fine, you know what, FINE, i’m just going to LEAN INTO being an on-fire garbage can, whatever. this is who i am now. whatever. WHATEVER!!!! death comes for all of us.
Daphne Blake is very good at almost everything. She should be: she practices. Fencing, polo, archery, dance, tennis, volleyball, karate, yoga. She wrings them out of herself minute by minute, gesture by gesture until her muscles have memory.
She doesn’t mind the work. Daphne likes to struggle. She likes the feeling of victory when she gets to the end: learning a music piece, defeating an opponent, adding a language to the résumé she’s been building since she was ten. She doesn’t have to be the best, but she likes to be better.
Daisy revolutionized city-based trauma centers, Dawn redefined modeling with her The Body Is Art campaign, Dorothy was the first woman to win the Triple Crown of Motorsport, and Delilah is so highly decorated she’s run out of room on her dress blues.
Daphne’s sisters were born with the promise of one perfect thing written on their palms. Daphne was born with empty hands, and cannot make anything perfect. Daphne is only ever very, very good.
Norville “Shaggy” Rogers is high, right now. He is looking at the spiral of stucco on his ceiling, his dog Scooby’s head on his stomach, one hand in a bag of Cheetos and the other holding a joint. He isn’t floating, but he’s thinking about it.
“Daph,” he says, heavy eyes blinking open. “What time’zit?”
Daphne lowers her epee. She has a national tournament this weekend. Her parents might come.
Then again, Shaggy knows, they might not.
“Four-fifteen,” Daphne tells him. She flicks her red ponytail off her shoulder, adjusting and readjusting her grip on the sword until it meets some unwritten standard. “When you finish your Cheetos we’ll go over to the fair grounds. It won’t open until seven so we can have a look around before it gets busy.”
Daphne is a nationally ranked fencer; captains the Crystal Cove Country Club women’s polo, archery, and tennis teams; speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian; she can even apply eyeliner on a train. Shaggy saw her do it once, in Paris.
Daphne is the child Shaggy thinks his parents probably wanted. Good at everything she tries, and tries at everything she does.
Shaggy had his first panic attack at age nine. He was seated at a piano. It was his first recital and he was going to play a piece by Béla Bartók. He had liked the song while learning it: fast, uneven, somehow new every time, new enough to keep up with the way his brain could never seem to settle. Shaggy liked it because he was never bored playing it, and he was always bored, in a strange way, in a way that made his heart beat fast and, sometimes, his stomach ache as if he was starving. Sometimes he was bored even when he wasn’t bored–sometimes he became distracted and forgot what he was doing. He lost things all the time. It drove his mother crazy. It made his parents yell like the first three bars of the Bartók piece, Norville! focus Norville! sit still Norville! Norville! Norville!
Shaggy fell apart in trembles on the piano bench, in front of everybody, in front of his panicked teacher and his wide-eyed classmates and his father, who only sighed and said he was doing it for attention.
“Shaggy,” Daphne says, and he realizes his eyes have fallen shut again. When he opens them, she’s bent over him, grinning, too sharp. Daphne is always a little too sharp.
“You’re not gonna chicken out on me, are you?”
Shaggy thinks about it. He feels good. Calm. Daphne always makes him feel calm. She’s kinetic and sharp-sharp-sharp. She sucks up all the energy in the room and leaves him feeling like he finally has enough room to breathe.
“No,” he decides, “but I’m bringing Scoob and we’re stopping for burgers.”
Fred Jones is an Eagle Scout. The boys on the football team make fun of him, but the boys on the football team also go nuts for the jalapeño cheddar popcorn he sells, so frankly Fred thinks they can shut it. Fred had liked having tasks he had to complete before he became an Eagle. He had liked learning about nature, about how to survive in the woods, about how to build a fire.
He had liked learning how to identify tracks and what a branch looks like when it has been broken by human hands. He’s not going to be a park ranger or anything but he likes knowing how to leave something undisturbed. He likes thinking of nature the way they’d taught him to think of a crime scene at Forensics camp: How are things? How should they be?
Anyway, Fred’s dad had been excited. He likes when Fred gets elected to things–captain of the football team, president of Student Council, Editor-in-Chief of the high school paper.
