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Wes isn’t stupid.
Stubborn, maybe, and a little too observant for his own good — but not stupid. He gets good enough grades in his classes, and he’s the best at finding openings to make a shot or pass the ball to someone who can make it. He notices when teachers are paying attention, and when they’re more interested in whatever’s going on inside their heads or on the other side of the classroom — it makes it easy for him to catch and pass notes discreetly, or to make a joke that won’t get him or his friends in trouble.
He notices when his friends are in bad moods, and he does his part to help — but it isn’t much. The way Dash and Dale and the other footballers target the nerds leaves a bad aftertaste in his mouth, but hey, at least it isn’t him getting stuffed in some tiny locker. Perks of being a basketball player, he guesses. He’s not going to play hero, and it isn’t his job to police his friends.
And besides, he has an image to keep! He more than anyone can see how hard it is being on the fringe of the A-Listers. One bad move and he’ll be demoted to the nebulous purgatory somewhere between cool kid and true nerd — a place where he’ll never be able to have friends. He can ignore a few nerds getting stuffed in lockers if it means he can be somebody.
He can ignore the weird Fenton kid getting chased by Dash for the umpteenth time, even if it makes something in his chest twinge.
He thought he could ignore everything else about Fenton, too.
The way his hands turn translucent and beakers slip literally right through his fingers, scattering broken glass across the science lab.
The way his voice echoes down the hallway when he raises his voice in a way everyone else’s voices don’t.
The way his eyes shed their bright, human blue and glow dangerous, otherworldly green.
Wes isn’t stupid.
He’s not about to play hero - there’s enough of that, between the havoc Fenton’s parents wreak and the danger Phantom causes with his presence and actions.
But the thought of doing nothing while whatever weird stuff is happening with Fenton persists just feels… wrong.
He can’t explain why, and that unnerves him.
So he does what he does best: he waits.
And he watches.
And maybe, if he’s good enough, he’ll be able to pass the ball to somebody else.
Wes watches as Fenton pulls a spork out of his stomach with his own hand. What the hell. How does that even work? What the hell? Why is he still eating with that thing, that’s so gross! What the he—
“Yo, Wes!” Kwan smacks Wes on the back — probably in a way meant to be friendly — but it startles Wes out of his disgusted reverie. “You okay? You keep staring over at the weirdo table.”
Before Wes can answer, he hears Dale guffaw. “Hey, maybe the man has a crush! Huh, Wes? See something you like?”
Wes feels heat rise to his face. “No way! They’re too weird!” He glances over at Fenton, still eating with that same spork, and feels his stomach churn. “Way too weird, especially Fenton.”
“Yeah, Fentoilet’s such a loser!” Dash’s voice calls from across the table, and a wave of “Yeah!”s and “Nice one!”s wash over the A-Listers. “You should have seen the freak when I gave him a swirly before lunch…”
Wes quickly tunes Dash out. He’s grateful for the way Dash’s loud mouth draws the attention of the other A-Listers. He really is. He doesn’t want the spotlight on him right now. But he can’t help but want Dash to just shut up about bullying Fenton for once. It’s always “Fentina” this, “Fentoenail” that — Wes almost wishes Dash would talk about the near-touchdown he made yesterday.
“I know, right? Anyways, Fenturd —” Dash continues, and the laughter surrounding him is so phony it makes Wes sick.
He abruptly stands.
“I’m not hungry.”
And he walks away.
Wes isn’t stupid.
He knows he shouldn’t rock the boat.
He shouldn’t talk to Fenton, like, at all, let alone about any of this.
But he doesn’t think there’s any other way.
Fenton keeps being weird in ways that humans couldn’t — no, shouldn’t — be weird.
Sometimes, it’s as obvious as Fenton’s entire head falling through his desk while he’s napping on his notes, and Wes doesn’t get how oblivious everyone else seems to be.
Fenton’s weirdness is going to get him caught, and with all the ghost hunters running around Amity Park, who knows what’ll happen. Nothing good, for sure.
And Wes shouldn’t care. He knows he shouldn’t care. He doesn’t get why he cares. Fenton’s a weirdo, and anything that happens to him isn’t Wes’s business.
But Wes cares, and it scares him.
