12. STEVIE
STEVIE
S etting up Lo’s house for our paranormal investigation—something I usually say with finger-quotes but might actually mean this time—is serious business.
Andrew and the twins had gone to work setting up cameras in each room while Lo and I were gone.
The goal is to capture anything that happens tonight.
I’m on the fence about whether this will end up actually being worth it, but pretty much anything can be thrown together to look haunted.
It just might not be the most exciting episode of television anyone’s ever watched if most of what we do is add some disembodied voices in post-production.
The biggest difference between setting up Lo’s house and setting up for all of our previous episodes is that we don’t have to do any additional work besides cameras and mics.
We don’t have to worry about setting up a room a certain way, so we can capture a chair mysteriously falling or see a random flash of light.
This time, it’ll just be us and the ghost that Lo seems pretty confident does, in fact, live in the house.
I can’t bring myself to ask her how she’s doing after all of the stuff with Sunniva.
It’s obvious it’s been a lot for her to process.
On the way back, she was the quietest I’ve heard her.
As a professional paranormal encounter faker, I’m pretty certain Sunniva was fucking with all of us, and none of it was real.
There’s only a tiny—a very, very tiny—part of me that believes that maybe there’s more to the story than just clever set design. I still can’t figure out how she could get a rock to move on its own.
After checking in on the cameras, the guys and I wait for nightfall. I find Lo in the kitchen, munching on a bag of chips from Trader Joe’s, staring off in the distance.
“I hope you’re not staring at some kind of figure in the corner,” I joke, hoping to lighten the mood even a small amount.
We’ve only known each other a short time, so it’s hard to know what she needs.
Everyone grieves differently. And I’m fortunate to have not lost any of my family members I’ve been close to, so I can’t even attempt to connect to her on what she’s gone through.
“No, just thinking,” Lo says. She tightly wraps up the bag to close it up and latches a chip clip back onto it. “That whole thing was so weird. Everything with Sunniva, I mean. It’s just not sitting right with me at all.”
I lean onto her kitchen island. “It’s not making sense to me, either.”
“It felt…real, right?” she whispers, as if someone is going to come after her if they overhear. “Like, that actually happened?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I really mean it this time. I’ve always been pretty firm in my beliefs. My grandparents and their neighbors love to share stories about encounters in the desert, but that’s all they’ve ever been to me—stories. They’re folklore.
But it’s harder to convince myself when it’s something that’s actually happened to me. Discrediting the story of another person is one thing, but doing it to myself over something I saw with my own two eyes is another.
“I don’t know,” I admit. We’re quiet for a beat. “Are you good for today? You don’t have to stick this out with us. You’ve already had a long day.”
“I’m alright,” Lo says. Then she says, “That’s a lie. I’m not. But I can handle this. We’ve made it this far already—I want to commit.”
“You don’t have to.”
Lo shrugs. “I kind of want to see what evil spirit Sunniva might’ve brought into this house.”
I nod and tap my fingers against her butcher block counter. “And you’re…okay?”
She takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. I just know I miss my mom, and seeing someone else have all those same feelings…it was really intense. I’ll be bringing it up in therapy.”
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” I say. “I don’t know if that’s the right thing to say or if that’s more annoying than anything to hear, but—”
“It’s okay. There’s not really a right thing to say. Nothing’s ever going to make it better,” she says. Her eyes flick up to meet mine, and nerves buzz in my chest. It’s almost stupid how beautiful she is. “But I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, of course.” I avert my gaze and clear my throat. “Tonight should be interesting, whether anything actually happens or not.”
“I agree. I’m kind of hoping the ghost shows out—I need proof of everything that’s been going on here.”
I chuckle. “I guess we’ll see what happens.”
We play the waiting game until the sun finally goes all the way down and it’s dark enough to film. I settle onto the dining room table to catch up on the edits I didn’t do last night while Lo gets comfortable on the couch.
After an hour of comfortable silence, I glance over in Lo’s direction. She’s typing away on her phone, her attention so focused on it that she doesn’t realize I’m looking at her.
It’s impossible not to imagine that the person on the other end of the phone is a fling of some kind.
Despite agreeing that it was a one-time thing and definitely a moment of weakness, our time together keeps popping back up in my mind.
