Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'll ever truly forgive him for my tía's death. If anything, it made me want to help him more, since he hadn't been in his right mind when it happened. His whole past with Jenny, and the cult, and that demon—Chernobog, I remembered it was called—basically ruined his chances of being able to trust anyone ever again. Anyone except me, I suppose.

Deadlines for different assignments and forms were hanging over my head all the time now, but that didn't stop him from visiting me almost every day. Without my permission. I'm not sure if he thought he could make up for all this by being extra friendly with me, or if it was something else. I mean, it worked. A little. When he dropped by one Sunday, anxious and sharper-looking than usual, I didn't bother saying hello. I simply let him get to whatever he wanted to say.

"Can we talk?"

I bit the inside of my cheek and looked to my textbooks sprawled out across my desk. "Does it have to be now? I was kind of going to sort through my things. And then...work. More."

Jack frowned. "You're practically killing yourself with all this. Whenever I see you, it's work, work, work—hell, the last time we saw each other for more than five minutes, you were pushing all these assignments to 3:00 in the morning!"

"And whose fault is..." I stopped myself before something hurtful was said. "Nope. Not doing that today. What did you need?" I asked with a sigh, pulling out my phone to check for any messages. Morgan had texted. Twice.

"What are you doing tomorrow? I'm having a lunch date, s.o. says it's fine if u tag along."

"They really want to meet you again!!"

Yesterday, at 11:00 PM.

"I guess help would be a good place to start," Jack said in a rushed yet tired tone. I furrowed my eyebrows.

"Hold on right there, I thought I was already helping you. This whole not-telling-Cher—"

I was cut off by a stern shake of his head and a finger to his lips. Oh. I guess I can't even say its name.

"That's not it. This is a different kind of help, I..." He sighed and threw his head back as if saying to God, please, take me now. "I want to learn how to be normal. Human. Or I guess 'relearn,' if that makes sense."

"Gladly. Lesson one: showers. Hands-on activity, try it out for yourself!" Not looking up from my phone, I pointed out the door towards the bathroom. "Go on." Jack wasn't amused.

"I mean how to act normal, Sawyer. And I don't need to take a shower that bad, I'm fine."

"When was the last time you did?"

"I'm not answering that."

I raised an eyebrow and sat up, running a hand through my hair. "M-hm. So...you want to act like a person. That's it? I don't know if you need a lot of help on this one, bud—"

"Trust me, I do. I haven't had a single conversation with someone in years, not a regular, human one."

I frowned. "So I'm not human enough for you, huh?"

"It doesn't count when I've talked to one person over the course of several months. I'd say you're more of a practice run. I have a human disguise, one that covers up all the physical stuff, keeps me from getting arrested if I'm just seen going to a convenience store or something. But I don't know how to interact with other people. At all. Not without giving something away. So I figured, why not go to the most human-y human I know?" He leaned down and ruffled my hair with a knowing smile. I batted his hand away, the seed of an idea having already been planted in my head. I had to fight back a smirk as the details started rushing to me.

"So I basically get to reinvent you? You're already something of an actor, if I do say so myself." I recalled our encounter at the park, months ago, with a bittersweet feeling.

"As long as it's not ridiculous, yeah." His eyelids widened in a jolt of panic. "God, I hope I'm not giving you too much power...?"

"Too late. My brain's buzzing, Jack, only a matter of time before it spits the new you out." I stretched my arms and stood up from the bed, pausing when I remembered exactly where we were. "...you do realize how little people care about how weird you act, right? This is a university full of tired 20-something-year-olds who are just trying to scrape a 'pass.'"

"One of them could be a detective. You never know."

I raised an eyebrow and nodded to humor him, already thumbing back a response to Morgan's messages. "Well, I guess you caught me on a lucky day, because I have the perfect little gathering for us to start with."

—

I gave him about a second's worth of information regarding the time and place of the lunch date, realizing my mistake as I began to dress myself. Knowing him—or, really, not knowing him—he could have either gotten by fine on his own with just my tidbit, or have been completely lost on this huge campus. The lunch tables near the performing arts building at 12:30. That's all I'd said. I bit a small piece of dead skin on my thumb as I glanced over my hair in the mirror, wondering if I should go looking for him in case it hadn't been enough.

