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Carrie knows she’s a bad person, okay?
She’s known since she was fourteen and told Los Feliz’s new lacrosse star that it would be beneficial for him to date her, like their high school romance was a business transaction without an ounce of emotional commitment involved. (She wrote up a contract. She made him sign an NDA. She refused to save his number in her phone.)
She’s known since she was ten and living with strangers because her dad tried to kill himself, and when her best friend—raised as her sister—tried to ask if she was okay, Carrie blamed Julie and her mother for Trevor Wilson’s failings and told her Carrie was too old for such a childish friendship, anyway.
Carrie’s known she’s a bad person since she was six and eavesdropped on her daddy’s therapy session, only to hear him say, “Melissa didn’t want to be a mother. She was certain anything she gave birth to would come out devilspawn.”
When she was little, and Ray and Rose Molina still had a lot of input in her rearing, Carrie tried really hard to fight what she was certain was an inherent darkness within her. She paid close attention to what her parents said and how they acted, when they apologized, when they didn’t have to. She learned how to hold her tongue and how to say what people wanted to hear. She learned the right way to smile and the right amount of eye contact to make, how to get what she wanted without seeming manipulative and how to give herself to others without letting them take it.
It got harder when her dad bought a mansion and moved her halfway across town. She lost a brother, a sister, and two parents all in one go, and even though her dad said he just wanted “more space to write” and “some independence to raise her as he saw fit,” she couldn’t help feeling like she must have done something to make him want to take her away. And what was the point of doing everything right if she lost her family anyway?
Flynn said she turned mean and heartless on a dime. Julie said she wasn’t acting like herself since she moved away. Mami and Papi were worried. Daddy was mad. But Carrie didn’t care what anyone thought anymore, as long as she didn’t have to pretend to be something she just wasn’t. As long as she didn’t have to fake being good all the time.
And then her dad’s assistant picked her up from school one day and told her she was going to live in San Diego for a while with the grandparents her dad had always said wanted nothing to do with her. And Trevor Wilson’s suicide attempt was all over the news.
Carrie’s sixteen now, and the scared little ten-year-old crying in the Shaws’ guest bedroom is so far away from who she is now, even farther it seems than the six-year-old voice-to-text-Googling “devilspawn” on the iPad her daddy got her for Christmas. She’s a junior in high school with a senior’s popularity, and she’s making a name for herself in music without the help of her father’s influence, and she doesn’t care if she’s had to hurt a few people’s feelings to get herself there.
Carrie Wilson knows who she is, damn it.
But that doesn’t make it hurt any less to sit in the back of a club between her dad and some reporter he pretends not to hate and watch Julie fucking kill it. She’s better—more at home on that stage—than Carrie could ever be. And those stupid holograms look so fucking happy just to be up there with her. Carrie’s friends—Carrie’s bandmates—have never once looked at her like that.
Her dad locks himself in his meditation room the second they get home, and with the mansion to herself, Carrie suddenly feels inordinately, unacceptably lonely.
She doesn’t know how to fix it, except by doing what she would have done a month ago. She calls Nick.
It rings for a really long time, long enough that Carrie’s stomach cycles through four separate rounds of nausea before she lets herself admit that he’s probably not going to answer.
But then he does, because Nick happens to be a very good person. In fact, he might just be the best person she’s ever met.
“Carrie.” He says her name cold and flat, like it’s an insult. “What do you want?”
She breathes past the instinct to snap at him. “I saw your car tonight, outside the Orpheum. You were at Julie’s show?”
Nick sighs. “I was supporting a friend, Carrie. Amazingly, you can’t stop me from doing that anymore.”
Carrie bristles. “No, I know! That’s not what I—” She stops, breathes. “I just meant… I wish I’d seen you there. My dad’s been acting weird tonight. I could’ve used—”
“I’m not your boyfriend anymore, Carrie,” Nick interrupts. “I can’t… do this with you.”
Her heart gives a pang. “I know.” Now, here comes the hard part. “Nick, I—I messed up, okay? I was jealous and stupid and mean, and I—I’m trying to be better. For real this time, I want… to have real friends like Julie does, like you do. I want to feel like a good person for once, I want—”
“Jesus, Carrie,” Nick scoffs. “Are you seriously asking me to take you back? We’ve broken up four times in three years and you still can’t even bullshit a real apology! I can’t do this anymore! For real, this time. And I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. Because I really do believe there’s a good person deep down inside of you. But fuck, man, I can’t be the one to help you find it. I’m done.”
Tears spring to Carrie’s eyes, but she’s certain the tightening of her throat is from anger more than sadness. She hasn’t felt this furious, this rejected, in… a long time.
“Nick!” she tries, but he’s already hung up. Carrie finally lets the tears spill down her cheeks as she throws her phone across the room, but she’s silent when she cries.
Too much happens too fast after that for Carrie to process, much less think too hard about it. Her dad checks himself into the psych ward, so she spends two weeks being pescavegan at Kayla’s house. Julie and the Phantoms skyrockets in popularity, especially once the holograms start sticking around long enough to do interviews. Carrie tries to keep up with Dirty Candi in return, but her fans just aren't interested anymore, and she doesn’t have the energy to try and win them back.
The lacrosse team starts a winning streak everyone attributes to a sudden rise in Nick’s aggression as a team captain. (Carrie doesn’t go to the games.) Kayla, Stephanie, Lulu, and Rachelle try out for the dance team since “Dirty Candi’s sort of over now.” (Carrie doesn’t try out with them.) Nick starts a band with a few of the theatre guys, and they open for Julie and the Phantoms at Prom, and Nick takes Julie as his date, and they win King and Queen by a record-breaking landslide.
