traitor | Ziggy x Nick

19: wish i loved you in the 90s

I wish I loved you in the '90s
'Cause I know that we would work
Say wrong place, wrong time, should've been alive
Bet it wouldn't hurt
-
Tate McRae

>>>

- 1978, Nick's first day of Senior Year -

Walking through Sunnyvale high's hallways, I realise I'd never wished to disappear more than right now.

"You motherfucking champ!" a random guy shouts at me as I duck under a bag being thrown across the hall. As I continue to make my way, pushing and shoving the densely packed hall, people were incessantly clapping my back for whatever reason. As I fight my way to my first period class, someone pulls me to the side and grasps both my shoulders.

"Will?" I ask him, looking around at everyone who'd seemingly stopped in their tracks to watch. And from the look he gives me, he knows they're all listening too. He looks like he wanted to tell me something, something important - and something anyone else definitely shouldn't know. "Have you seen Sheila?" He asks instead and I shake my head.

Suddenly a chirpy voice rises from a couple feet away. "I'm here Will!" She shouts and people make a pathway for the two to meet. Ever since camp they'd seemingly grown closer, also probably due to their mutual dislike for Ziggy.

Ziggy. That day of her mother's funeral played over and over in my head - the day she said she needed space from me. And I wanted to understand, I wanted to accept that it is hard after everything is done to her, but I had resentment. She made a decision to cut off everyone who cared about her, including nurse Beddy. I'd swung by the hospital a couple times to talk with him and to his dismay, he'd told me he hadn't seen Ziggy since the funeral either.

I'd gone and loitered outside her house a couple times, trying to build up the courage to talk with her, to hold her one last time and tell her I'm sorry. But I couldn't. sighing, I take the moment where Will kissed Sheila's cheek, eliciting a round of "aww"'s from the onlookers to escape from the crowd and hopefully hideout for the rest of the day.

"I'm home!" I shout to the empty mansion.

Will had decided to go out with his friends, Sheila included, to the local park to hang out whilst I returned home alone. As I put my stuff away, my mom emerges from the kitchen and gives me a smile, which I'm barely able to return before shrugging up the stairs to my room. Collapsing immediately into my bed, I try to get some rest after a long and tiring day. However, all I could do was turn over in my bed a dozen times a minute. Sitting up, I blindly make a grab for the first book on my bedside table and flip to the first page.

News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: RAIN OF STONES REPORTED.

Closing the book quickly, I catch the title on the cover - Carrie. Sighing in defeat, I throw it back onto my bedside table and burrow under my bed sheets, trying to ignore all the thoughts that were intruding my head. I refused to let all the thoughts and worries get to me, everything with Ziggy, the curse...it was tiring and it all sent a pant of anxiety through me. I never found anything in the book saying the curse would end if we killed the heart. I'd made a bunch for Ziggy's sake, and she didn't even stick around to be my friend after summer. Groaning, I turn over in my bed again, but that sliver of anxiety didn't disappear. Deep in my heart I knew, that if anyone ever found the book again, bad things would happen and I wasn't ready for it.

So in a bought of worry, I pull the covers back and make my way into my father's office and punch in the code for the safe: 0416. It was Ziggy's birthday. I'd found it out when I'd been looking for her address at the station, just in case I ever needed to find her. Shaking my head, I pull the door of the safe open and sigh in relief when it was still there. Nodding, I lock it once again and stand from my crouch, making my way to the grand mahogany desk that was centred in the room. Dragging my hand across the layer of dust that'd accumulated, I sigh softly, thinking of my father.