Do you even know where he lives? I frowned. Hold on, does he live anywhere?

I felt tempted to grab a few of my books off the desk and stuff them into my bag, so I could cram in some extra work during lunch as well. Jack's words from just an hour ago were slingshotted from the back of my brain to the edge of my skull, making me grip the bag's strap tightly and shake my head.

"You're killing yourself with all this," I muttered. "He's right." Not another second passed before I widened my eyes and slapped my forehead, with comically exaggerated irony. "Imagine that! Jack being right!"

I looked to a small alarm clock on my left. I had about ten minutes to make my way over, and for once, I'd pulled myself together a sufficient amount beforehand. I just needed to rendezvous with the human-wannabe himself, make sure he looked...presentable, and do my best to make things go smoothly with Morgan and her date.

It was one of those warmer days near the end of winter, where the sharp sting of its cold starts winding down and everything else starts kicking up. Whatever snow was left on the grass had, sadly, been trampled by muddy shoes or maybe even a few deer. Despite any plans today's temperature had in store for me, the sun was beating down and providing warmth to whatever parts of me fell under its rays. The world looked bright for the first time in a while.

I was beginning to get so distracted by the scenery surrounding the arts' building that I nearly ran into somebody on my path.

They didn't budge, and I glanced up to see a familiar red-headed "stranger" looking down at me with caution. He arched an eyebrow while I dusted myself off, as if checking my reaction.

"Sawyer," he began simply, like he was an old arch-rival of mine. I cleared my throat, still a little thrown off by his appearance. He was taller than usual, like at the park, although everything else stayed virtually the same except for his color palette. It's the hair. It's got to be the hair.

"Yes, uh...Jack, right?"

"We're in public. How about James?"

I crossed my arms. "How about Jimothy?"

He scowled and narrowed his eyes. "Jack it is, then."

I took the extra minute that I had to look him up and down, examining what could only be described as his "costume." The clothes were all weirdly formal, like he'd stolen this look from a stuffy white-collar worker. It looked too much like the real him to be any sort of doppelgänger situation, so worrying about whether he had a twin on the other side of campus was right out. Forgive me for assuming, but I'm not sure pre-eye-gouging Jack would be caught dead in any of this.

His eyes, I'd just noticed, were a scarily artificial shade of baby blue, like someone had colored them in with crayon. I knew it probably wasn't what he looked like when he was alive, but...

"They look nice."

He blinked. "Huh?"

"Your eyes. The fake ones." Though he didn't look the least bit offended (and I had no idea why he would, he might have still been processing my first sentence), I couldn't help but feel like I'd just put my foot in my mouth. I took a step back and awkwardly held up my hands.

"I mean, I still prefer the old you. It's just...no, what am I doing? You didn't ask for my opinion." I grabbed his hand and started towards the tables before he could respond, making a mental note to not look his way for another five minutes. That face is only going to trip me up. "Let's go."

"Uh, okay—!" He lurched forward as I dragged him along and pointed hesitantly towards one section of tables on our path. "Hey, she's that friend of yours, right? Is that the 'gathering' you were..."

I noticed two figures sitting there, one familiar and one not so much. The other person had short-cropped blond hair and about ten bracelets of varying sizes on each wrist. Before Jack could continue, I called out, "Morgan!" and started walking faster with a hand outstretched in greeting. She perked up and waved me over, while her blond partner gazed at Jack and me with calculating eyes.

"Hey! Soy-Soy, you're on time." Within the second, Morgan's hands were clasped together on the table and her eyes read stern worry. "You're not holding anything off to be here, are you?"

I laughed and took a seat across from her. "Nah. Well, kind of, but it's all just busywork, not due for a long time."

"I told you," Jack singsonged quietly as if he couldn't help himself. I nudged him in the arm and scoffed.

"Shut up, you know I'm actually taking your advice for once."

Morgan cleared her throat, nodding to my right with a sort of learned reverence saved for anyone she didn't know. "And this is...?"

I hastily patted Jack on the shoulder and gestured to him as if he were something for sale, or a celebrity I happened to pick up on the sidewalk. "Oh! The great Jack Nichols, theatre major. Jack, this is Morgan and..." While I blanked on the other person's name, Jack shot me a look that said, where'd you get that?

