(Jazz's POV)

What-what did that have to do with drinking? "I never said you were gay. I asked you why you started dri-"

"M'not gay!" he yelled, cutting me off. "D'nt say m'wi'him...'cause, m'not. I nev'r will be..."

"Don't say you're with who?" I pressed, hoping I wasn't starting to frustrate him. I didn't know what would happen (Tucker never specified) but I had no desire to find out.

He kept his eyes on the ground but let his shoulder sag and his head drop. "Sam."

"There's a guy named Sam?! And you like him?!" I gasped, almost horrified.

He cracked a weak smile. "Yup...yup...he us'a be d'ere f'r'me. Us'a be d'ere for all'a's. Not...not d'ere anym'r. S'fine though, we get 'long w'out 'im."

"Wait a minute, there's a guy named Sam-"

"S'funny, I know a girl name' S'mantha," he said, finally taking his eyes off the ground and resting them on me.

He...he was almost speaking pure English... I understood everything in that sentence. And was it just me, or did his voice crack at "S'mantha"?

"Last night he told me three, maybe four times that he wasn't gay."

Tucker said that... He said my brother told him he wasn't gay. Did Tucker say anything about Sam? About the girl Sam? Is there even a boy Sam, or is it just because he's drunk? He's told me twice now that he's not gay, and both times I...I think I brought up Sam without knowing it. Not gay, and now a guy named Sam... Then he says he knows a girl named Samantha, aka Sam... I've never heard anything about a male Sam, so I think Danny's actually talking about the female Sam.

Wait. Sam... He was saying Sam...something. I don't know what he said, he's too drunk. But he was saying something about Sam. Is she the reason he drinks so much? So often?

I can talk to her but Danny said no one else knows that he drinks. That means Sam doesn't know anything about his drinking problem. Danny isn't a liar until it comes to the big things. He was telling me the truth only because I found out. Why does he keep this from everyone though? His own family doesn't know about him or what he does to himself. We can help him if he would just let us.

"You know a girl named Samantha? What's she like?" I asked in false curiosity.

He grinned and straightened. "Sh's 'n amaz'n' girl who lov'at're." His eyes lit up in spite of the haze that filled them. "Sh'wears all black 'n she'n't eat meat. Sh'kiss'd Phan'm f'r twice." I saw heavy tears forming at the rims of his eyes. As his voice became strained, they started to spill out. "I'lov'er."

I could easily be wrong, but did he just say he loved Sam? After all those years of not doing anything, of not making a single move on her, he suddenly loved her? How? From what I could tell, Sam always had a boyfriend by her side and the trio never really hung out anymore. So how did he suddenly "love her"? Of course, he could also be saying "Oliver" or "a liver". I recalled Tucker saying he often said random nonsense. This could be one of those times, one of those random moments. He was drunk, after all...really drunk.

"Danny, I-"

"M'not Danneh! Dun call m'Danneh!" he shouted.

"Why should I not ca-"

"M'not...m'not Danneh." He sounded more like he was talking to himself than me. "M'not Danneh. I'uz, but...m'not anymore."

"What do you mean you aren't Danny?" I had a bit of a hard time translating, but he was speaking a better now. He was also becoming a little more serious, which I wouldn't have thought possible considering how he was acting before I mentioned the reason he started drinking. I was convinced it was Sam...but I could be wrong. With him so drunk, it was a possibility that he didn't know what he was talking about. For all I knew he was still talking about something random and unreal.

Drunk Danny was becoming a little more English. Either that, or I was getting better at mentally translating his language into mine.

"M'not Danneh. Not anymore," was all he said.

His eyes darted everywhere. It was impossible for me to tell whether it was just him being drunk or actually looking for something. He looked desperate, but why? What was he desperate about? It couldn't be ghost trouble, could it? Last I remember, he chilled the air around him with an icy breath. I hadn't seen him for so long though... Maybe his ghost form had changed. Maybe he no longer released that breath. Maybe he felt something inside him that recognized a ghost.

