I got to my feet and grabbed a pen and the black-and-white composition notebook Dad had bought for me this morning. “Let me know when you’re done, okay? I need to write that post about the next episode.”
“’Kay.” His eyes stayed glued to the forums as I headed into the hall. I found Sam in the lobby, reading a magazine. Roland lounged in an armchair nearby, scribbling in a book titled 1,001 Brain-Twisting Crossword Puzzles. He arched an eyebrow when I sat next to Sam on the sofa and opened my notebook.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Roland drawled. “All interviews with Sam Sumners must be arranged through his manager.”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “I don’t have a manager.”
“You do, actually,” Roland said, tapping his pencil against his mouth. “I hired one. He’s incredible.”
“Who is it?”
“Me.” Roland squinted down at his book. “Hey, do either of you know a four-letter word that means ‘really terrible at crossword puzzles’? Pretty sure it starts with a Q and ends with . . . um, also Q.”
I snickered. “Nope, sorry. And I’m not interviewing Sam. He said he’d tell me about this waterfall we’re investigating so I can write a blog post. Is that okay with his manager?”
Roland pretended to consider it. “Approved, I suppose,” he said at last. “Man, Jess wasn’t kidding about you, was she?”
“What?”
“She said you’re a natural journalist.” Roland wrinkled his nose as he erased something on his puzzle. “I watched the cemetery video. It wasn’t awful.”
“It was really good,” Sam told me seriously. “I’m impressed you were able to contact Ana so quickly.”
“Thanks,” I said. “If it was really Ana.”
Sam tilted his head. “You don’t think it was her?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to tell him I still didn’t entirely believe Oscar hadn’t been pushing the planchette. “It wasn’t like when we contacted Sonja, that’s all. I was kind of distracted.”
“Why?” He studied me intently. Sam had a way of making people spill their guts, and I was starting to figure out why. He actually listened. Unlike most people, who only half-listen because they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to respond to you.
“Because of the stupid cameras.”
Sam smiled sympathetically. “I understand. I was uncomfortable with the cameras during our first few episodes, but now I barely even notice them when we visit a haunted site.”
“To be fair, you barely notice other living humans when we visit a haunted site,” Roland pointed out.
Sam ignored this. “You’ll get used to it, Kat. I promise. It’s just stage fright.”
I blinked. Stage fright? Seriously? But I’d never had that before. Not in the school play in fourth grade, when I played the Evil Queen to Trish’s Snow White. Not last year during class elections, when I’d moderated a debate in the cafeteria between Mark and the other class-president candidates. Sure, I’d been a little nervous, but in the fun kind of way.
This camera thing? Not fun, and I didn’t want to get used to being on TV.
But I didn’t say any of that to Sam. I just smiled.
“Thanks. Anyway . . . what’s the story behind this waterfall?”
Almost an hour later, I returned to my room with several pages of notes. I’d never really thought about this part of Dad’s work before. Back when he hosted a morning talk show called Rise and Shine, Ohio! I just thought his job meant sitting in front of a camera, talking about the news, and making jokes. It was definitely not a career I’d ever be interested in. But this—doing research and “finding the story,” as Jess put it—this part I actually liked. The whole time Sam had been talking, I was mentally writing my blog post. I even found myself planning out how I’d want to film the episode, if I were in charge. On the not-terrifying side of the cameras, of course.
Oscar was gone, and he’d left Dad’s laptop open on the desk. I sat down and clicked over to my blog. “Thirty-seven comments,” I mumbled. “Woo.”
EdieM: This is FANTASTIC! So proud of you, KitKat.
trishhhh: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MARK: Nice! Love your shirt, btw.
Maytrix: Wow, excellent mini episode! Oscar, you crack me up. Can’t wait to see you guys on the next episode!
JamieBaggins: As an official Ouija Master, I proclaim this to be outstanding Ouija-ing.
skEllen: OMG THIS IS AMAZING!!! OSCAR IS SUCH A CUTIE! I HOPE YOU DO LOTS MORE OF THESE!!!!!1!!!
