Chapter Text
The longer that Luke was dead, the more he realized how little he understood about being a ghost. Alex had been right when he said that the afterlife needed some sort of instruction manual. The three of them kept coming up with questions that no one could answer. Personally, Luke would have liked an audience with whoever sat in the seat of the universe so that he could demand answers. Like, why had they spent twenty-five years in a dark room while Alex cried? How come only Julie could see them, but everyone could see them when they played music?
And most importantly, how was is possible to have skin problems as a ghost?
It seemed like one more cruel joke that the universe was playing on them – the fact that he could still somehow have eczema, that Alex could still struggle with anxiety, and that Reggie still had to wear his hearing aids. He wasn’t sure what he had imagined his afterlife would be like, but he certainly hadn’t pictured it being so similar to the seventeen years he had lived before the hotdogs.
Luke’s skin had always been dry. Almost all of his shirts irritated it, so he had chopped off all his sleeves. The backs of his hands were the worst, but there was nothing that mutilating his shirts could do for that. His mom had taken him to the doctor, who had told him to lather them in lotion and sleep with a special pair of gloves. It helped a little.
But then he had run away, and the last thing on his mind had been those stupid gloves. His fingers throbbed and his skin split. He tried to cover his hands with an old pair of socks when he slept, but it wasn’t the same. His skin worsened. Before he had died, his eczema had spread to the pads of his fingers and the palms of his hands, turning them into a cracked desert of itching and aching. He started to realize that playing the guitar was good for a lot of things, but cracking skin was not one of them. Thank God for the band-aids and lotion that Alex kept in his fanny pack.
His skin hadn’t been that bad the night they had died. Seeing that his eczema had followed him into the afterlife had been an unwelcomed surprise – a surprise that became even more unwelcomed after his hands started to get worse.
“I don’t understand,” Alex said as he wrapped a band-aid around one of Luke’s knuckles. “You’re dead. Shouldn’t your skin be healed? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Has anything about our deaths made sense?”
Alex sighed. “Fair point.”
“Maybe we should tell Julie,” Reggie suggested.
Alex finished sealing the band-aid on Luke’s finger. It was so tight that he couldn’t bend it. He should have been worried about losing his circulation, but he was more focused on how he was going to be able to play certain chords.
“Why? I don’t think she can help,” Luke said, holding up his hand to inspect Alex’s work. He patted the drummer on the back. “Thanks, buddy.”
“I agree with Reggie, actually –“
Reggie laughed, bouncing up from where he had been lying on the couch. “Wait, you actually agree with my idea? Never thought I would see the day when that happened!”
“You do have the occasional good idea, Reg,” Alex admitted.
“Occasional,” Luke emphasized.
“But I do think that maybe we should talk to Julie,” Alex continued. “What happens when I run out of band-aids?”
“We sneak into the house and steal some.”
“No! We’re not going to steal, Luke. We’ll just have to ask her for more.”
Luke groaned, already picturing himself struggling to explain to Julie why a ghost would need a band-aid. “Why do you have to make everything so hard?”
“Dude, she’s letting us live here. The least we can do is not steal from her –“
“Alex, it’s a band-aid!”
“You could always just steal some from the store,” Reggie suggested.
“No!” Alex covered his face and groaned, exasperated. “I hate being the responsible one. This is supposed to be Bobby’s job!”
It was agreed that Luke wouldn’t steal any band-aids from the Molina’s house, or the store, or anybody, for that matter. But that didn’t stop Luke from considering stealing something else.
He hadn’t told Alex and Reggie about his visits to his parents; that was a conversation that he wasn’t ready to have. They would worry about him – or worse, try to follow him – and he didn’t want that to be one more thing on everyone’s plate. The visits were for himself. Sure, he mostly just watched his parents, but he didn’t want his time with them to become a shared event. Not to mention that he was now making a point of looking for his old cotton gloves while he was there, and he did not need a lecture from Alex about why he shouldn’t take something that used to be his.
