, I didn’t exactly believe you.”

“Yeah, I remember. But I wasn’t lying to you, honest. I do know some stuff about ghosts.”

She brightened. “And hey—you know stuff about technology, too! Right? I mean, I’ve got all this gear, and I don’t know how half of it works. Maybe you could, you know, help me with that sort of thing?”

Suddenly Tucker realized that this conversation was not heading at all in the direction it was supposed to. But he felt his determination wavering. Maybe he could find a middle ground, where he could help Valerie even while maintaining his loyalty to Danny. Maybe he could even influence her, get her to change her mind, or at least commit a little sabotage on her equipment if it would save Danny’s life. His mind raced, and he seized on an opportunity. “Well, I don’t know much about all those. . . uh, guns and stuff. . . but I do know about that Thermos thing that you couldn’t get the lid off of.”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah. It’s called a Fenton Thermos, by the way, but it doesn’t work. Total piece of junk.” He tried to keep the triumph out of his voice, savoring his own cleverness. He could totally save Danny’s bacon and Valerie would never even know that he had lied.

“But—”

“I’m not kidding! It really doesn’t work. Danny’s father told me so a couple of months ago, and he’s the one who invented it, so he should know! Go ahead, ask him if you don’t believe me. You might as well throw it out, or keep soup in it.”

She looked thoughtful. “That’s weird. Everything else seems to work. But whatever, if it’s a dud then that’s one less thing to lug around. Do you have any idea how heavy all that stuff is?

“No idea,” Tucker said, thinking ironically about the Fenton Thermos in his own backpack.

“It’s pretty darned heavy, even though it’s all incredibly well designed, you know? And no matter how much it weighs, I’d carry every bit of it around as long as it takes to reduce that creepy ghost kid into a smoking pile of stinking, ectoplasmic goo!”

The effect of her words couldn’t have been more dramatic if she had whacked him in the stomach with a two-by-four. Tucker literally gasped for breath and wondered whether he’d be able to keep his breakfast down. His mind reeled in horror: this was no time for subtlety, no time for playing both sides! This beautiful, sweet, glamorous girl was determined to murder his best friend, and if she succeeded, she’d probably do a victory dance on his remains and expect Tucker to join her.

“Tucker?”

“Uh. . . .”

“Tucker, are you all right?

“Uh. . . .”

She peered at him. “You’re looking a little green.”

Danny had been right all along: this had to end. As much as he would like to thread the needle, to negotiate the nuances of half-truths and clever distractions while enjoying Valerie’s company, he simply didn’t have the skill required to play this game. There was only one course of action left to him. This was no time to be a wuss, he told himself; he had a job to do, a man’s job, one that demanded courage and steadfastness. He swallowed his fear and carefully selected from the list of classic break-up lines that he had amassed from a lifetime of watching television.

Gingerly, hesitantly, he reached out and took her hand. He raised his eyes to hers, carefully keeping his expression fixed in an attitude of quiet sympathy. “I think. . . I think maybe we need to give each other some space.”

“Why?” A flicker of alarm flashed across her face as she slid a foot or so down the bench. “Do you think you’re going to hurl?”

“Huh? Uh—no! I’m fine. I just think we need to, you know, take things a little more slowly.”

She studied his gaze, puzzled. “Take what more slowly?”

“You know. . . things. I mean, we shouldn’t rush into this.” He kept his eyes locked with hers, praying that she would pick up on his signals. “We should take it slow.”

“Rush into what? Tucker, you’re not making any sense.” Looking a little suspicious, she pulled her hand away.

“Believe me, Valerie, it’s not you. It’s me. I’m just not. . . I’m just not ready.”

Her voice was starting to sound strained. “Not ready for what?”

“I think we. . . should both see other people!”

“What other people!?”

He leapt up from the bench in frustration and took a few steps out onto the track. This was a lot harder than he thought it would be. With his back to her he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and threw down his last card. “I mean, we can still be friends. . . .”