AntiSimon: Kat, this is really great! Thanks for sharing this story about Flavia and Ana with us. Oscar is too funny!
Heyyyyley: This. Is. So. COOL.
YourCohortInCrime: Wow, you could’ve at least tried not to make it obvious you were moving that planchette. Cheap stunt.
presidentskroob: what a tragic story
I scrolled through the comments, smiling when I recognized some of the fans from the P2P forums. Quite a few thought Oscar and I had faked the Ouija thing, but whatever. Some people would always be skeptics, no matter what.
There were a few anonymous comments, and over a dozen from people I didn’t know, either from real life or the forums. I’d nearly reached the bottom when one caught my eye.
kbold04: did u think kat wuz a boy at first? i did lol
I read the comment several times, and a strange, sour feeling sprouted in my stomach and wormed its way up to my heart. Numbly, I scrolled back up to the video and clicked Play, then skipped through the first minute or so until I saw myself on the screen. I clicked Pause and leaned forward, scrutinizing everything about my appearance.
Between the camera angle and the lack of light, it was impossible to see the super-short ponytail sticking out of the back of my head unless I turned. My black Frankenstein T-shirt was pretty shapeless—not that I had much shape to fill out a more revealing top, anyway—and I had on yellow board shorts and flip-flops. I never wore make-up, but that shouldn’t matter. Plenty of girls didn’t. And my face was . . . just my face.
I chewed my lip, staring hard at the screen. Did I look like a boy?
“There’s nothing wrong with being a girly girl, Kat.”
My mother had said that at least a hundred times last week. It was like after six months of not speaking, she had to let out all the criticism she’d been storing up. Every time she said it, it took everything I had not to retort, I know there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with being me, either.
But staring at kbold04’s comment, I started to wonder if maybe I was wrong, after all.
“Hey, Kat!”
Gasping, I swiveled in my chair to find Mi Jin in the doorway. “Oh!” My voice came out kind of squeaky. “Hi! What’s up?”
“I was just heading downstairs to get some dinner and saw your door open,” Mi Jin said, glancing at my laptop. Her face lit up when she saw the video. “Oh hey—you posted it! Any comments yet?”
“Um . . . yeah.”
I stood up and went to sit on the bed so Mi Jin could read through the comments. “Aw, Jamie and Hailey are so funny,” she said, smiling. “I can’t wait to see them next week . . . Heh, that Cohort dude from the forums thinks you guys faked the Ouija thing, what a shocker . . .”
My heart pounded faster as I waited for her to see it. A few seconds later, the smile faded from her face.
“Ugh, freaking trolls,” she muttered. “Loser. Do you want me to . . .” Trailing off, Mi Jin squinted at me. “Kat? You okay?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, fine.” My eyes felt dangerously hot, so I fixed my attention on the bedspread.
“Hey.” Mi Jin scooted the chair over until she was right in front of me. “That comment didn’t get to you, did it? Kat, that’s just a stupid troll.”
“I know.”
“They say mean stuff just for fun.”
“I know.”
“You’re one of the most confident, awesome kids I’ve ever met,” Mi Jin said. “You and Oscar both. I hate seeing the dumb things people say hurt you guys like this.”
I wrinkled my nose. “What are you talking about? The fans all love him.”
“I meant . . . never mind.” Leaning forward, Mi Jin nudged my knees with hers. “Look. Are you a girl?”
“Yeah,” I said, startled.
“Then you look like a girl,” Mi Jin said firmly. She scooted back over to the laptop and started clicking. “You look like you, and you’re the only person who gets to decide who that is. The end. I’m deleting that stupid comment.”
As I watched her, the knot in my chest loosened a little bit. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.” Closing the laptop, she faced me again. “Did I ever tell you about the time I cosplayed as Moondragon at Comic-Con when I was sixteen?”
“Who?”
