Ahaha, so it's been a while (but fear not, nothing's abandoned! You're just getting a taste of how ridiculously spotty my writing spurts actually are and why I usually stick to oneshots). Life's been fairly overwhelming lately, but I'm making an effort to get a couple of these things updated in the near-ish future if at all possible.

Teenage Ghost Punk

December 21, 2015

Knowing the mystery girl's full name proved surprisingly unhelpful. No one in their class was called Mary Yeh and none of them recognized the name from someone in the grade above or behind them either.

During a call to school administration hoping to track down the owner of a lost textbook, they were told that there was no one who attended Casper High by that name.

This knowledge threw Sam off balance as she wondered what that really meant and it convinced Tucker that it was high time to give up the chase for a girl who may or may not be invisible.

It just made Danny more determined than ever to find Mary and return her biology notes, however. If he hadn't confronted her in the street, he wouldn't have minded never seeing her again. But now that she had run away from him and half convinced his friends that he was crazy, Danny couldn't just cut his losses and forget about her.

In fact, he wasn't going to stop until he found the teenager.

But she'd started avoiding his block. While he used to pass her coming home from school a couple times each week, the sidewalk was conspicuously absent in the next few weeks. No girls in a skirt and a bob, leather messenger bag slung over their shoulder or not.

He couldn't imagine why she would be avoiding him, though. He hadn't done anything that should have scared her off and he wasn't that much of a freak that she would be able to tell with just a glance across the street, right?

It kept bugging him, though. So much so that he asked Jazz if she had any classmates named Mary who might be especially good at science. When she looked at him oddly and said no, he pulled up a quick search of the closest schools other than Casper High. Even though none of them were actually in Amity Park, he called anyway, claiming that he'd found a textbook in his neighborhood and wanted to make sure that the school got their property back and their study was able to properly study. Which, okay, was stretching the truth a little, but he didn't think that school secretaries were going to care about a single sheet of notes. And he wanted answers.

Despite his apparent concern for their student, none of the nearby schools had a Mary Yeh enrolled. He tried the school in Elmerton, the private school, and the high school the next town over, and even the community college. But nothing.

His next step was trying the yellow pages. Pulling out a thick dusty book that was propping up a work light in the lab, Danny found no entries for any Yeh's in the area, with or without a Mary.

When he asked Tucker to do a search on the web, his friend looked at him in concern and hinted that he maybe take a break from the hunt. Especially since more than a week had gone by without anything coming of the search. And even to sympathetic friends, the whole thing was starting to get pretty weird.

This was the sort of behavior that would scare her off if she could see him now, Danny finally realized with a sigh. So he nodded, chucked the yellow pages in the recycling bin— Tucker thanked him even more than Sam would have at that move— and suggested they take a break and get a milkshake over at the Nasty Burger.

Tucker gratefully accepted the offer and led the way, chatting cheerfully as he tried to get Danny's mind off of his search. And they spend a nice afternoon together, slurping at their chocolate milkshakes and wiping the salt from their French fries off on their pant legs as they talked about the Dumpty Humpty CD that was going to be released in a few weeks and wondered if Sam might not have a connection that would let them get their hands on an early copy.

They'd decided to ask her the next morning at school because it certainly wouldn't hurt to try. And then it was time for them to go home to the homework that waited for both of them. Splitting up by the park, Tucker waved and shouted a goodbye as he walked toward his neighborhood.

Danny continued along the edge of the park and was just about to turn onto his street when he stopped and turned around.

The dark eyed girl was sitting underneath a tree. It wasn't Mary. And there was no reason to think that this girl might know Mary, but she was another of the mysterious teenagers that Danny had started seeing around town.

He knew that if Sam or Tucker were here, they would drag him away and tell him to not bother the poor girl. Half of him was also ready to leave well enough alone, but… the other half didn't want to give up so easily. Danny had always called Jazz the stubborn one, but he was realizing that that streak ran strong in the Fenton family.

Staring at the girl for another moment, Danny vacillated.

But then he took a step forward because there was no harm in saying hello, now was there?

Danny stepped forward cautiously, moving slowly as he came up to the girl. She met his eyes as he stepped off the sidewalk and watched him walk across the strip of grass toward her tree. Danny almost sighed in relief that she didn't look ready to run.

He stopped a few feet away from her, though, just in case his presence freaked her out as much as it did the now missing Mary Yeh.

They stared at each other in silence for a bit. The girl seemed to be waiting for him to do something, so he smiled, a little nervously. She smiled back. That bolstered his courage enough to say, "Hi, my name's Danny."

"Little Feather," she replied, in a quiet, carefully articulated accent, and Danny blinked in surprise. But then he realized that she did have leather fringes on her pants and, sure enough, a little feather braided into her hair.

"Oh," he said. "Right. So, um, do you live around here?"

The girl nodded and pointed east, toward the denser part of town.

Danny nodded at her answer, but wished she had given him something more to work with. Small talk had never been his strong suit and since he basically only hung out with Sam and Tucker these days, and avoided everyone else, his not great skills were even more rusty than normal when talking about normal non-ghosty things.

He plowed on anyway, though, since he'd already said hi. "Are you new around here?" He hadn't heard of any Native Americans moving to the area recently, but then again, with the accident, he hadn't really been paying that much attention to the people in town, or any news that Jazz tried to tell them over the breakfast table.

Little Feather shook her head, and suddenly Danny felt really bad that he hadn't noticed her before. Maybe she'd lived here for years without him ever taking the time to introduce himself.

"We've been here long," she said. "Many moons."

Danny quirked an eyebrow and stared at her, trying to see whether or not she was joking. He started feeling really awkward when he honestly couldn't tell.

"Yeah?" he asked, trying to figure out what to say next when she continued speaking.

"We live by water."

So, down by the warehouse district, then, over by the lake. It was across town, so he suddenly felt better about not knowing her before. She was actually pretty far from home, out in this park. There were at least two closer to her house, if you counted the elementary school.

"On grassy plain along the shore."

Something started prickling on the back of his neck with each carefully spoken word.

There wasn't a shore to the lake anymore. The warehouse district had built over it until you got out past city limits. Even then, it was dirty gravelly pavement out past Elmerton. He'd been in enough ghost fights on that side of town to know that there was no grassy plain along the lakefront.

"I…" Danny stared at her hard, looking at her closely as he fought the urge to back away.

Little Feather stared right back at him with her wide eyes, like she was trying to decide something. "Haunt," she said after a moment.

Danny gaped at her. "Wh-what?" he managed to ask.

"You. Haunt," she repeated, and Danny's face drained of color.

to be continued.