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Nick jolted awake from yet another Caleb nightmare, feeling like he was going to be sick. He choked as he tried to breathe, tried to remind himself that Caleb was destroyed. He owned his soul own again. Just to double check, Nick raised his shaky hand to pull down his sweatshirt sleeve and sighed in relief when he found it was still stamp-free. It had been a month now since Julie and the phantoms defeated Caleb, since Nick got his soul back, since the phantoms came back to life. It still felt like every day he was still fighting for any energy to live. Caleb had possessed Nick for weeks, making him miss school, nearly getting him kicked off the lacrosse team for missing practices. He came back to his own body to find that he was grounded for the next months worth of weekends for a laundry list of awful things Caleb made him do. Shouting at his family, sneaking out, skipping practice and class. His dads weren't impressed when he broke down pleading with them, insisting he didn't remember doing any of that.
He was pretty sure his dads thought he was going crazy and, well, maybe he was. Nick had experienced the afterlife. How was he ever supposed to move on from that? School exams, lacrosse practices, chores, even hanging out with friends felt pointless after that. Even music was hard to enjoy right now. Music just made him think of the Ghost Club. Nothing mattered anymore, he felt totally disconnected from his life.
He stared blankly at the ceiling, trying to summon the strength to do anything. It was Saturday. Before Caleb, Saturdays were for sleeping in, hanging with friends, and lacrosse games. Now Saturdays just days when he could stay in bed as long as he wanted. Being grounded was actually nice because no one questioned why he didn’t want to go out and do anything only…today was starting to feel like a day where he really didn’t need to be alone. On those days, even if all he did was sit on the beach with Willie and watch the waves then it was a relief, at least, that he wasn’t alone. After finally forcing himself out of bed around noon, Nick made himself shower (an ongoing battle between him and his parents was hot water usage; they had no idea he had literally been trying to wash the devil off for the past month), changed into his comfiest sweatpants and sweatshirts, tennis shoes and grabbed his gym bag. Not that he had any will whatsoever to work out, but any lacrosse-related excuse always won his parents over.
He found his parents lounging on the sofa downstairs.
“Dads?” He spoke up nervously.
His voice sounded so foreign and strange to him after his nightmare, and he hoped his parents somehow didn’t notice.
“I have a team workout this afternoon,” he lied, “I totally forgot to tell you. I’m so, so sorry. Is it okay if I go?”
“That’s fine, Nick,” his dad replied carefully. Most exchanged, concerned, looks. “We’re worried about you, Nick. You haven’t been acting like yourself. Is there anything going on that we should know about?”
“If the stress of the team is too much-“
“No!” Nick cut in quickly. He bit back a cry of frustration, forcing himself to keep his cool. “No it’s just…you know, high school’s rough.”
“We know, we’ve been there,” his father pointed out. “That’s why we’re concerned. We don’t want to make you late for work out but we should talk later, okay?”
“If there’s anything you need to tell us, you can.”
Over and over again for the past month he had imagined how that conversation would go:
Hey Dads…so, turns out ghosts are real, magic is real, the devil is real, and kind of possessed me for weeks to get close to Julie Molina, and when I wouldn’t let him get to close to her he just took my soul and used me as a meat suit to recruit people to join his club. So yeah, I’ve been a little off.
No way.
“Thanks,” was all he said instead, as sincerely as he could manage.
As soon as Nick pulled up to the Molina house, he could hear the band practicing from his car. He stopped for a moment, letting himself breathe through the panic of hearing so much loud music at once. These were his friends; Caleb was gone. Still, Nick didn’t feel like he could stomach sitting through a band practice so instead he knocked on the front door. Willie didn’t always stick around for practice- Nick had a feeling the music bothered them too- maybe they would be up for hanging out.
Ray was the one who answered the door, and a wave of déjà vu that he didn’t understand hit him. Nick swallowed the feeling down, determined to appear perfectly normal.