(Carrie doesn’t go to Prom, because she doesn’t have a boyfriend anymore, and no guy asks her, and the girls she thought were her friends go as a group without her, and social functions make her mean, so it’s easier to just stay home anyway.)
For eight months, Nick ignores her, and her band gets bored of her, and Julie shoots her awkwardly polite smiles in the hallway that Carrie lets herself return, but they don’t really talk.
Cause after everything, Carrie doesn’t know how to be nice anymore. But she thinks she can handle not being mean. So no matter how painful the loneliness gets, she leaves Julie and Flynn alone. She lets her former bandmates make their own friends. She tells herself Nick looks happy and forces down the part of her that says something’s off with him, and she keeps her head down and focuses on getting through the year without hurting anyone more than she already has.
And then the Los Feliz High lacrosse team wins the State Championship for the first time in seventeen years, and as Carrie’s following all the social media hype from the privacy of her bedroom, the doorbell rings.
Carrie switches from Instagram to Facebook. Her dad calls out, “I got it!” She rolls her eyes and tenses, expecting to hear Ray Molina’s voice filtering up the stairs. He’s been around a lot lately, picking her dad up at weird hours and whispering to him over the phone. Carrie thinks they might be dating and just don’t know how to tell her.
But instead of Ray’s warm, broad tenor wishing her dad a good afternoon, she hears an icy polite, “Hi, Mr. Wilson. Is Carrie home?”
The next thing she knows, Carrie’s standing in the doorway of the balcony outside her bedroom while her ex-boyfriend four times over looks down over the railing into her dad’s $2.4 billion sculpture garden.
They’re in positions she doesn’t think they’ve ever been in before—him with his back to her, her hiding in the shadows of sliding glass. He looks thinner, his letterman jacket a little loose around his shoulders like he’s lost weight, and his posture is ballerina straight, like someone’s implanted steel rods in his back. His skin is two shades tanner than it used to be, yet still somehow manages to look sickly. His eyes look sunken, and almost bruised in the light of the setting sun. He looks so unlike himself.
But after eight months, Carrie has no way of knowing if something’s really wrong with him, or if she just hasn’t gotten a good look in too fucking long.
“Congrats on the game,” she says, unsure how else to begin. It’s not what she would’ve said a year ago, and she thinks Nick knows it—he snaps his head around to glare at her over his shoulder, and for a split second, she swears his eyes look purple instead of their usual blue.
“Do you think I came all the way here just to get your congratulations?” he scoffs. “What, did you think the whole school’s praise wasn’t enough, that I couldn’t feel complete until the great Carrie Wilson was proud of me?”
Carrie blinks, taken aback. She doesn’t often find herself speechless, but… Nick has never spoken to her like that. She didn’t think him capable of it.
Nick turns back to face the sunset. “You know, Carrie, there are a lot of things about this life that I never thought I’d understand until I was right in the thick of them. Lax bros. Theatre parties. How stupid and selfish teenage girls can be.”
Carrie bristles, offended. “Nick, what—”
“Don’t interrupt me!” he snaps, and a shock of real fear courses through Carrie’s veins. She takes a step closer to the safety of her bedroom. Nick huffs impatiently and continues, “But there’s one thing I still don’t understand, after all this time.”
He doesn’t elaborate, like he’s waiting for Carrie to cue him. Her stomach twists, but against her better judgment, she prompts, “What don’t you understand?”
“How I wasted so much time chasing after the likes of you. Poor little rich girl with a superiority complex and a ridiculous fashion sense. No wonder everyone realized what a nobody you truly were the second a better offer came along.”
Carrie’s eyes well up with tears. She doesn’t know how to wipe them away. She doesn’t even know how to breathe. She manages, “I guess Julie was the better offer?”
Nick lets out this awful bark of a laugh that only just sounds like him. “Oh my god, Carrie. Julie is everything. She’s everything I want, everything I never knew I needed. Her power is unparalleled, and she fucking knows it.”
He finally turns to her, eyes wide and alight with a fire that belongs in the depths of Hell. “I need someone at my side who knows how powerful she is. Of course Julie’s better than you. Carebear, you don’t even know who you are.”
He smirks, satisfied, and stalks past her to step over the threshold back into her bedroom. Carrie finds herself frozen in place as tears stream down her face, but she manages to call out before he’s out of earshot, “Is that all you came here to do, then? Break my heart?”
“Oh, honey,” Nick says sweetly. “You broke mine first.”
He goes, and Carrie stays there on her balcony, crying silent tears, as he jogs down the stairs and calls, “Good night, Mr. Wilson!” and drives off, revving his engine obnoxiously.
Nick’s gone, and Carrie stands there and sobs until the sun sinks all the way below the horizon, leaving her shrouded in darkness and shivering in the breeze from the Malibu shore.
Nick is mean now, and Carrie feels like the worst person in the world for having anything to do with making him that way.
She cries until she has no tears left. And then, because she’s Carrie Wilson, and fuck it, she does know who she is—and she knows who Nick is too, or at least who Nick’s supposed to be—she goes back inside and dives straight for her phone.
I know I’ve been terrible to you, she texts. And I’ve been trying to make up for it, but I know that’s not the same as saying sorry, so I’m sorry. I have excuses, but they’re shitty ones, so I won’t bother you with them. Just know you didn’t deserve the way I treated you. I’m really sorry.
But whether or not you forgive me—and I’d understand if you didn’t—I need your help now.
She swipes an arm across her face and takes a breath. Please, Julie, she texts, swallowing back the ache in her chest. I think something’s wrong with Nick.