She followed him and laid a hand gently on his shoulder, leading him to turn around to face her. Her expression was a strange blend of concern and bemusement. “Wait a minute. Are you trying to. . . break up with me?”

“Uh. . . I. . . .”

“You are!” She laughed, incredulous. “You’re trying to break up with me!”

“Uh. . . well. . . I. . . .” He hadn’t expected her to laugh. But he could feel things start to spin wildly out of control, as her expression of bemused tolerance was hardening into cold contempt.

“Oh, no you don’t! This doesn’t happen. You do not get to break up with me, Tucker Foley. Not after everything else that’s happened. Not after I sat here and bared my soul to you, you sniveling little bottom feeder! This doesn’t happen, not to me, not by you, not now, not in this lifetime. You do not get to break up with me!”

Tucker backpedaled. He understood that saving face would be important for her, especially after all the other social disasters she had endured in the past few days. “We could. . . we could let people think that. . . that you were the one who broke up with m—”

“There is no break-up! There can’t be—because we were never together!”

“But—”

“One basketball game! Which, by the way, ended less than five minutes into the first half. That wasn’t a date, it was barely a handshake!”

“But last night—”

“Last night you showed up, uninvited, and now my father thinks I’m making out with you behind his back. Speaking of which, ‘ew,’ and while I’m on the subject, ‘never.’ And now he’s got me grounded for two weeks and that means I can’t hunt that stupid ghost boy and I have to sit around in that stupid apartment where we don’t even have cable—”

Tucker could do nothing but stare, open-mouthed, as she tore him to shreds. Which was just as well, because Valerie wouldn’t have let him get a word in edgewise, anyway.

“—much less a decent high-speed line! My God, Tucker, this is the second time you’ve done this to me! Oh, don’t you think for one lousy minute that I’ve forgotten how you humiliated me the night of the freshman dance, when you stood me up and left me at home with a spectacular dress that cost seven hundred dollars and all the hours I spent getting my hair done, and my makeup, and. . . and. . . I couldn’t even wear that dress again, because everybody knew about it and knew what it was for!”

“I apologized for that already! Val. Valerie. I am really, really sorry—I just. . . well, I just forgot about the dance.” Tucker had hoped that she wasn’t holding that faux pas against him any more, especially since his ungallant behavior had been forced upon him against his will. Helpless to tell her the truth, he fell back on the same, lame excuse he had used three months earlier. “I got involved in this on-line Doomed marathon, and I just lost track of—”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” She glowered at him, her voice low and thick with bitterness, and crowded him so he had to back away in trepidation. He’d already seen her bloodthirsty side. “Do you not realize that I have friends at this school? Close friends, good friends who look out for me, friends who care enough to tell me that my date showed up at the dance in the arms of another woman? You humiliated me!”

“And. . . I’m sorry!” Tucker ducked away from her, trying to keep her at least at arm’s length.

“I hate you, Tucker Foley,” she spat. “I despise you with every fiber of my being, you worthless toad. To think I was even thinking about being nice to you! Well you had your second chance, mister, and you blew it, and you’re not ever— ever— going to get another one. In fact, I will rub your nose in this every opportunity I get for the rest of your life. Count on it.”

There was silence, then. She had said her piece, and she stood defiant, waiting for his surrender.

“You know what they say,” Tucker replied glumly, being very careful to keep his eyes lowered.

“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.”

“And I am totally indifferent to you!” With that, she shoved Tucker to the ground and fled across the field toward the school.

He sat there in the grass, stunned, and watched her go, not taking his eyes off of her until she disappeared around a corner of the gym. And when she was gone, he gave a bitter, ironic smile and spoke quietly to the open sky.

“No, you’re not.”

ooo0ooo

By the time Tucker met up with Sam and Danny in the cafeteria at lunchtime, he was determined to put the best face on it. He knew he had done the right thing, and he longed to be able to point out to his friends how great a sacrifice he had made, but he stubbornly clung to the promise he had made: he would not betray Valerie’s trust. Ever.