“Hey…um, is Willie here?”
“Yeah, we’re watching a movie, want to come in?” Ray replied. Nick hesitated at first, not wanting to crash their bonding time, but Ray offered him a kind smile and told him: “We’re both having rough days. We’d love the company.”
Nick shouldn’t have felt as relieved as he did.
“Let me get you something to eat,” Ray announced.
It wasn’t a question, and that Ray knew him well enough to know to not rely on asking him about his appetite made him feel comforted. He took a seat on the other end of the couch opposite Willie and tried to offer them a small smile. Willie was already looking a little older, he noticed, like their years were catching up to them now that they were human.
“Hey,” Nick greeted.
Willie’s eyes were glued to the television, which was showing a documentary about National Parks. The former ghost didn’t look like they were paying attention at parks.
“I’ve been there before,” Nick felt awkward as he waved toward the image of Ole Faithful. “Yellowstone, I mean. It’s incredible.”
No answer.
Ray wondered back in with a grilled cheese and some chips, and his stomach growled at the sight. At the least, he could make himself eat some chips.
“Rose and I loved Yellowstone,” Ray remarked as he settled into the armchair. His eyes twinkled as he played with the ring finger of his left hand, which no longer bore his wedding ring. “It’s where we got engaged.”
A smile draped across his face. Nick wished he understood it, how Ray could look back on his life with Rose with so much joy and not just sadness and bitterness. He launched into the story of the engagement while Nick made himself eat the chips and Willie stared straight ahead. Eventually they all settled into silence, continuing to watch as the document moved on to talking about Glacier National Park
“I went to Yellowstone,” Willie spoke up suddenly, a full twenty minutes after they had stopped talking about it. Nick and Ray looked up at them. “When I was…when I was a ghost. When I was dead.”
Ray paused the television and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he studied Willie with concerned dad eyes.
“What did you think of it?”
Swallowing nervously, for a long moment Willie looked like they were trying to poof away- an ability the guys had lost since becoming human.
“Beautiful,” Willie whispered. “Overwhelming. I wasn’t supposed to go that far, but I always wanted to go and it didn’t seem fair that I couldn’t so I did and I came back and Caleb…”
Willie curled in on themselves, and Nick was hit with a sudden flashback of being with Willie in the Dark Room. His body went cold- even the room seemed like it was getting darker. There was a prickling in the back of his neck that was just a cold sweat but felt like Caleb taking over, slowly crawling in…
“Nick?” Ray called, drawing him back to reality. “What happened?”
His instinct was to run away, flee before anyone realized how crazy he had really become. But he couldn’t move. He listened to Ray’s voice, reminding him to breathe and felt his own fingernails digging into his knee and thankfully, this time it was enough to bring him back.
“Sorry,” Nick whispered, turning to Willie. Willie’s eyes were wide and terrified, like they had recognized something in Nick’s moment of panic. “You were saying something?”
“It’s okay.”
Everything felt like it was boiling to the surface all of a sudden. All the attempts he had made to be normal, to talk to people, to be around his friends that had ended up just like this…he was done.
“It’s not okay!” He exclaimed, jumping up.
Maybe if he was pacing, he couldn’t lock up again. If anyone understood what he was going through, it was these two, and he knew he should be able to talk to them…and felt so weak for being too afraid to.
“You can talk to us, Nick,” Ray offered. “This is a safe place. No one’s going to judge you or hurt you.”
Somehow he kept perfectly calm even though Nick knew there was no way he was okay. He knew it had to be hell for Ray to try to keep up appearances and always be the strong one for the sake of all of them…the least he could do was talk to him.
“This keeps happening,” Nick whispered. He stopped pacing, wrapping his arms around himself instead. “When I’m around other people I…I get this feeling like…like he’s coming back. And I’m afraid I’m going to hurt someone.”
He looked away, unable to look them in the eye as he realized how terrible that sounded.