I hear her breath in my ear, the sound of my name on her tongue.
When I was driving us around earlier, it was so easy for me to remember what her touch felt like.
I look away, shaking my head. I can’t fixate on her, can’t let this become more than what it is. Or was.
We’re going to film the rest of the episode, and I’m going to be entirely normal about it. And then I’m going to continue to be very normal about it even after we say goodbye, and I have to pretend that I don’t want to see her again.
Even as I’m silently saying my goodbye to Lo, there’s a small part of me that wonders why we even have to keep it to one time. We live in the same city; we can theoretically see each other whenever.
But there’s no way with the work that we do, we’d ever been in the same place enough for that. And we might as well be in a long-distance relationship with how long it’d take to get to each other.
And beyond all of that, Lo was the one who’d made it clear it was a one-time thing. I’m not going to be the idiot who ignores her saying that and then gets hurt when she doesn’t want anything more from me than something casual.
Even if there’s a part of me that’s hoping, maybe, she’ll change her mind.
The front door suddenly flies open, making me and Lo jump.
Lo’s house has been suspiciously quiet all day—so quiet that we haven’t had a single scare since we arrived back from Sunniva’s.
It’s suspiciously quiet, and despite my best efforts, I’m on edge and waiting for the next weird thing to happen.
Not that I think the house might actually be haunted or anything.
“We come bearing enough food to feed a small city,” Andrew says as he steps inside the house. The twins follow behind. All three of them are carrying a bag of fast food that’s practically bursting at the seams.
“Jesus, did you guys buy the entire place out?” I shut my laptop—there’s no chance I have any work left in me. It’s been demonstrated to be impossible to focus when Lo is anywhere in my vicinity.
“Brain food.”
“Right,” I say, and clear my stuff from the table so we can lay the food out.
“We got everything everyone requested,” Andrew says. He lugs his bag up onto the dining room table and starts pulling it out. Lo disappears into the kitchen, and the clattering of plates sounds out moments later.
“And everything else on the menu, too, apparently. You know our food budget isn’t unlimited just because we’ve been writing these meals off, right?”
“Is that legal?” Lo asks as she comes back into the dining room with plates in hand.
“Don’t come to me for tax advice. I still can’t afford an accountant, so it’s just been me, TurboTax, and whatever I want to write off on my taxes for years,” I say, putting my hands up defensively. “Not one receipt from travel kept.”
Lo snorts as she moves the food Andrew has been laying out on the table onto plates.
After doing that, she moves on to placing all of the drinks onto coasters.
When she catches me watching her with an amused smile, she blushes.
“It’s…real wood,” she explains, almost like she’s making a confession. “It’s thrifted, at least.”
“No judgment from me,” I say, even though the mental math I’m doing on getting a real wood table of this size suggests this piece of furniture was not cheap.
But I guess the same goes for all of the furniture in Lo’s house.
I don’t know much about furniture, but I do know none of the furniture here is from IKEA; the show she was on had definitely paid her well.
The twins reach over Andrew to grab their food and settle into seats around the table. “Tonight’s going to be crazy,” Sean says, his mouth half-full.
“What makes you say that?” I ask, and Andrew hands me the plate of my food.
We’d all agreed on a burger place nearby that Lo had recommended.
I’d gotten a mushroom burger—my favorite—and fries.
Lo kept it simple with her burger but ordered sweet potato fries.
I can tell I’m smitten because just her liking sweet potatoes is cute to me.
He furrows his brow. “You didn’t hear all of the shit going on?”
Lo and I look at each other. “No?”
“There was, like, a scratching sound or something in the walls.”
“It was so loud. We heard it the entire time we were setting up cameras earlier,” Tanner chimes in and stuffs a fry in his mouth.
Lo goes so pale she’s practically a ghost herself. “What?” Her voice comes out small. “While we were gone?”
“Yeah. It was crazy ,” Sean says.
We all go so quiet we can hear a pin drop. Lo doesn’t touch her food at all; she just stares at it, her thousand-yard stare suggesting she’s not even on this planet with us anymore.
After another beat, Andrew sighs. “They’re fucking with you,” he says, and Tanner and Sean burst out laughing.