Between Some Pudding and a Hard Place

by Cooking Spray

This is probably the most bizarre thing I've ever written, but the plotbunny refused to let go. For some reason, a dumpster sounded like an interesting place to write about. . . o.O;;

I don't recall exactly how it happened.

But I do know that somehow, some way, Danny and I ended up in a trash can together.

It may've vaguely had something to do with Danny, being the hot-headed fourteen-year-old boy he is, making some snide comment to Dash that he just couldn't bear to keep to himself. It may've also had something to do with the resulting verbal joust that followed, which my sword-tongue couldn't resist participating in. Whatever the case, we soon found ourselves being thrown out along with the rest of the school trash, because Dash couldn't keep up with the linguistics and decided to solve things his usual way, with violence.

So there we were, nestled snugly amongst a squalid array of toxic cafeteria refuse. I don't care what you see in cartoons; there's more than just banana peels in a garbage bin. And this was no ordinary garbage bin, it was an industrial-sized garbage tank. The kind trucks lift up and tip over.

Had the smell and the surroundings not have been so completely nauseating, I might've been enjoying the arrangement.

I brushed some who-knows-what off of my arm, hearing Danny shift and make a similar grunt of disgust beside me.

"Well, we're certainly sinking to new lows." My sarcasm was ever-present.

"Can you believe this?" Danny's tone was still heated, and he was thrashing around like an enraged wildebeest. A speck of an uncontemplatable something splattered across my cheek at his flailing, and I swore I felt yesterday's chocolate milk dribbling down my leg.

"You know, now would be a really great time to go ghost and get both of us out of here." I tried to find a more comfortable position. Ew, creamed corn.

"How can you be so calm? He shoved us in a dumpster, Sam. A dumpster!" His fist impacted with the metal lid overhead, making a hollow and ineffectual thud.

"Yes, Danny, I can see that. Which is exactly why I'd like you to make us both intangible and spirit me out of here, before I contribute my own lunch to this mess." I was starting to become really irritated, not to mention uncomfortable.

There was a flash of motion in the darkness, and without warning, Danny was three inches from my face, giving me more of a start than the pudding currently smeared across my thigh.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I hissed, flustered and nearly pinned to the sludge-streaked wall behind me.

"Don't you see, Sam? They want us to bust out of here, all covered in food and angry. They want to laugh at us!" His eyes were shining with some stupidly zealous fire that I didn't like at all.

"Or they want us to suffocate to death and die, which is going to happen a lot more quickly if you don't stop wasting your breath. . ."

He grabbed both of my hands, ignoring me completely for his own epiphany. I'll admit, if cold sticky things weren't being squished into every crevice of my body, and the air hadn't had all the perfume of Mr. Fenton's armpit after a long day of ghost-hunting, it would've been a favorable position. But for the time being, there were more imminent things to attend to than the knocking of my heart against my chest.

"We're not gonna give them that victory! We're going to stay in here, just to prove them wrong! And then we'll come back to class all squeaky clean and show them!"

I wrangled my hands out of his grip. "Are the fumes getting to your brain? We can't stay in here that long just to prove a bunch of jocks wrong! Where do you think we're gonna take showers, anyhow? Just use your ghost powers!"

"No!" His face was wild with the thought of revenge. "We can tough out these odds, Sam! We can endure! Just think of the looks on their faces!"

I was really beginning to become concerned, as well as frustrated. I'd heard of male aggression, but this was bordering on retardation. Had Dash infected him with stupid? "Okay, what ghost are you, and what have you done with Danny?" I grabbed his shoulders. "Forget about settling your little vendetta! Haven't you seen those shows where the victims turn up dead in the garbage the next morning? Go ghost!"

"No!"

Fed up, I tried to grasp the lid by its hinges, rattling it violently. Oh, where was Tucker when you needed him? His silly mini-GPS units might've actually been useful right about then. And where was Jazz, the voice of reason, to talk sense into her little brother?

The lid refused to budge, and I slumped in defeat, fuming over Danny's childish antics. What was with him? Usually, he wouldn't have hesitated to spirit the both us out of the whole sticky situation, but today, he was being illogical and childish. There wasn't some juvenile mind frame-inducing ghost lurking about, was there? Wasn't there any way to evoke Danny's powers?