Fred hadn’t wanted any of those positions, but his dad didn’t get excited about a lot of things, and…it was nice. When he did.
Fred’s phone buzzes. He flicks open the lock screen and reads Velma’s text: meathead bring a flashlight.
hi Velma, Fred types back. my day was great thanks for asking.
Fred has enough time to go to the kitchen and make himself a ham sandwich before Velma replies. The text says neat story. Thirty seconds later, she follows up with, i’m outside.
Fred looks out the window behind the sink. Mrs. Dinkley’s terrible van is idling in their driveway and Velma is already getting out of it, jogging up to Fred’s front door. He shoves his feet into the tennis shoes he’d last abandoned in the foyer and opens the door before Velma can knock, catching her with her hand half-raised.
“Lookit you, eager beaver,” she drawls. “D’you have the flashlight?”
Fred lifts his keychain. It’s got a small but powerful flashlight dangling between his house and locker keys. “Always be prepared,” he recites.
She cranes her neck as she peers over her shoulder. “Is your dad home?” she asks.
“No, he’s got a town hall meeting until dinner. They announced the plans to build a parking structure where the Neubright Community Center is and everyone’s pissed.”
“With great power, etcetera etcetera,” says Velma, then pauses. “Wait, the community center in south Cove? The only one with free daycare and after-school programs?”
“Wow. Like, fuck your dad.”
Fred doesn’t say anything. He knows. He knows. But it’s his dad.
Velma winces into the silence. “Uh. Anyway. We should get going. The fair opens at seven and we want to get there before the crowds move in.”
Velma Dinkley is almost always right, but never says the right thing. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t mean to. Words come tumbling out of her mouth before she can stop them, and they almost always lead to that terrible beat of silence where the wrongness hangs, suspended, until someone is gracious enough to speak into it.
Everything lines up in Velma’s head: numbers, logic, equations, puzzles, those stupid Mensa games. But it never comes out right, or at least not just right. Her mother says she gets “a tone” when she speaks sometimes that makes other people feel like she thinks they’re stupid.
First of all, it’s not Velma’s fault if people are stupid, and it’s not her fault if they know it, and it’s not her fault if they find out only in comparison to Velma being smarter than they are.
But of course Velma lives in the world, so it’s not her fault but it is her problem.
She hadn’t meant fuck your dad, for example. What she had meant was: fuck the mayor. The mayor is Fred’s dad but she hadn’t meant to say it like that. Fred idolizes his dad. Velma knows that.
Anyway, Fred never gets mad. Everyone else gets mad eventually but Fred hasn’t, not since they were kids at Forensics camp together and Velma hadn’t had anyone to partner with and had been trying so hard not to show anyone that it bothered her. And then Fred had said, “Hey, we can have three in our group.”
Velma gets things right and people wrong. Her mother says she’ll grow out of it. Velma isn’t sure.
“So what makes you think we can do what the police can’t?” Fred asks, taking a left-handed turn that Velma wouldn’t have risked.
Velma rolls her eyes. “The police said that a ghost pirate tried to commit murder by tampering with a roller coaster, Fred. If our baseline of detection is ‘jinkies! we think a ghost did it,’ I am sure we can find something to bring to the table.”
Fred laughs. “We can put that in our report,” he says.
“Scoob wants a BLT,” Shaggy informs her, and Daphne rolls her eyes.
“Scooby’s a dog, so he’s getting the cheapest thing on the menu,” she says.
Shaggy frowns. “Daph, you’re like, a literal millionaire,” he points out. “And we’re at the drive-thru of a Denny’s. Splurge on the BLT, dude.”
“Potheads who live in four-story houses shouldn’t throw stones,” Daphne snaps back.
“Okay, girl wearing a Burberry tracksuit–”
“Uh, ma’am? Is that all?”
Daphne blows a long breath out of her nose. She glances at Scooby, who is sitting in the back seat but with his head on the arm rest between them. He looks up at her and whuffles what she swears to God sounds like, “please.”
“No,” she tells the machine, sighing. “And a BLT.”