His hands kept getting worse, and his arms weren’t doing so great. When he ran his fingertips together, he could feel every ridge and every crack on his skin, a desert that itched and burned and hurt. He was worried that Julie would see, or that Alex and Reggie would get worried about him and tell her. It was stupid, he knew, but the way his hands looked and felt made him nervous.
When he had been younger, there had been a point when his hands were so bad that people at school shied away, afraid to make contact with him. People saw his blistering hands with the blood set in the cracks and grimaced after having to sit too close to him, or, God forbid, touch something that he had touched. He could still see the way people cringed after he borrowed a pencil, shaking their heads and saying, “No, you can keep it”, afraid that they would catch something from him. Luke didn’t know what he would do with himself if Julie looked at him that way.
His flannel shirts had escaped the wrath of his scissors, being the only fabric that he could stand to have touching his arms. He wore them more and more often, using the long sleeves to cover his hands so that Julie couldn’t see how red and cracked his hands were.
“You’ve got to tell her, man,” Reggie said. He sat on top of the piano, watching as Luke applied to last of Alex’s band-aids to his fingers.
“No.”
“But you’re out of band-aids and lotion,” Reggie said. “If you tell Julie what’s up, I’m sure that she can get more for you. Maybe she could even get you some of that lotion that’s made specifically for eczema!”
Memories of past classmates flinching away from him flashed across Luke’s vision. “No, I’m not telling Julie –“
“Telling Julie what?”
Julie stood in the doorway of the studio, watching them. She still wore her backpack, so she couldn’t have been standing there very long. She raised her eyebrows at the boys when they all froze. “Tell me what?”
“Nothing.” Luke pulled his hands away from Alex and pulled his sleeves down to cover them.
“Tell me what?” Julie repeated, her voice walking a fine line between concerned and a tone of strictness that Luke was used to hearing only from adults. She dropped her backpack and stepped into the studio, watching them all carefully. “What did you guys do? Are you still messing with Carlos, because Tía –“
Luke picked up his guitar and slipped the strap over his head. “Don’t worry, Julie, nothing happened. We’re not in trouble.”
The singer started to speak again, and from the corner of his eye, Luke saw Alex and Reggie shake their heads. Drop it.
“Fine,” Julie said, her tone lighter but still tense. She grabbed her microphone and headed for the piano bench. After a quick run-though of some scales, she smiled at the boys. “Ready? I was thinking we could start with Finally Free.”
The boys let Julie lead them through a few songs, but Luke was distracted by the smarting in his fingers. He would have assumed that the calluses on his fingers would hold up against his guitar strings, but the cracks on his fingers stung as they played through their set. It was enough of a distraction to cause him to wince and stumble over lyrics, which he almost never did, not even on his worst days.
The band-aid on his pointer finger had loosened while Luke played. His finger was easier to move, but as he bent his finger to change chords, he felt a painful sting that he wasn’t prepared for.
Luke cursed into the microphone, his words echoing through the studio.
Julie shot him a worried glance as she sang. Her voice faltered and she pulled her fingers away from the piano keys. The sound of Reggie and Alex’s instruments tapered off shortly after, leaving Luke trapped in a quiet studio with everyone staring at him.
“Those are some . . . interesting new lyrics,” Julie noted.
His hands stung. Instinctively, he rolled his sleeve back a little to inspect the damage. The rest of the band followed his gaze.
“Oh my God!” Julie jumped up from the piano bench. She rushed to Luke’s side and moved to take his hand. He was only able to jerk it away because his hand passed right through hers. He had never been so grateful to be made of air. “Luke, your hands! Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he grimaced, trying to hide them from her view.
Reggie appeared behind him, and his gentle hands took hold of Luke’s arm. He held out Luke’s hands for Julie’s inspection.
Julie sucked in a breath. “Ow.”
His hands were red and angry, and watching her react to them made his eyes sting. Her expression wasn’t anything near those of old classmates – Julie’s eyes held nothing but concern – but still, he didn’t want her to think that he was gross, or that he had some kind of disease.
“Do you need a band-aid?” Julie asked. “Disinfectant?” She tried to take his hand again. She wasn’t afraid.
But he was afraid – afraid of what she might secretly think of his hands. It was all too much.