“Not like that,” Nick spoke up quickly, “I don’t actually…not like that, I mean. I mean it feels like he’s trying to take back over. Like he’s going to make me…”
“Hurt someone,” Willie murmured.
It was all he offered, but Nick could tell by the haunted look in their eye that they knew exactly what he meant. Ray stayed silent for a moment, clearly trying his best to keep staying calm but he looked shaken too.
“I know what you mean,” Ray finally sighed, “it’s like that for me sometimes around the kids and Trevor.”
It was possibly one of the only times in his life that an adult had related to him on this level- and it was over one of his deepest, darkest secrets. How scared would the kids at school be if they knew he had been possessed by a demon all that time? If they knew he had a legitimate fear that it was going to happen again?
“What do you do?” Nick asked, sitting back down.
Ray hesitated as he nervously ran a hand over his head, like he was torn between really needing to talk about this himself and being mindful that he was still just talking to teenagers. Nick looked after him helplessly, and Willie looked just as desperate for advice too.
“Sometimes I have to leave the room,” Ray admitted. “Panic starts to take over, and I have to find some kind of way to stop it. Somedays it’s harder than other. Usually when it’s really hard I know, from the moment I wake up. That’s when I know I need to tell Trevor and let him be there for me. It’s not always easy to let him.”
The tension seemed to ease a little in the room. Even Willie shifted, understanding flashing across their face.
“I get that,” Nick confessed. “Sometimes…sometimes I wake up and I’m convinced I’m not me. It’s always worse on weekends like this, like…”
“Like your body spent all week fighting and now it’s just exhausted?” Ray suggested, throwing him a small, understanding, smile.
Nick nodded. He turned to Willie, wondering if they would feel more comfortable talking if it wasn’t just an adult leading the conversation.
“Does that happen to you?”
Willie’s haunted eyes stared ahead for a long moment but at last, they offered a single nod. He turned back to Ray.
“What do you do, when that happens?”
Ray offered a shrug, looking not entirely sure of himself.
“I just try to give myself some grace and remember that we’ve all been through a lot. Sometimes I think we’re all so tired our bodies just don’t know what to do anymore.”
Letting out a single laugh, Nick felt like a huge weight was lifting off his shoulder. Someone actually got it. It was like he knew they had been through similar experiences and the other two understood, but he never could have imagined they understood this much.
“If it’s really bad, like I said I try to immediately tell Trevor,” Ray went on. He smirked. “If he’s here though, he can usually tell and somehow…even when he’s not here he can tell.”
Nick got that. On really bad days he got so quiet and put so much effort into trying to be okay that almost always, someone caught on right away.
“It helps, to write everything out,” Ray told them.
“I hate journaling,” Nick mumbled. “It just makes me more anxious.”
Somehow, trying to write out all of his thoughts just made him overthink even more about everything he was going through and everything he did to the point where he had to stop and completely distract himself with something else.
“It helps me,” Willie stated softly. “It reminds me that I’m in control because Caleb never would have let me do anything like that. I write everything out in one go and then Alex and I burn it. Bad memories gone.”
Ray looked slightly concerned at the idea of those two using matches with anything that could catch fire, but he kept his lips pursed as he thought about it for a moment.
“Does it help?” Ray asked. “Or…does it feel a little bit like you’re trying to force yourself to forget instead of processing?”
Willie looked up to him, looking like Ray had reached right into their soul and pulled out exactly what was going on.
“The second one,” Willie muttered.
“Different things help different people,” Ray offered. “Sometimes what usually helps us doesn’t help at all.”
But Nick couldn’t relate. He felt so lost lately that he hadn’t found anything like that.
“What if nothing helps?” Nick asked, his voice shaking. He had been kidding himself, for weeks, acting like he could get through this and he was so, so tired. “What if it feels like it will never get better? And there’s no one who understands?”