I shot him one right back, saying, where do you think? I did my homework, don't worry.

"Leigh," the blond said after a silence that lasted about one second too long. They gave us a crooked but friendly smile, shaking Jack's hand and boop-ing me on the nose. Apparently, meeting them once before was enough to warrant that kind of gesture. "We were just about to get some real food, want to come with us?"

I arched an eyebrow. "'Real' food?"

Leigh reached into a tote bag wedged between them and Morgan, retrieving what looked to be about five energy bars with tired eyes. "Apparently, these are not sufficient for a lunch date."

Morgan shook her head, fighting back a smile, while I felt a small but sudden jolt of guilt at the word "date." I drummed my fingers on one arm and mustered an apologetic look.

"Uh, I really hope we're not intruding on anything, or I'd have to drag this guy somewhere else." I gestured to Jack with a jab of a thumb, and he scoffed.

"You don't have to say that. I'm not a dog."

"We'll see."

"Sawyer, it's fine," Morgan said with a laugh. "I invited you, remember? Come on, if either of you are hungry, now's the time."

When everybody but Jack stood up, I threw him a warning glance, remembering with haste that he probably couldn't eat whatever would be served at the dining hall. He scratched his face and shrugged.

"Um, you guys go on. I'll just hang back here."

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Is he even trying not to look suspicious? "Nonsense. You're coming with us, now get up! It's the whole reason we came here."

"I've already eaten today."

The way he looked at me when he said that gave me a horrible, gut-wrenching feeling. Besides the obvious meaning Morgan and Leigh wouldn't pick up—that he lived off of human flesh, and that meant some poor soul nearby had died earlier today—he was giving me a warning look of his own, one I knew well but still couldn't quite put my finger on. It said something like, If you argue with me on this, it'll only make things worse. I chose, with difficulty, to ignore this warning, and shook my head.

"You're still getting up. You won't last a second out here alone, trust me." I took his arm, gentle despite my words, and pulled him to his feet. "Blasted concrete jungle full of millennials, textbooks, tables with umbrellas..."

He huffed. "You've made your point." As Morgan and Leigh started towards the nearest dining hall and turned their attention away from us, confusion still apparent on their faces, Jack jerked his arm to the side, and by association, me. "What was that you said about nobody here caring how weird I am?" he said in a hiss.

"We're in polite company," I hissed right back at him. "Besides, that's for quick stuff that doesn't require a lot of talking. You wanted my help. Well, this is what I'm giving you."

"I don't think you know what 'polite company' means."

"Just try to go along with whatever's happening. Don't make a fuss."

"You were the one who—!"

Leigh turned their head and fixed us with a worried yet curious look, and we both shut our mouths.

—

I returned to the table with a generic house salad and a nervous Jack still on my arm. We'd basically traded places once we entered the hall, what with all the people crowded around us and the painful overhead lights. Those seemed like a waste, too, since there was already plenty of sunshine outside. Could he just...choose not to see things? With the whole no-eyes deal? That'd feel like a blessing right about now.

Morgan and Leigh, the shameless lovebirds, got something to split. I couldn't even begin to tell what it was supposed to be; maybe a starting base of pasta salad, with god-knows-how-many other things piled on top. Seemed to satisfy them both either way.

Jack, being...well, whatever kind of thing he was, took no more and no less than a cup of fountain soda. At least it was something. When we all sat back down, he was still attached to me, whether he realized it or not. I practically had to shake him off, giving him a light pat on the arm to assure him that there were no hard feelings when there were, in fact, several hard feelings about him clinging to me like that. Dammit, this is a cold, cutthroat world of social queues and I won't have you thinking anything else!

Unfortunately, Morgan seemed to notice the exchange (if only the surface-level bits) and shared a conspiratorial glance with Leigh before turning back to us.

"So how long have you two been...well..." She awkwardly linked two of her fingers for lack of better words. I stifled a laugh. Wait, they think—?

"We just met this year," Jack answered, looking bored already. I wanted to pinch him and say, "oh, so now being normal suddenly isn't cutting it for you?" But I obviously couldn't. So I settled with tapping his shoulder and muttering, "She means dating, Jack. They think we're together."