He isn’t going to play hero, though — that would be stupid. He’s going to handle this with as much subtlety and tact as he can manage.
So, he waits.
And when Fenton’s alone, he resolves to make his move.
Wes isn’t stupid.
He’s watched Fenton enough to learn his schedule by heart.
He knows where Fenton usually goes during his passing periods.
And he knows that for days after Dash gets another bad grade, Fenton tends to head for the hallway only when it’s mostly empty of jocks.
Mr. Falluca handed back midterms yesterday, and Dash has been complaining and pounding on nerds ever since. This is good. Well, not good for the nerds, but whatever.
It means Wes can finally get Fenton alone.
So, Wes waits.
His locker is in the same hallway as Fenton’s, so he has a ready excuse. He opens his locker, fidgeting with the books and folders within.
The hallway clears.
And soon enough, Fenton cautiously makes his way to his own locker.
Wes pointedly ignores Fenton’s proximity as he passes behind Wes — a cold spot that comes and goes, leaving Wes’s fingers and toes tingling, leaving butterflies in his stomach.
But he can’t help but watch out of the corner of his eye as Fenton approaches his own locker, barely looks down the hallway, and shoves his arm right through the locker door.
Wes rolls his eyes, about to shut his own locker and confront Fenton about his recklessness — but then Nathan turns the corner on the opposite side of Fenton, and Wes’s plan falls to pieces.
“What the heck?!” Nathan exclaims, and of course that’s when Fenton notices Nathan — well after the chance for damage control.
Still, Fenton tries. He yanks his arm from his locker, books and folders spilling everywhere. And he waves awkwardly at Nathan, with the same hand. “H-hey, Nathan, what’s up?”
He doesn’t do very well.
“You — you’re not a ghost, are you?” Nathan takes a step back.
“What?!” Fenton nearly shrieks. “No way, I mean, my parents are ghost hunters, they would have noticed and totally dissected me or something or —”
“Dude! That means you have, like, superpowers! That’s so cool!” Nathan gets up in Fenton’s face, and even Wes is overwhelmed by his excitement. “Were you bitten by a radioactive spider? Did you make a deal with a ghost? Oh! Did your parents experiment on you or spill some weird green goop on you or something? Or —”
Wes is about to intervene, but something holds him back. Maybe the way Fenton seems to tense at the mention of his parents. Maybe something in Fenton’s tone when he says lightly, “Yeah, you’re right, Nathan, I have superpowers. Want to see?”
Nathan, of course, doesn’t notice. No one seems to notice anything when it comes to Fenton. Instead, his eyes go wide, and he nods wordlessly.
Fenton grabs Nathan’s arm, and his whole body goes translucent as he does something Wes has only seen other ghosts do: his body morphs, and he seems to slip through the point of contact on Nathan’s arm — into Nathan’s body.
Nathan’s horrified expression smooths into a lifeless stare past Wes. His eyes gray, and his skin takes on a pallor reserved for the dead. Wes shudders — but he does nothing, keeping the focus of his gaze on the innards of his locker. He knows what comes next. The near daily ghost attacks have taught him that.
Sure enough, out of the corner of his eye, Wes watches as Nathan blinks, and his eyes glow green with dangerous, otherworldly power.
“Okay, great. Good going, Fenton.” The voice comes from Nathan’s lips, and the tone sounds like Nathan — but the cadence is wrong. The wording is wrong. It sounds like Fenton.
“Alright, here goes,” Fenton-in-Nathan mutters. Then he loudly states, “Nothing’s wrong. I took a nap on the floor, and everything I saw with Fenton was a dream. Oh, and I do not want to date Valerie Gray!”
Fenton-in-Nathan closes his eyes, and suddenly, Nathan collapses as Fenton steps away.
Fenton glances towards Wes, and Wes makes a show of rummaging in his locker for some loose notebook fallen behind the rest of his books. By the time Wes pulls it out, Fenton is gone, and the stuff from Fenton’s locker cleared away.
Only Nathan remains, unconscious in the middle of the floor, twitching and muttering feverishly from a nightmare.
Wes shuts his locker and stares at Nathan. He should do something. Helping Nathan would be the right thing to do.
He slowly walks to the unconscious nerd. His steps feel loud and heavy in the silence of the hallway. Everyone should be in class by now — the bell must have rung while he was focused on Fenton.