Her eyes widened. “Moondragon! Avengers? Guardians of the Galaxy? Argh—okay, I have some comics you need to read. Mandatory.” She nodded decisively. “Anyway. So I put together a pretty decent costume: green bathing suit, green boots, green cape with a really high collar. I got a bald cap, because Moondragon is bald, right? But it looked super fake. So I shaved my head.”
My mouth fell open. “You did?”
“Yep,” Mi Jin said proudly. “My parents were furious, and I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, it’s my head. Moondragon was bald, and I wanted to look like her. Even my best friend was like, ‘But people will think you’re a boy!’”
“And it didn’t bother you?” I asked.
Mi Jin shrugged. “Nope. Why should it? Their mistake, not mine. I liked how it looked, honestly.” She paused, running her fingers through her hair. “Maybe I should go back to that. My mom would freak.”
I giggled. “My mom always hated my costumes, too. I was Dracula when I was seven, and Grandma helped me make my costume. It was awesome. A bunch of neighbors didn’t even recognize me! I remember Mrs. Vesky down the street saying, ‘And who’s this little boy?’ Drove my mom nuts, but I loved it. Isn’t the point of a costume to fool people into thinking you’re someone else?”
“Totally!” Mi Jin beamed.
“Elena’s going through a princess phase,” I told her. “My mom loves it.”
“Who?”
I immediately regretted bringing her up. “My mom’s fiancé’s daughter. Hey, want to get some dinner?”
Mi Jin studied me for a few seconds before responding. “Sure, yeah.”
I stood and headed to the door, saying a silent thanks that Mi Jin hadn’t pressed me to talk more about Elena. What she said about not letting other people decide who you are made a whole lot of sense. Besides, Grandma liked makeup and dresses and all that, but she never, ever made me feel bad for not liking them, too.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about that comment, and I couldn’t help wondering if there’d be more . . . especially if I ended up on television after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ONLY THING MISSING IS A MANIAC WITH A CHAINSAW
Post: The Lost Campers of Chapada Diamantina
Tomorrow morning, the P2P crew is heading to Chapada Diamantina National Park, about a five-hour drive from Salvador. We’re going to camp out overnight near a waterfall where three teens died in the summer of 1974.
According to the locals my dad interviewed yesterday, this group of friends went camping the weekend after school let out. When they packed up to leave, they realized they’d lost their hiking trail map. They tried to find their way, but they kept circling back to the waterfall. Soon they ran out of food.
It was weeks before authorities found their bodies. They also found their footprints circling the area over and over again. Ever since then, other campers have reported feeling a strong sense of fear and panic near the waterfall. Some even claim to hear the frantic whispers of the teens as they wander through the trees, lost.
Sam believes the waterfall might be an example of a residual haunting. That’s when the emotions of the people who died are trapped in an energy field and the event is “replayed” again and again, as though it’s on a loop. If he’s right, that means we won’t actually see the ghosts of the lost campers, since this type of haunting is like a record of their feelings—their actual spirits won’t be present. Hopefully we’ll find out one way or the other tonight.
Also, big news! Oscar and I are officially joining the cast of P2P, starting with this episode. We’re both really excited about it, and we hope you are, too!
ABOUT an hour into the drive, I was ready to scream. Oscar would not stop talking about what the fans were writing about him. He’d stayed up so late reading the P2P forums last night that Lidia told us she’d had to literally drag him out of bed this morning. There were new threads just to discuss the newest cast members, me and Oscar. I had already made a silent vow not to read them anymore. Which would be pretty easy to stick to in a national park with no reception.
Oscar, on the other hand, was obsessed. Probably because the fans already totally loved him. Maybe I thought his reporter personality was annoying, but apparently it was effective.
“Did anyone say anything bad?” I asked him at one point, and he shrugged.
“A few thought the Ouija part was fake.”
“Yeah, but I mean . . .” I fidgeted in my seat. “Well, there was this comment on my blog yesterday. Mi Jin deleted it, but . . .”
Oscar stared at me. “What did it say?”