I could almost see his mind buffering as he tried to come up with an appropriate reaction to that, while Leigh looked disappointed.

"Aw, you're not? But you guys would be so cute!"

"Well, sorry." I shrugged, not very sorry at all that I wasn't...involved with somebody like Jack. Morgan piped up.

"Haven't you at least thought about it? I mean, you basically argue like a married couple."

So they really did hear all that.

"Pssh. You wish, two losers getting hitched on each other means you'd get to narrow in on the hot ones. And we're not trying to make that any easier for you, isn't that right, Jim?" I nudged him in the arm, and he nearly choked on whatever sugary crap he'd been drinking, shooting me a dirty look. Morgan tilted her head.

"You mean Jack...?"

Shit. "Uh, yeah, I just like calling him that to piss him off. Funny, how much it gets to him."

Jack leaned on his elbows and grumbled into his hands, "It's not the only thing you do that gets me...off...no, that's not right."

Leigh snickered. "Ever the wordsmith, isn't he?"

I laughed along, though I couldn't help feeling a twinge of embarrassment for the guy. "Yeah. Ever since he learned to talk on stage, he's forgotten how to do it with real people." His face is getting redder by the second! Can't he control that?

"So, Leigh, you're doing something with art?" I hurried to change the subject while Jack recovered. "The last time I saw you, it was with some ungodly amount of markers, and paper, and..."

Their eyes lit up once the magic word had been uttered. "Yes. Art. Hold on," they said in an exaggeratedly breathless tone, rummaging through their bag once more and pulling out a beat-up spiral notebook with immeasurable glee. They flipped it open to the middle, revealing a small but detailed thumbnail of some landscape scene, colored in with roughly blended marker, and wrought with post-it notes. They passed it to me, giving me little choice but to raise my eyebrows and try to decipher their rushed chicken scratch.

"And this is...?"

"Animation project. It's about an angel who falls from grace, and has to rely on the help of two humans to get back on her feet."

I took another look at the drawing, realizing that there was more on the subsequent pages. The little character certainly looked angelic, although if not for Leigh's description, I couldn't tell you the first thing about any of this. I nodded, intrigued nonetheless.

"And how far along are you with that?"

"Couple more months, and it'll be done. These are just the brainstorms, they're kind of a mess."

I sighed internally, relieved that at least this wasn't all they had to work with. "Cool. I've heard animating is a whole lot of work and tough shit for circus peanuts, so...I mean, good luck. Seriously."

They shrugged as I handed the notebook back. "It's okay. I like doing it, even when it's a pain in the ass. It's my 'calling,' I guess."

Jack suddenly looked interested for the first time that day, but I had a feeling it didn't have much to do with Leigh's project. He folded his arms on the table and furrowed his eyebrows at me.

"Wait, you never did tell me why you're in med school, did you?" He nudged me in the arm, for once not seeming so uptight. "Out with it! What's the reason, what made it your 'calling,' or whatever?"

Appreciative as I was that he was actually engaging in the conversation now, this was one subject I didn't want to touch. Not during lunch with two other people, at least. I shrugged.

"Nah. Sorry, Jimothy, my reasons are mine alone. Locked up in here." I gestured to my forehead with a click of my tongue and stabbed at a particularly uncooperative cherry tomato. It wasn't a horribly tragic or personal story—well, not too personal. But going into it would've been a bit exhausting for this time of day. I still had work to do when I got home, a fact I internally winced at when reminded.

"Alright then, the great Jack Nichols." Morgan jumped to my defense, though it really wasn't necessary; Jack already looked like he was ready to drop the subject. "What's your story? Theatre major...that's got to be a whole lot more interesting than what we've been doing."

I could tell she didn't exactly mean that, but something seemed to awaken in Jack at those words. He arched an eyebrow, adopting a strange persona that I'd only seen in the "human" version of him in small doses.

"Hey, it's not all fun and games. I didn't even like theatre before I started college, it was only because of..." He started scratching at a tiny bump on the table and directed his gaze to a nearby shrub. "...my dad. He's been so pushy about my career and everything, a-and I've tried reasoning with him but all it ends up doing is make him stricter. Wanted me to go to this huge, prestigious school for the fine arts, or whatever, he was this close to grabbing my arm and forcing me to write up an application. I made an extra-mediocre compromise going here, just to piss him off. I'm sure he won't even let me back in his house for breaks. It's fine by me—oh, and he hates Sawyer, for one reason or another. Forget why. I think she's just a little too human for him."