He poofed out.
His parents weren’t home. Sometimes his mom went out to lunch with her friends and his dad ran errands. When they were gone, Luke usually just wandered through the house, taking note of what had changed and what had stayed the same after all those years.
But not that day; Luke was on a mission.
He was going to find those gloves if it was the last thing he did.
His old room hadn’t changed much. A lot of his things had been packed up in boxes and shoved into the closet or the garage, but most of the room stood unchanged, like a time capsule that stood still throughout time, displaying the memories of his life for the days when his parents needed to be reminded of their son.
Luke was so upset that he couldn’t focus all of his energy into his hands. They passed through the handles of his dresser drawers, not letting him open them or take anything from inside. They phased through the boxes stacked in his closet. He was vibrating he was so upset, but none of that energy wanted to stay in his hands.
“Damn it!” He flopped down onto his bed, buried his head in his pillow, and screamed. He was crying. When was the last time he had cried?
The last time he could remember crying that hard had been during his freshman year of high school. His gym class had done a dance unit in which all the boys were required to dance with a girl. Luke had been pumped. The girl he had been crushing on was in that class, and picking her for his dance partner had seemed like the perfect way to make his move.
He had offered her his hand. She had taken it with a smile, only to recoil in horror.
“Your hands!” she had yelped, pulling her own away. “They’re so dry! What’s wrong with them?”
Nothing was wrong with them. He had tried to explain that to her, but it was useless. She was afraid of catching something from him if she had to hold his hand for long periods of time.
“You can’t catch eczema,” Luke had assured her. “It’s not contagious.”
She had made such an upset of it all that the gym teacher allowed her to switch partners. By that point, everyone knew about Luke’s dry hands, and none of the girls wanted to touch him. He had ended up partnering with Reggie, who was the only one who wasn’t afraid of catching eczema.
Luke had locked himself in his room after school that day and cried for hours. He was positive that no one was ever going to want to hold his hand, to touch him. That was what he was afraid of with Julie. He couldn’t even touch her, but if he somehow could, she would never want to hold his rough, cracking hands.
Remembering the experience brought a wave of emotion over Luke. He screamed into his pillow again before flinging it across the room in anger. It hit the door of his closet, which had been slightly ajar, and slammed it shut.
Somewhere in the house, another door shut. He could hear footsteps outside his door. A second later, it opened and his mom poked her head into the room, eyes wide.
She looked around. Her eyes studied the bed, with its comforter in disarray from where he had been lying on it. She looked toward the closet, her eyes settling on the pillow that had slammed into the door. She stepped into the room. “Luke?”
For a moment, he forgot that she couldn’t see him.
“Mom,” he said. He held up his hands to show her his cracked, itchy skin. “Mom, please help me.”
His mom was still staring at the pillow, trying to work out how it had flown across the room. Her hands came up to cover her mouth. She rushed out of the room.
“Mom, wait!” Luke cried, still forgetting that there was no way that she could see or hear him.
Emily had retreated into the living room. She sat on the couch and took up her knitting, the needles flying with a ferocity that Luke had only seen used after their fights. The clacking sound of the needles calmed her, but she focused only on them. Every now and then she whispered something to herself and shook her head, like she could forget what she had seen if she threw herself into her work.
Luke stood in front of her, still crying. She can’t see me, he realized.
He sat on the arm of the couch that was farthest from her, watching her work. He pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his head between them. “God, I wish you could see me. I wish you could help me like you used to!”
He balled his hand into a fist and felt the skin crack across his knuckles. The day that his crush had rejected him because of his skin, he vowed to never leave his room again. His mom had convinced him to at least unlock his bedroom door so that she could bring him dinner.
“You found me crying on my bed,” Luke remembered aloud. He slid off the couch so that he was sitting on the floor, looking up at his mom. He wished he could rest his head on her lap, but he settled for leaning it against the edge of the couch instead. “The boys told you what had happened. I was embarrassed.”
She continued counting her stitches under her breath.