Sam glanced up from her salad when he sat down across from her. “So, you’re eating lunch with us today?” she asked dryly. “What happened to your girlfriend?”

“Sam—” Danny cautioned, but Tucker interrupted him.

“It’s okay. Seriously, it’s okay. Valerie and I sat down and had a conversation this morning, and it turns out that I’ve been mis-interpreting some of her signals.” Well, that was true enough. “I guess I was seeing a lot of stuff that just wasn’t there.”

“Stuff. . . ?” Sam prodded.

He shrugged and tried to keep the tension out of his voice. “Turns out, she’s not my girlfriend after all.”

Danny sighed. “Aw, Tuck. . . .”

“It’s okay!” he insisted. “I made a mistake, and now it’s fixed. Besides which, girl is way too intense for me. At least with you two, a guy can kick back and have some fun once in a while. Right?”

Sam raised her paper cup in mock salute. “Welcome back to the losers’ table, Tucker. We missed you.”

“Glad to be back.” Tucker took a big bite of his fish sandwich before he had to swallow any more pride. Sam seemed satisfied, and turned her attention back to Danny.

“Gonna play it a little safer now that Valerie the Ghost Slayer is around?”

“Yep,” Danny answered with an air of weary resignation. He tried to make eye contact with Tucker, but Tucker quickly looked away.

As if on cue, Valerie the Ghost Slayer chose that exact moment to walk through the cafeteria, carrying her lunch tray with an attitude of lofty indifference. When she approached their table, she steeled her expression, eyes closed and jaw clenched, leaving a waft of bitter resentment in her wake. Tucker turned and followed her progress through the room, noting with sad admiration her effortless, casual disdain when she passed the popular kids’ table.

“I just wish I knew where she got those weapons,” Danny mused.

Tucker jumped in, trying to steer the conversation to safer ground. “...Or that costume! Costume that stylin’ had to cost something, you know?”

“Well... I don’t know where she got the weapons,” Sam replied innocently, “but I think I know where she got some extra cash. Remember those concert tickets she sold on the internet?”

Danny’s mood lifted as he caught her gist. “You bought her tickets?”

Sam smiled triumphantly, but Tucker squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. Scoring tickets to the Dumpty Humpty concert was a major accomplishment, and the prospect of rocking out at the arena on Saturday night instead of doing homework or hunting ghosts was intensely appealing. But the thought of using Valerie’s ticket while she stayed home. . . .

He could do it! He could give a ticket back to her, and she could go to the concert, and take her mind off her troubles and her anger and her mission of revenge. She wouldn’t even have to back down much on the anger; after all, Tucker couldn’t very well attend the concert with her if she was using his ticket. And maybe she would be grateful, all over again, and maybe she would soften her expression the next time she walked past, and. . . .

No. No!

This is the way it has to be.

Having announced to her former friends that she had sold the concert tickets because she needed the money, Valerie’s immense pride and dignity would hardly allow her to accept a ticket given back out of charity. Certainly not charity from the boy to whom she had just sworn eternal hatred. And even if she did accept the ticket, what then? She’d have to spend the evening squeezed in between sneering condescension from the popular crowd and cold resentment from Sam and Danny. Worse yet, she’d be right there if Danny’s ghost sense were to go off.

Something’s gonna slip.

She’s going to see something, or hear something. . . .

Despite the dull ache in his chest, Tucker knew Danny was right. They weren’t children any more, and this wasn’t a child’s game. He couldn’t allow his own his desires to tempt him because the risks were far too great. Sighing, he took one last, longing glance across the cafeteria. Valerie was sitting alone at a table in the far corner of the room, digging eagerly through the contents of a gift box, her lunch pushed to one side, untouched. She was smiling. Somebody was kind to her, Tucker thought. Somebody gave her a gift, and made her happy.

And with a little effort he managed to smile, too, and returned his attention to his best friends.

And let her go.