Wes should be in class.
Instead, he tentatively crouches next to Nathan, and he shakes his classmate’s shoulder.
Nathan gasps awake and grabs Wes’s wrist with an iron grip, wide eyes boring into his own. Wes doesn’t scream — he doesn’t — but he can’t help the way he falls backwards, free hand to his mouth, pulling Nathan’s arm taut.
Nathan sits up, pulling Wes with unexpected strength into an awkward half-crouch. “Just a dream,” he wheezes. “It was just a dream. Nothing’s wrong.”
Wes freezes. “What?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Nathan repeats, staring through Wes, his eyes bloodshot. “I took a nap on the floor, and everything I saw with Fenton was a dream. Oh, and I do not want to date Valerie Gray.”
Goosebumps raise on Wes’s arms, and he shudders. Fenton did this. Fenton did this.
Fenton, weird Fenton with his sometimes-translucent arms and sometimes-green eyes, whom Wes wanted to help, possessed Nathan, messed with his brain, and dropped him on the ground like a sack of potatoes. Wes feels sick to his stomach.
What else could Fenton do?
Could he turn invisible? Fly? Shoot people with blasts of power the same color as his eyes?
What if he’s still here? Watching to see how Wes would react?
Wes tamps down another shudder at the thought. If Fenton’s watching, he doesn’t want to give any reason to wind up like Nathan. Instead, he adjusts his position so he can wrap his trapped arm around Nathan’s grip, making it so that he’s holding Nathan’s arm. Then he stands, wordlessly pulling Nathan up with him.
Nathan wobbles and nearly falls, so Wes reaches around Nathan’s shoulders, hauling him up by the armpit. With Nathan still holding his wrist, it feels like an awkward dance. Still, he doesn’t mention it.
“Let’s get you to the nurse’s office, dude. You might have a concussion.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Nathan automatically replies. “I took a nap on the floor, and everything I saw with Fenton was a dream.”
“Yeah, sure,” Wes mutters under his breath.
“Oh, and I do not want to date Valerie Gray.”
“Good for you. And we’re walking.”
Wes doesn’t notice any cold spots as he walks Nathan to the nurse’s office. But Wes isn’t stupid.
He knows that Fenton could still be lurking.
As Nathan mutters the mantra put in his head, Wes keeps his mouth shut.
Wes is observant. And he’s been watching Fenton. He’s seen Fenton slip his arm into the vending machine to get drinks without paying. He’s watched Fenton turn a dumpster intangible to dump its dirty contents on Dash.
And maybe Dash deserved it. He’d shoved Fenton’s head in a toilet twice that week.
But no one deserves to be possessed.
Wes has seen Fenton possess three more people since Nathan. Who knows how many more when Wes isn’t watching.
It sickens him.
No one should have their mind violated and their head scrambled and their body dumped wherever Fenton decides to leave them, helpless and confused and marked by thoughts and feelings that aren’t their own, unable to do anything about it.
And Wes, all this time, has said nothing. Has done nothing but look on, as Fenton violates his classmates.
It’s not right. He feels dirty, complicit in his silence.
But what can he do?
He can’t play hero — Fenton would probably just possess whoever he could tell, and twist the truth into a half-remembered dream. And then Fenton would possess Wes himself.
The thought of it churns Wes’s stomach.
He doesn’t want to think about that.
But every day, his silence becomes harder to bear.
Wes isn’t stupid.
He knows that humans are alive, and ghosts are dead. He knows it the way he knows two plus two equals four, and not negative forty-two. It’s basic. It’s obvious. It’s a part of his fundamental understanding of the world: throw a two-pointer and a two-pointer, and he’ll have given his team four points, not lost them forty-two.
He knows that alive and dead are two separate states of existence. To be human is to be alive. To be a ghost is to be dead. There’s some math thing, some sort of mathematical logic puzzle, in this. “If alive, then not dead. If human, then alive. If ghost, then dead. Does human imply ghost? Does ghost imply human?”
The answer should be a resounding “No.” He can flip the last statement to be “If not dead, then not ghost.” Then everything chains together: “If human, then alive, then not dead, then not ghost.”
He can go the other way, too: “If ghost, then dead, then not alive, then not human.”