“Sweet!” Shaggy cries and holds his hand up for Scooby to high-five. He ruffles the hair at the top of his dog’s head and beams over at Daphne like she’s won him a prize. “The Scoob looooooooves bacon.”
In the fourth grade, Daphne found Shaggy in the hallway, shaking so hard she thought his teeth might fall out. Some kid from the grade above–Red something–was standing over him, calling him names. Daphne hadn’t really thought about it before punching that kid in the nose. She hadn’t thought about it before crouching down in front of Shaggy and trying to get him to breath steady. She hadn’t known what to say, but Shaggy had joked, “Like, wow, you hit like a girl,” between shuddering breaths and Daphne had laughed.
Nobody in Daphne’s family is good at telling jokes. Not like Shaggy is.
“Eat those quick, you two. I’d hate it if the scent of delicious burgers lured the pirate ghost to us.”
Shaggy swallows a big bite. “Like–you didn’t say there would be a ghost!”
Daphne is neither convinced nor unconvinced of the reality of ghosts, so she shrugs. “I said we were going to check out the fair grounds! I thought you knew they said it was haunted.”
“Like, why would I know that?”
“It was all over the news!”
“Well, ghosts probably aren’t real,” Daphne assures him as they pull into the parking lot.
“‘Probably’ is like, not as reassuring as you think it is, Daph,” Shaggy mutters, but gets out of the car and directs Scooby to get out, too. He’s still gently high, and his belly is full, and it’s not dark out yet.
And anyway, Daphne’s here. He’s seen her split an apple with an arrow from across two tennis courts.
“C’mon,” Daphne wheedles. “I’ll make you guys some Scooby snacks when we get home.”
Shaggy’s about to answer when another car pulls into the lot–with any luck, it will be fairgrounds staff and they’ll be told to leave.
Instead of that, Fred Jones gets out of the car with a girl that Shaggy has Latin class with. Shaggy knows three things about Fred Jones:
His Student Council presidential campaign rested on cafeteria and vending machine reform.
He and Daphne kissed once, in the seventh grade, on a dare.
“Jones, what are you doing here?” Daphne asks, crossing her arms over her chest.
Shaggy guesses it wasn’t a very good kiss.
“Hi, Daphne,” Fred says. He likes Daphne. It’s not that he can’t tell that Daphne basically hates him; he can, but he likes her anyway. He likes what her hair looks like when she sits in front of him, and how she grips her pencils too tightly. As far as he can tell she hates him because he beat her for Most Promising in their freshman year yearbook, which seems unfair because it’s not like Fred voted for himself.
Velma knocks his shoulder with hers. “They’re saying a ghost broke that roller-coaster that fell apart last week,” she says. “We’re going to figure out what really happened.”
“So, like, you don’t think it was a ghost?” asks the guy Daphne’s with, a tall and shaggy-haired kid Fred’s pretty sure is stoned. “Ha, ha. Ghosts. Right?”
“Right,” says Fred, as reassuringly at he can. The guy seems nervous, so Fred puts a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure it was just mechanical failure.”
“Anyway, what are you doing here?” Velma asks, eyeing Daphne Blake skeptically. Fred had kissed her in the seventh grade and told Velma afterwards that her lips had tasted like clouds. Velma had said that clouds had no taste.
“Scoob and I just came for, like, the free burgers,” says the guy with Daphne, who Velma is pretty sure is named something preposterous like Orville or Neville. “We hunt neither ghosts nor, like, pirates.”
“Well, great news for you: we’re going to prove it wasn’t either of those stupid ideas,” Velma tells him. “Right, Fred?”
Daphne snorts, then tightens her ponytail. “Whatever,” she mutters. “Come on, Shaggy.”
Velma frowns. “Wait–you do think it was the spirit of the Dread Pirate Roberts?”
“The existence of the afterlife can neither be proven nor disproven,” Daphne says, and throws a grin over her shoulder that’s so sharp Velma feels her lip get bloody from it. “All I’m saying is, if it was the spirit of the Dread Pirate Whats-His-Name…” she shrugs, and shoves the sleeves of her track suit up over her elbows. Fred’s smile widens.
“Then I’m gonna fight a fucking ghost.”