A ghost... I couldn't help but think back to Danielle. She had been asking about Danny at least once a week. 'Has he come back yet? How is he doing nowadays? Where is he at? Do you think I can see him soon? What do you mean you don't know?' she always said. Had I known this was what Danny was up to all this time, for almost a whole year, I would've told Dani a bunch of lies to protect her from having to know about this. It was hard even for me to watch, so Dani, his cloned cousin and the small child (being a clone, she never did age because her DNA wasn't actually hers to begin with, and therefore became stale, which didn't allow for an aging process) who saw Danny as just the best and most wonderful thing in the world, would be devastated to find him like this.

A twelve-year-old girl without a home, mother, or father, looked at Danny and saw her hero. Her hero. He had saved her life...and now no one was letting her see him. It seemed cruel, the way Danny would do this without any thought about what anyone would think or how they would feel.

Then again, she had remind herself that she had no idea what his life was like recently. He had changed dramatically since she last saw him. His discretion to drink until he couldn't even talk had all but isolated him from those closest to him. Well, all but Tucker. I was pretty sure Tucker was telling the truth when he said he chanced across Drunk Danny one day, which was how he found out. This meant that Danny had tried to keep it even from his best friend.

I sighed. "You know, we really need to do something about your drinking problem... You have any suggestions?" I wasn't expecting an actual answer, but maybe because he was so drunk and therefore lacking any and all logic, he could drop me a hint of some sort. Anything was good right now.

"I dun'ave a dr'nkin' prob'm," he replied.

And so we were back to square one with his speech issues... Yay. But it did show me that he didn't know it had become a problem, an addiction apparently. Either that, or he did know but was too smashed to realize it at the moment.

"Danny, I think you do. And you need to get some help," I tried, for some unknown reason, to rationalize.

"Damnit!" he yelled. "Damn this fuckin' dr'nk'n prob'm! I dun care 'f yer a psych...ps-psych...o...sum'm! I dun'ave a damn dr'nk'n prob'm!"

I felt my jaw drop and my eyes widen as the rest of me went completely numb. I had never heard language like that come from his mouth.

"Danny, language!" I breathed.

"Why r'n't you Tucker?" he mumbled, cocking his head and casting a strange look at me.

I was pretty sure I knew what he said that time. "Well for one, I have two X chromosomes."

"Whas'a 'roms...o...sump'mins?"

Uh...a little hard to translate there... I actually couldn't tell what he was saying. Maybe it was just the way he said it. Everything that came out of my brother's mouth was very vague and slurred. His speech patterns were greatly inhibited. I knew it would be hard but I never thought it would be this hard. I was obviously too used to hearing English to fully understand Drunk Danny, like Tucker could. He had been around Danny long enough to have learned a whole new language. Artificially invented by beer and my brother.

I walked out of the room for a second while he was doing...er...whatever drunkards like him did...and rummaged around in my purse, which I had set in his room, in hopes of finding something that would either counter or delude the alcohol Maybe even something that could knock him out, although I highly doubted I had anything that would do that.

"Daniel!" I heard Danny's boisterous cry come from the living room.

"Danny?!" a young girl's voice followed.

Oh no... This can't be good...

I rushed back inside the living room to find Danielle (although Danny had called her Daniel) in her human form, being brutally crushed in my brother's greeting hug.

"Dani!" I breathed.

The last person I wanted to be here, and she was here.

I bet five bucks she followed me here...

"Dani, what are you doing here? My brother's sort of...busy."

She opened her mouth to speak but all that came out was a strained grunt.

Upon hearing his cousin, my brother let go of her and smiled.

"Daniel!" he yelled again, throwing his arms up in the air as if his joy was uncontainable.

A look of confusion swiped her face. "Huh?"

I cleared my throat and tried to pretend Drunk Danny wasn't here right now. I went up to him and gently clutched his shoulder, softly and nervously laughing. Dani was here. With a very drunk Danny in her presence.

This situation couldn't possibly get any worse...