If Fenton is human, then he can’t be a ghost.
If Fenton is a ghost, then he can’t be human.
It’s basic logic. The same logic he’s learned how to use in geometry. It should be a given — like two plus two.
But Wes is observant. Wes knows when to trust his senses. And here at this festival, full of tents and music and the smell of fried foods and sweets and sweaty bodies running past him, full of screams and shouts and explosions and the smell of burning and ectoplasm, he knows his senses aren’t deceiving him. He knows he should run. Maybe hide.
At the very least, he should stop gawking at the patch of grass where Fenton stood.
Where Phantom threw himself into the air to fight whatever ghost of the day is terrorizing the town this time.
Where Fenton exploded from his middle with rings of light, blazing and cold and splitting and sweeping up and down his body and leaving burnt hazmat suit and dead flesh behind.
Where Fenton’s face became Phantom’s face was the same face but dead but with white hair but with those same dangerous, otherworldly, glowing green eyes that haunt Wes’s mind and dreams and nightmares.
Phantom is a ghost is dead is not alive is not human, and Fenton is human, right? Weird, horrible ghost powers or not, he feels too… real. Not liminal enough. Fenton has to be human, therefore not a ghost.
Fenton can’t be Phantom. Phantom can’t be Fenton.
Then what the hell did he just see?
And why does it make so much sense?
Someone bumps into Wes in their flight, shaking Wes from his shock and reverie.
Wes runs.
But he doesn’t forget.
Wes watches Phantom’s fights now.
He watches as Phantom’s stray ectoblasts bring down a building.
He watches as civilians are nearly crushed beneath the rubble.
He watches as Phantom captures the giant tatzelwurm ghost — but not before using stopped cars as shields from its lashing tail, destroying them and everything in them. What if there were people in those cars?
He watches as the crowds stupid enough to stay nearby cheer and wave, like there’s nothing wrong — like Phantom didn’t just almost kill them, like Phantom isn’t possessing people left and right to keep his damned secret, dirty with the weight of his crimes.
Wes seethes.
Wes isn’t stupid.
But he is pissed.
He is too angry, and too frustrated, and too disgusted, and too many other things to keep track of.
And he is tired of doing nothing.
Eventually, Wes snaps.
He watches Fenton laugh with his friends at lunch, like he didn’t just possess Mr. Lancer to keep him from calling a parent teacher conference ten minutes earlier.
He wordlessly gets up from the table, and he leaves.
He doesn’t care that he looks like a jerk — he can’t just sit there, he needs to do something.
So he writes.
Nothing long — just enough to put Fenton on edge. To give Fenton a taste of the fear and horror and frustration Wes has been hiding.
And he slips the note into Fenton’s locker, while Fenton’s too busy laughing it up with his friends to see.
I can see it.
The Ghost In Your Skin.
I’m onto you, Fenton.
Fenton wants the world to believe that he’s normal — that he doesn’t have the power to fling someone into a brick wall at 50 miles per hour, or force them to do something against their will and destroy the memory of it happening, or blast a hole in someone with his unpowered fist.
But Wes isn’t stupid.
He knows that actions have consequences — and the more power you have, the harder those consequences hit everyone around you.
Wes more than anyone knows how hard the consequences can hit — has lived it, every single day of his life, ever since the night of the accident — when he survived the crash, and the drunk driver survived without a scratch; but his mom didn’t make it.
Fenton, though — Fenton doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t know how hard he hits, doesn’t know how badly he violates the people he possesses — doesn’t know how dangerous he is, or how much damage he does.
Or maybe he doesn’t care.
Either way, the result is the same: he hurts everyone around him, and he gets to go on without a scratch.
He gets to go on being fine.
The drunk driver’s always fine.
Not this time.
Not again.
Wes is going to make sure everyone knows what Fenton is — what Fenton has done — if it’s the last thing he ever does.
Screw Fenton.
And screw his unintended consequences.
This is war.
And Wes isn’t stupid.
He’s observant, and he’s resourceful, and he’s resilient. He’s made sure to compile his evidence of Fenton’s identities and crimes both online and offline. He’s made sure to record messages for himself in case Fenton decides to possess him for it.
One way or another, he’s going to make sure the consequences fall on Fenton.
Or should he say — Phantom.
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