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Nick comes back to himself in May.
His doctors tell him he’s spent the last two weeks in a coma that none of them can determine the cause of.
His dads tell him he was missing for six days before then, that he left for school one day and never made it to first period, that it took the cops forty-eight hours to care and another ninety-six to find him, unconscious, bleeding, and bloated from near-starvation amid the rubble of an abandoned hotel in downtown L.A.
Only Willie tells him the truth: that for the better part of a year, Nick’s body didn’t belong to him.
Slowly, the memories come back to him—as the doctors do tests and his dads get second opinions and Willie figures out the intricacies of being alive again. The memories come back as nightmares and panic attacks, as debilitating headaches and nausea at even the smell of meat, as hours spent staring off into space and minutes wasted searching for words that just won’t come.
In June, Nick tells Willie, terrified, that there are still blank spaces months long, and Willie apologetically says, “There’s probably all sorts of stuff he didn’t want you to see.”
In July, Nick’s dads finally get up the courage to ask him what happened, and Nick gets so caught up in wondering whether it’ll hurt worse if they don’t believe the truth or if they do that he ends up telling them nothing and also loses the ability to eat, sleep, or speak for three days.
In August, the doctors diagnose him with anxiety, anorexia, and PTSD not unlike the kind found in kidnapping victims. They tell him the aphasia is situational and might even sort itself out over time. They prescribe him antidepressants and a strict meal regimen to get his calorie intake back on track. They highly recommend therapy.
And they say it might not be a great idea for Nick to go right back to school at the end of the month.
“This sucks,” Nick informs Willie eloquently that night. The former ghost has all but moved into Nick’s bedroom over the last few months—ostensibly because Willie doesn’t want to put Ray Molina out any more than Julie’s hologram bandmates already have, but they both know it’s really because Nick can’t stand to be alone. His dads don’t know about this arrangement. “I’m behind enough as it is,” Nick continues, voice muffled by the blanket pulled over his head. “If I want to graduate on time, I can't just not go back to school.”
He hears the swish swash of Willie paging through his closet. It’s been an ongoing project, getting rid of all the clothes Nick can associate with specific traumatic memories—his lacrosse uniform, his Keith Haring sweatshirt, the suit his body wore to Junior Prom—and Willie graciously took responsibility for actually handling the stuff Nick can’t bear to look at, much less touch. “Might be good for you, you know. Taking some time off to… you know, recover.”
Nick shakes his head, biting back tears. He doesn’t want to “take time off and recover.” He’s been doing nothing but “recovering” for the last three months, and the nightmares haven’t gone away, the dissociation hasn’t stopped. He can’t keep spending all his time hiding from the world in his bedroom, or following Willie around because he’s scared of spending more than a minute alone with his thoughts. He can’t keep interrupting Julie and her ghosts’ band practices because his dads’ worried looks make him nauseous. He can’t keep hiding, after eight long months of being hidden.
Nick wants his life back, damn it.
“I can bring you notes and stuff,” Julie offers the next day. She’s watering her mom’s plants while Nick sits tight against one arm of the couch in her studio, the ratty Millennium Falcon blanket Reggie insisted he borrow folded over his knees. “If you stay home for a couple weeks, I mean. You could still get your work done and not fall too behind.”
“I dunno if that’s allowed.” Nick fiddles with the frayed hem of the blanket. “Feels illegal.”
Julie offers him a sympathetic smile—kind, he tells himself, not pitying—and moves from one potted plant to the next. “That’s what they did for me for a while after my mom died. Flynn brought my books home and I worked when I felt like I could handle it.”
Nick hums thoughtfully, a little embarrassed to admit he doesn’t remember that. He didn’t know Julie very well back then, and honestly, he was a little too caught up in Carrie to notice much of anything at the time, much less his girlfriend’s nemesis missing the first few weeks of school.
Julie finishes in the greenhouse and comes over to sit on the other end of the couch. She places one hand on the cushion between them, but she knows better than to try to touch Nick, knows whether or not he can stand to be is sort of hit or miss these days. “Talk to me,” she urges gently. “What exactly are you worried about?”
Nick closes his eyes. What is he worried about? God, there are too many things to count. That he’ll have a nervous breakdown in the middle of the school hallway. That he’ll become a tragic victim of the rumor mill and end up fielding thousands of questions about his supposed kidnapping. That he’ll fail all his classes because he doesn’t know how to be a person anymore and end up haunting the halls his stolen body walked for the next several senior years.
“I’m worried…” he tries after a few moments of thought, “that they’ll wish I was him.”
“Oh, Nick,” Julie breathes (caring, he reminds himself, not pitying). “You know the people who matter would never think that, right? I don’t. Carrie doesn’t.”