“I felt stupid. But you held me, and you told me that there was nothing wrong with my skin. You said that someday, someone would want to hold my hand, regardless of the fact that my skin felt like sandpaper.” His voice cracked. “Why can’t it be like that now? Why can’t you hug me like you used to, and tell me that everything will be okay?”
“Knit one, two, three, four, knit two together . . .”
“I never stopped needing you. I’m sorry if I ever made you feel otherwise.”
“ . . . one, two, three –“
Luke buried his face in his hands. “I wish you could hear me. I wish you could give me some sort of sign that you know how much I need you.”
“Purl one, two, three . . .”
He squeezed his eyes shut and poofed out.
He only opened his eyes after he felt the studio couch appear underneath him. Rough skin scratched his face as he wiped his eyes. Alex and Reggie were nowhere to be seen, which was fine – he needed to be alone – but then he looked up and saw –
“Julie!” Luke scrambled back on the couch, despite the fact that the singer hadn’t even moved.
She studied him intently, worry creasing her brow.
“You’re still here,” Luke said. “Where’d the boys go?”
“I told them that we needed some space,” Julie explained. She shifted closer to him. “Luke, why didn’t you tell me that you were in pain?”
Emotional or physical? He wanted to ask.
She looked beautiful, sitting across from him. Sunlight was streaming in from the window behind her, illuminating her in a halo of warmth that made her soft skin glow. Luke knew that she was at least a little upset with him, whether she admitted it or not, but all he could focus on was how pretty she was. He looked between her and his cracked hands.
Julie was so pretty, and his hands . . . they were so not pretty. Surely she wouldn’t be as mean as the girls in his gym class, but she would never want to hold his hand.
“I didn’t want you to think . . .” He couldn’t find the words. How could he explain it? “I didn’t want you to be grossed out.”
“Why would I be grossed out? It’s just eczema. It’s not like it’s contagious, or anything.”
Luke glanced down at his hands again. They itched like crazy and they pained him when he moved his fingers. They were red and rough, and when the weather got bad, his arms matched them. Could he trust her to understand how bad that made him feel about himself?
“People see it and they treat me like some sort of leper,” Luke explained. “It just makes me feel really bad about myself. Alex and Reggie don’t mind my skin because we’ve been friends for so long, but I was afraid of seeing how you would react.”
Her face softened. She reached out to take his hands, but they passed right through him.
She’s not afraid, Luke thought, his heart tapping out a surprised rhythm of staccatos. She’s not afraid to touch my hand! He didn’t even mind the fact that he was made of air and that she hadn’t been able to actually touch him, it was just the fact that she had tried.
Julie gave up on trying to take his hand. She offered him a smile and turned toward the sofa table, where a bottle of Eucerin sat beside a pair of cotton gloves. “Carlos has eczema. It’s pretty tame, but sometimes it really bothers him. I don’t think he’d mind sharing his lotion if it’s going toward a good cause.”
“Won’t he notice that his stuff is missing?”
Julie laughed. “Dad keeps so much lotion and spare gloves stocked up that you’d think we were preparing for the apocalypse. Trust me when I say that no one will notice a bottle going missing every now and then.”
The thought of Carolos accidentally aiding and abetting the ghosts that he was always hunting made Luke chuckle. He would just have to make sure to store the lotion somewhere so that Carlos wouldn’t notice it when he came into the studio to snoop around.
Julie held out the bottle and the gloves. “Let me know if you need more, or anything else. Or if this isn’t the right brand, I could always go to the pharmacy myself –“
“Geez, you sound like Alex,” Luke teased.
“I actually gave him some extras to keep in his fanny pack.”
Luke’s hands were shaking, but he managed to focus his energy just enough to squeeze some lotion from the bottle and slip the gloves onto his hands. The lotion bit at his skin, but the relief it brought was unlike anything he had felt in far too long.
“Thank you, Julie,” he said. “Like, really. Thank you.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome. But no more secrets, okay?”
He saluted her. “Sure thing, Captain.”
“I’m your friend,” Julie reminded him. “And I would never judge you, or the boys, for anything.”
“No more secrets,” he promised, although he could think of one that he wasn’t ready to share yet – how badly he wanted to hold her hand.