The tears he had been holding back were finally breaking through, and he jumped up in shock that he had let anyone see how bad he was. Ray jumped up too, stopping him from running by placing a hand on his shoulder. Nick looked up to him, feeling hopeless.
“That’s when you call me,” Ray told him, "and I know it's scary to think about talking to your parents about all of this, but your parents love you, Nick. If you need help talking to them or just need someone, I'm here. We all are."
He was so sincere that Nick knew he meant it; he knew Ray probably would have been there all along if he had just reached out and hugged him. He hadn’t had a parent hug him like that in what felt like months- and Nick knew it was only because he had been pushing his own parents away. His dads would have been there for him, if he let them.
“Thank you,” Nick managed, feeling overwhelmed. “I guess sometimes it feels like I'm going crazy."
“I know the feeling,” Ray assured him, “but you’re not going crazy, mijo. None of us are. We’re just going through a really hard time.”
Ray just offered him a kind smile and looked between him and Willie, who still looked shaken and drawn into themselves on the sofa. They didn’t look at all convinced that they weren’t going crazy.
“I think we could all do with some fresh air,” Ray announced; his eyes twinkled, “and maybe some pizza.”
His stomach growled as Nick looked down to his half-eaten sandwich, and suddenly eating something comforting like pizza sounded like something he could do.
“Why don’t we go down to the beach for a bit?” Ray suggested. “We can grab some pizza on the way back for dinner.”
Fresh air and walking sounded like a lot of work right now, but Willie perked up at the idea of going to the beach, and Nick knew he owed it to himself to make the effort. At the same time, he thought of his own dads back at home, who had probably felt confused and hurt over his behavior for a long time. Nick wasn't sure how much longer he could do this, keeping up this act around his parents like he was okay. He still wasn't sure how to tell them about what happened, but he could at least try to open up to them more.
“Actually,” he spoke up, “I might take my pizza to-go, if that’s okay…”
His dads were cooking dinner when he slipped back into the house. They both glanced to each other before their eyes narrowed in on him. Nick noticed right away that there were only three plates set out for dinner and he swallowed nervously, realizing they wanted to eat with just him.
“Is Ava home?” Nick asked.
“She had a sleepover tonight,” his dad explained. “How was your workout?”
Nick blinked, and he realized he had forgotten all about his lie. He had come home feeling completely prepared to open up to them about how much he was struggling, but now that he was here the panic was settling in again. Would they just think he was crazy? Making things up? Would they ship him off to a psychiatric hospital somewhere? If he really told them what all was going on in his head without telling them about Caleb they’d definitely have grounds to think he was that crazy.
But he had to start somewhere. He had to, because if he kept going on like this he really was going to go crazy.
“There was no workout,” he confessed quietly. Neither looked surprised as they both crossed their arms. “Dads…”
He trailed off, the panic suddenly making his chest feel way too tight and he felt like he was falling again.
“Whatever it is, Nick, you can tell us,” his dad stated.
Instead of saying anything he let out a choked sob as he finally, finally broke down and his dads didn’t hesitate to wrap their arms around him. It was like after fighting for so long all his body had left to do was break down and be held.
“Is it Carrie?” His dad asked as he rubbed circles on his back.
Nick let out a shaky laugh as he shook his head, still clinging to them. One positive from the past couple of months was realizing he didn't like girls or boys and learning the term aroace. That wasn’t even something he intended to keep from his parents but, somehow, hiding all of his Caleb trauma led to hiding everything. And he was so, so tired of hiding.
“No, I promise,” Nick insisted. “It’s just…there’s just so much.”
His dads held him tighter, planting kisses to the top of his head.
“Just start somewhere, then,” his dad offered. “We just want to know how we can help.”
When he hesitated, his dad quickly added:
“And if you’re not ready, Nick, it’s okay. Just know that we’re here whenever you’re ready to talk.”
Letting out a shaky breath Nick pulled away and ran a nervous hand through his hair. He knew it was time, he could feel that he could trust them.
“I’m ready.”