Chapter Text
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2020
12:03 AM
Dad is eerily quiet on the drive home after the Panic! at the Disco show. They stayed for the rest of the show after Julie finished opening, and Carrie even got a selfie with Brendan Urie that she posted on her Instagram that went viral among the Panic! stans. With any luck, they’ll check out her stuff and find Carrie’s Dirty Candy videos posted on YouTube. She can make the educated guess that most Panic! stans aren’t going to vibe with Carrie’s style of bubblegum pop, but a stream is a stream.
There is something wrong both with Julie’s weird hologram band and with her dad. Her dad will get this haunted look in his eye a few days a year, and grief will choke him until he calls his therapist. Back when Julie’s mom was still alive, they’d drive to the Molina household every late July, and he’d spend a weirdly long amount of time with Rose and Ray. Their friendship was never compromised after Julie and Carrie stopped hanging out because Carrie stopped going with him. But this past year, he spent more time meditating and calling his therapist. Without Rose, he doesn’t spend time with Ray.
Her dad doesn’t really have friends his age. It’s weird. And sad, now that she thinks about it.
Carrie can’t stand the tense silence for another second. She slides up the partition and turns to now-washed-up rock legend Trevor Wilson.
“Dad, what is up with you today? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He startles, elbowing the seat behind him. “Christ, Carrie,” he wheezes.
She levels him with an unimpressed look.
“Nothing’s up, sweetheart,” her dad insists. “The show at the Orpheum was just… wow. I haven’t heard Urie perform like that in a while.”
Carrie rolls her eyes. “Dad, please. I was next to you the whole time Julie was on stage with her pixels. What’s up with you!?”
It could just be fondness. Her dad watched Julie grow up too—but that wasn’t the reaction of someone proud. It was the reaction of someone sad. But unless he’s feeling particularly mournful about Rose, what could he possibly be sad about?
Her dad sighs. “It honestly wasn’t about Julie. I’m proud of her; of course, you know I got my start at the Orpheum. But my… reaction… was toward her holograms.”
Carrie raises her eyebrows. She can feel her hackles rising at her dad’s pride in Julie, but she shoves that aside. Her dad emphasized holograms like he doubted that’s exactly what they were. Why would those make him so sad? “Oh? What about them?”
“They’re very… life-like,” her dad says haltingly. “It’s very cool tech.”
“No one can get her to really explain it,” Carrie says. “But, yeah. It was a bit more drawn out at the Orpheum. Usually, it’s like how it was in the Edge of Great video, where they come in at once. We don’t even know their names. Julie clamps up whenever someone asks. She always says something about the guys having crazy anxiety. It’s weird if you ask me.”
Her dad makes an audible gulp. “Weird. Yeah, you got that right.”
Feeling slightly validated, Carrie opens the Dirty Candy group chat as the car pulls into the mansion. Her dad practically sprints to his room. He shouts “Goodnight!” as he does, and Carrie half-heartedly does it back.
Carrie doesn’t believe her. The memory of the spirit assembly still burns brightly in Carrie’s mind—ugh, she hates that unintentional pun. Sure, at the open mic, Kayla kept whatever stray thoughts she had regarding Julie and her holograms to herself, but…
Actually… can Carrie leverage this?
Is that what Carrie wants? Dirt? She definitely thinks the whole thing is sketchier than Julie presents, but she doubts it’s anything truly shady. Julie isn’t built for that. She isn’t exactly a goody-two-shoes; the spirit assembly was proof enough of Julie Molina’s willingness to break rules.
She taps off of her conversation with Kayla and feels an impulse bubble in her gut. Without thinking, she presses the icon of a pen writing on a notepad in the top right corner and searches for a contact she hasn’t texted in a very long time.
No way she just did that.
No fucking way.
Carrie backspaces the Hell out of you killed it and clicks off of Julie’s contact.
Red-hot… something… floods Carrie’s system before it snuffs itself out just as fast. She’s tired; her defenses against those urges are way lower than usual.
Carrie sighs, turns off her phone, and tries to sleep.
She hopes Julie is too keyed up to go to school on Monday.
《✦》
Carrie is right, of course. She usually is.
There’s no sign of Julie on Monday, but there is sign of Flynn, who is smugly holding court in front of Julie’s locker. Carrie can’t help but notice that Nick is hanging around—and wow, how the mighty fall. Carrie can’t believe Nick’s demoted himself to being Julie Molina’s groupie, especially when she’s clearly got something going on with the brown-haired guitarist with a haircut straight out of the ‘90s.
“Julie is fine,” Flynn announces, waving her cell phone around. “Her voice is just shot, and she’s super tired from her gig. And no, none of you can drop off the homework of the day. That’s my job. Now skedaddle, and don’t forget to stream the Edge of Great performance on YouTube!”
Flynn flutters away, waving teasingly at some marching band girls toward the music room.
Carrie goes to her own locker and gets her necessary books for today’s classes. Los Feliz Performance Arts High functions on a block schedule with a minimum day, A-Day, and a B-Day. Mondays are minimum days exclusively for the various performance classes that all the students take—Carrie is in intermediate composition and vocal classes and advanced dance classes. Tuesdays and Thursdays are A-Days, while Wednesdays and Fridays are B-Days, with a block for her performance classes and three other blocks for regular high school courses like Geometry and English. Thankfully, today is a Monday. The only books she needs are the notebooks where she imagines Dirty Candy choreography and song lyrics.
When she finishes organizing her materials, she pops the bubble of serenity around her as Julie’s voice—recorded—belts out somewhere in the hallway. Someone’s watching the Edge of Great video again.
Carrie slams the locker a little louder than usual.
Here’s the thing.
No matter what Carrie does, she can’t escape Julie Molina. She kicked her out of the then-nascent Dirty Candy in the seventh grade, but Julie was still Rose Molina’s daughter, and Rose was Trevor’s best friend. They wound up at the same performance arts high school despite there being plenty in Los Angeles. Even when Rose died, and Julie lost her voice for a year, the void she left behind haunted Carrie like no other. Instead of fading into the background and dropping out of the music program—and therefore out of Los Feliz—Mrs. Harrison fought for her to stay. Julie became a bruise that Carrie couldn’t help but poke and prod at. A festering scab that Carrie kept scratching off.
And then, when Carrie thought she was free from Julie, she hijacked the spirit assembly with her weird hologram band and managed to brute-force her way back into the music program. Julie was—and Carrie hates herself for the pun—brighter than ever. And even Carrie’s dad is swept up in the wave.
It’s disconcerting. Because as much as Carrie does not like Julie, she still knows her. Those twelve years of best friendship don’t fizzle away (no matter how hard Carrie tried), and Julie has always been painstakingly consistent and predictable. She really hasn’t changed. Just… matured. She got sadder after Rose’s death, sure, but she’s still the same. So it’s incredibly obvious to Carrie that there’s something weird going on with the hologram band. Her dad’s reaction only cemented this to her. But she doesn’t have any proof. It’s just vibes, and she’s the only one who really cares about how weird it is. Her dad is focused on the logistics, but Carrie is focused on the why.
Carrie doesn’t like being haunted by someone she cut off.
Even when Julie is gone, she’s here.
Julie and the Phantoms…
She’ll get to the bottom of it.
Whatever “it” is.