We both sulked on our ends of the dumpster. Much as I wanted to break out, I remembered that Lancer's class was next. And that there was something undeniably funny about seriously contemplating ways to escape from a school dumpster.

I tried to find Danny's outline in the darkness, ignoring the tumble of chicken nuggets that shifted atop me. Given the close proximity, I could still reach out and touch him from my distance, and the pungent smell was wearing away, probably because I was getting used to it. The potential this setup held sent an odd throb through me, as well as the proverbial sweaty palms. I cursed the functionality of my endocrine system.

"So, we're stuck in a dumpster with nothing to do," I finally managed, with what I hoped was a tone of sarcastic whimsy.

"Yeah," Danny replied glumly. I could see him wrinkling his nose at some Jell-O-like goo on his hands in the near darkness.

Judging from his drop in enthusiasm, then would've been the perfect time to say something like, 'Lancer's going to be really pissed when we don't turn up for class.' But instead, I found myself rummaging in my pocket and withdrawing a bottle of hand sanitizer. Samantha Manson had been overridden by her raging hormones, succumbing to the sickening fate of the general teenage populous. Oh, cruel fate!

"Do you want some?" The bottle caught the gleam of the sunlight through the tiny crack overhead. I laughed nervously. "I don't know how much good it'll do, but. . ."

"Thanks." He took the antiseptic from my hands, our fingers touching for the briefest of moments. I tried to pretend that my stomach didn't do a few entirely cliched somersaults. It was silly that I was regarding normal behavior as intimacy, especially in our current location.

I caught the scent of alcohol as Danny unscrewed the cap, and wondered why I hadn't thought of it earlier myself. I also why wondered my urgency to escape seemed to have been misplaced. . .

"Here. You, uh, look like you might need some." His eyes were resting on a section of my forearm, which appeared to have gotten in a nasty tussle with some ranch dressing.

I giggled. Giggled? Did food by-products compress one's IQ? "Yeah."

But as I leaned forward to accept the bottle, another mortifyingly cliched something happened. Conveniently, the massive growth of trash decided to stint to one side at my sudden motion, causing my foot to sink down through several layers of unnamable disgust and hit a crunched-up aluminum can. The end result? Me thudding face-first into Danny's lap, and possibly smearing all the varieties of pudding in Hunt's catalogue on his pants.

There was this sickening moment when our eyes met. I was somewhat reassured to see that Danny's cheeks were glowing as violently red as my own, but that small satisfaction was obscured my worries that he could feel my heartbeat on his, erm, thigh. I scrambled to get out of the compromising situation, loudly exclaiming an apology, but in my haste I knocked the top of my head against the lid of the dumpster, coming crashing down again. How could I've forgotten about that little detail? This was all beginning to reflect rather badly. . .

This time, I fell full on him, effectively pinning poor Danny to the side of the dumpster. I was starting to feel as if I were trapped in some twisted version of a dime-store romance, the way things were progressing. I made an embarrassing squeak and tried to squirm off of him, all too aware of how our bodies were molded together, and of all those other little things you're supposed to notice, like the "scent that clung to him" (although that was a bit hard to detect, given the situation, I swore it was Hollister cologne), and the softness of their skin. I have to give chick flicks some credit for being at least partly accurate.

"I'm, ah, so sorry. . ." I at last managed to gain a solid foothold and wrenched myself off of him, landing with a thud against the back of the grunge-encrusted dumpster. A stretch of awkward silence dawned, each of us too disquieted about the recent turn of events to be able to look each other in the eyes. Also, we were both catching the breaths we didn't want to admit we had lost.

Danny was the first to break the silence, and his words were the most relieving I had heard in a long while. "I, uh, think we should get out of here." His ambitions of payback seemed to have been completely banished from mind.

I just nodded mutely as Danny tentatively grabbed my hand and I felt the familiar tingling sensation of becoming translucent. In an eyeblink, we were once again out in the bright of the day. The contrast from "Dark Dank Dumpster" to "Shiny Sunny Schoolyard" shocked my retinas. And with that, we promptly darted off towards class, actively avoiding each other's gaze.

When Tucker saw us, he just raised his eyebrows, looked over our food-sodden clothes and nervous dispositions, and shook his head. Some things were better left unsaid.

And when we walked into class, Dash's self-satisfied grins and Paulina's giggles unfortunately weren't the only things that reeked.