I raised an eyebrow as he gave Leigh and Morgan a thoughtful glance. Oh, okay, I see what you're doing here.

"You two...you're lucky. You don't seem like you have somebody breathing down your neck about what to do with your lives. Take advantage of that." Something resembling a sympathetic look had crossed his face, and I couldn't help but stare a bit.

Aw, he's not so bad. A little rough around the edges...okay, really rough around the edges. But he's trying. Kind of.

A few minutes passed, and I didn't even realize I was still staring at him until he gave me a funny look, eyes darting back and forth between the couple and me; the cinematic mist over our eyes had dispersed as quickly as it'd fallen. Jack raised an uncertain finger.

"Why are you...?"

I snapped out of my daze and raised my eyebrows, hoping I'd successfully covered it up. "You ready to go?"

Jack cleared his throat and nodded, still looking a tad confused. I stood up, stretched, then grabbed his hand to help him up. Not that he really needed it. Wait, why did I do that?

"Come on. Get those legs to walk again, young horse...!" I said, pretending to pull as he stood up himself.

"That's not a thing," he muttered. "Is...is that a thing?"

"Eh, who cares. It was really nice talking to you, Morgan and Leigh, whose name I did not forget this time," I said with a grand, salutatory wave of the hand. Leigh snickered again in their excessively Leigh-esque way, lacing their fingers with Morgan's and turning to her with a surprised look. Morgan furrowed her eyebrows.

"What?"

"I'll tell you later. Bye, you two!" They turned back to Jack and me with their head in a hand, like they were already plotting something out for the two of us. I pushed that worrying notion to the back of my mind and started heading back to my house. Without a second to waste once we were out of sight, Jack gripped my forearm and knit his eyebrows close together.

"Theatre major?" he grumbled under his breath. "Seriously?"

I laughed. "Yeah, thought it'd suit you. You're always so dramatic, plus, with...this whole thing," I said, pinching a small patch of fabric on his sleeve, "you can't really say I'm wrong. And that backstory, with your dad and college and everything? I didn't know you had that in you. I'm proud of you, you little nerd." I gave him a celebratory punch on the arm while he scoffed and held his head high, like some snooty businessman.

"I've told you. It's survival. And for your information, my name is Jack Gordon, not Nichols."

I gasped. "I searched you up on the internet and was fed lies? For shame."

"Shut up."

"Hey, if you want to be seen with me in public, you're going to have to get used to talking like this. You know that's what people do with each other in the real world, right...? They talk."

"Ever hear about something called an introvert? Maybe I don't want to talk to people I don't know, in a place I don't like. If we were just sitting, alone, looking like we're busy, I think I could tolerate that."

"You and many other people. Look, I already told you, you did pretty good back there. And you're the one who asked me to help you out! You've been alone for way too long. You should get some friends—real ones, not those demons, or whatever. God knows how long I'm gonna be alive, so just try to be a person around other people."

Jack hesitated, then dug his nails into the sleeve of my sweater, grabbing on tight.

"Remember that night I came to your house, all high and beaten up after the boss possessed me?"

How could I not?

"...yeah. What about it?"

"Remember how I said you didn't need other people because you had me there?"

I didn't answer. He stopped walking, his hold on my sleeve causing me to stumble back and face him. He narrowed his eyes, and I could see the roots of his hair fading back to their original color, little by little. He didn't look annoyed anymore; in fact, his expression was practically unreadable. I only saw a trace of disappointment flicker through his features—in the way he furrowed his eyebrows, in the fixed corners of his mouth.

"I want you to think about that," he said, so quietly that I wasn't sure whether I'd even heard him right at first. "Because that was probably as real as I've gotten with you."

He let go of me and nodded towards the front door of my house; we'd arrived there about a minute ago, and I hadn't noticed. When I looked back at him, he was already walking away, his hands turning gray, his shoes tracking blood, his clothes now pitch black.

A statue, I realized as I dug around in my bag for the house keys. Jack Gordon is a statue.