Nick’s heart gives a pang at the reminder that he still hasn’t actually faced Carrie Wilson since he woke up from his coma. She visited him in the hospital almost every day, according to Willie, but not once when he was actually conscious. Julie informed him that she’d lost a lot of her popularity at school, fell out of the public eye. That when Nick was possessed, he barely even looked at her.
She told him Carrie was the one to open Julie’s eyes to the fact that Nick wasn’t acting like himself, that he hadn’t been for a long time. He might have never been saved if it wasn’t for her.
But Nick was horrible to Carrie, and not just while he was possessed. Before then, too. Of his own free will and of sound mind and body, Nick told Carrie, I can’t do this anymore.
It’s the memory that haunts him the most.
He gets home from Julie’s after his family’s already sat down for dinner, which makes him think about the eight months of family dinners he’s missed out on already. It makes him want to march right up to his dads and tell them the truth, tell them that it wasn’t him who disappeared without warning three months ago, and it wasn’t him that was spending “a lot more time in his room than usual,” and it wasn’t him that took the lacrosse team to state for the third year in a row, breaking Los Feliz High’s school record! It wasn’t him living in this body for eight months, and after three months of failed recovery, he just wants to tell them that!
Instead, he mutters something about eating at the Molinas’ and closes himself in his room. But he only gets as far as ripping his shirt off his suddenly sensitive skin before a displacement of air behind him signifies a ghost poofing in.
“You can’t skip dinner, Nicky.”
He spins around, all the air leaving his lungs before he recognizes Willie leaning against the door. “Fuck,” Nick gasps. “Don’t… do that. I thought you were—”
Willie stands up straight, his expression shifting instantly from mild concern to immense guilt. “Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just… I know you didn’t eat at Julie’s, and I saw you come straight up. You know that’s not good for you.”
Nick crosses his arms over his bare chest, pouting. “What?” he grumbles. “So, just because ghosts don’t have to eat when they’re possessing somebody, I’m not allowed to have a moment?”
“Hey.” Willie comes closer and—asking silent permission with just his eyes—wraps his arms around Nick’s shoulders and pulls him into a tight hug.
Nick leans into it, closing his eyes with a shaky breath. Willie might be alive now—he breathes and bleeds, his heart beats strong against Nick’s chest, he eats more than Nick does these days—but he’s also still mostly a ghost. People who aren’t Nick and Julie can’t see him unless he wants them to, and he poofs in and out of places, as tangible as the wind. But Nick’s been able to touch him since that first day in the hospital, and when he feels trapped in his own skin like this, itchy and tight and like he doesn’t belong to himself all over again, Willie’s is the only touch he can stand.
“I got you,” Willie murmurs, rubbing firm circles into Nick’s back. “You wanna tell me what’s going on?”
Nick tries to focus on drawing each breath, in and out, and on the safety and comfort of Willie holding him, so that he doesn’t lose himself or his words before he can get them all out. “I just wish it never happened,” he says, burying his face in the warm crook of Willie’s neck. “I wish I had that time back, or that I remembered it all. I feel like… I’m an actor, playing myself in the sequel to everyone’s favorite movie, but I’m not allowed to see the first one, so I have no idea if I’m playing myself right. I wish he was the actor, in a shitty prequel no one wants to watch, and everyone could just be happy to have me. I wish… I wish I could tell somebody. Somebody who wasn’t there, who never knew him, who could just see me. So I wouldn’t have to pretend anymore.”
He ducks his head to hide in Willie’s chest and drags in ragged breaths, but he doesn’t let himself cry. He’s done more than enough of that in the last three months.
Willie cups the back of Nick’s head, tangles a hand in his hair, and just holds him, rocking back and forth until Nick’s breathing steadies.
And then he says, “Bro, we have got to get you a therapist.”
Nick breathes a watery laugh. “I wouldn’t even know what to say to one.”
But it does get him thinking, as Willie feeds him toast and eggs a little while later and then tucks him into bed, with Willie wrapped around him like an invisible weighted blanket. It gets him thinking so hard, in fact, that the next day he finds himself on the Wilsons’ front porch, somewhere he’s only stood once (and not as himself) in the last year.
“I need to practice,” he says when Carrie opens the door, before she can do more than stare at him in shock. “So I’ll know what to say if I ever have to tell people the truth. And I’m sure you know some of it, from Julie, but you don’t know all of it, and I figure if you hate me after, or whatever, it won’t hurt because I already got over you, but if you don’t hate me, then you’ll know everything and maybe we can be friends again, because I really miss you, and I just feel terrible for what he—for what I did to you, and you’re the only person I know who could maybe make me feel normal again, so can I just please practice on you? Saying it?”
He swallows, mouth dry, and forces himself not to look away as Carrie’s expression moves out of surprise into her unemotional default. He has no idea what she’s thinking or feeling until she breathes, “Nicky. I could never hate you. Please. Come in. Tell me everything.”