“Just . . . this rude comment about how I looked like a boy or something,” I said as offhandedly as possible.
“Oh that.”
I turned to him. “Wait, you saw it?”
“Yeah.” Oscar shrugged. “Just a troll, right? They show up in the forums, too, sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”
“I guess, yeah.”
I looked out the window, feeling a little stung. Oscar had been bullied before, after all. Being tormented by your friends was obviously way worse than having one dumb troll say something mean about you online, but still. I guess I’d figured he’d be a little more sympathetic.
Or maybe I really was making too big a deal of this.
“Not sure Camp Half Hell was the best thing to watch right before camping,” Lidia mused, grabbing a bunch of cables out of the back of the van.
“Think of it as training in case things go wrong,” I told her. “Basically, don’t do anything the counselors do, and you probably won’t die.”
“And stay close to Kat,” Oscar added as he zipped his iPad up in its case. “Maybe her grandma taught her how to defend herself against a serial killer with a curling iron.”
Mi Jin hopped out of the van wearing a gigantic backpack. “Oscar Bettencourt,” she said sternly. “You know I love being pranked, but if you come at me with a curling iron at any point tonight, I am not responsible for any serious bodily harm that may befall you.”
“Aw, come on . . .” Picking up his bag, Oscar followed Mi Jin down the dirt path. Dad and Jess, both weighed down with camera equipment, were already up ahead with our guides. Brenda and Hugo, who ran a small tour business in a nearby town, had told us the waterfall would be at least an hour’s hike from where we parked. Roland and Sam weren’t far behind, each carrying two extra-long duffel bags containing our tents. I helped Lidia get the last of our supplies out of the van, and we set off after the others.
Most of the hike was uphill. The incline wasn’t all that steep, but after half an hour, my calves had started to ache. Then we stepped out of the trees, and I forgot about my sore legs.
“Wow.” On either side of us, grassy hills rose up and up until they were vertical, turning into rocky cliffs that towered overhead. The sun hung low in the sky, causing the stone to glow gold and orange.
“Gorgeous,” Lidia said happily, readjusting h
er backpack straps as we walked. “Mmm, it feels so good to be outside. Jess spent Thanksgiving with us in Oregon, and she yelled at me when I so much as got out of bed.”
“Well, you did look pretty sick the last time we saw you,” I told her. Which was putting it kindly, to be honest. After the whole Emily disaster at Daems, Lidia had told us the last thing she remembered was setting up in the mess hall. Then she woke up to Jess giving her CPR and figured she’d passed out. She definitely did not remember when Red Leer took over her body, forcing her to run from cell to cell and free all the ghostly prisoners. And giving Oscar and me a pretty good scare while she was at it.
“True,” Lidia agreed. “But I’m pretty tough. I mean, I was possessed all that time between Crimptown and Daems, and I managed.”
I glanced at her. “But you didn’t know it, right?”
“That I was possessed? Not exactly.” Lidia frowned, toying with the locket on her necklace. “It’s hard to explain. I didn’t have blackouts, but there were these moments where I’d see something, or feel something, that wasn’t real. Like the day we left Rotterdam—I looked out at the waterfront and saw a ship way out on the ocean. A really old ship. Then I blinked and it was gone. A little hallucination, courtesy of Red Leer.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.” Lidia shook her head. “The weirdest part was when I saw it, I felt this . . . this connection to it. Like it was my ship, and I wanted nothing more than to be on it, to just sail out into the ocean and never look back.” She sighed, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “Anyway. At least now I know the signs of possession firsthand, right? Not many people can say that.”
“I guess,” I said. “You have your heart medicine, right?” Lidia had been born with a condition that meant she needed to be fitted with a pacemaker. Since manipulating electricity took less energy for ghosts, it was her pacemaker that made her easier for them to possess.
Lidia let out a short laugh. “Yes, and just so you know, Jess and Oscar have been checking to make sure I take it every day. Incessantly. Between them and Sam, sometimes I feel like no one trusts me to take care of myself anymore.”
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