Chapter 8
XoXoGossipCat
Dead. These two are something Else. Why watch all Skroll’s cooking videos when there is ThIS?
Notabot283758392
I think this guy puts a little too much weight on the Ovilus. It’s not really proven to work. Otherwise, this is pretty good.
Falseflagz
ok but did anyone else know this is what he looked like?
rosWILL @Falseflagz
yeah dude on the website
Falseflagz @rosWILL
oh ok more importantly, do u think they’re dating?
?
?
It turns out people like watching Hayden and me antagonize ghosts.
Those ghosts got their views after all.
Later that week, Hayden and I stood in the Nyan Cat conference room as Chloe played our pilot episode for the team—thirty minutes of bullshitting, ghost hunting, and sharp editing. Hayden handled all the storytelling, while Jamie and I did the physical editing.
It was a show . A real show . One we’d made together, one that I was a part of, just as much as he was.
By the end of the presentation, I was a ball of giddy energy, ready to run and find the closest haunted house. So giddy, in fact, that I hardly heard Chloe give us the go-ahead for a full season. The thrill of making something had never felt this thrilling before. It was a good thing I was so ready for it, because we had to pull together another episode in the next week.
I spend the following days at Hayden’s apartment, since he has the better workspace, central AC, and an easily accessible library of resources, from morning until evening. I always arrive with coffee, and we expense takeout while we work all day. I know where things are in Hayden’s apartment now. He keeps the beers in the lower half of the fridge door; flatware is in the drawer beside the sink. The bathroom is always clean, and there is always toilet paper. I have yet to see his bedroom, but I imagine that’s clean, too. Or all the mess is shoved in there.
It’s nearly time to break into the takeout menus for dinner when Hayden asks me to fetch him a book from the shelf. This week’s mission: Who killed JFK? Was it a cover-up, or was it aliens? Or was it aliens and a cover-up? I’m not sure what I buy yet, but the fact that I’d even entertain these ideas is progress.
Some episodes are going to be on location, while others are mostly filmed in studio. Most Skroll shows use a lot of their budget on video and music licensing. Cade used a lot of his getting influencer guest stars on the show. We’ve set aside most of our funds for travel accommodations. For our in-studio episodes, we’ll spend more time on our graphics and editing to make those episodes pop, but driving to Dealey Plaza in Dallas would make us look like tourists and wouldn’t actually enhance the episode.
Hayden’s been looping a play-by-play of the assassination on the TV for an hour, pausing periodically to break down key moments with his laser pointer that support the alien theories he plans to talk about in the episode. I’ve seen the video so many times I’m giving the Warren Commission a run for its money. I’m at least grateful for the poor filming quality of 1963 so I’m not seeing high-definition brain matter every ten seconds.
“The book you’re looking for should be pretty beat up. I got it secondhand. The author’s last name is Haggerty,” Hayden directs from the couch. He’s face down in his laptop, jotting episode notes in one window, writing a script in the other. Today he’s struggling to compile a surplus of information from his four-part podcast series and condense it all into a single half-hour episode.
“But it’s all compelling, Hallie!”
“You don’t understand just how many theories there are!”
“I cannot cut the Magic Bullet segment, Hallie. I just can’t .”
He’s spent most of the day frustrated. I’m learning that a frustrated Hayden typically manifests in his face dropped into books, or his keyboard. He paces, and talks through his frustrations (which I often do not understand, but I listen nevertheless), and sometimes hums the X-Files theme song under his breath.
I can usually make him laugh or distract him.
I can usually humble him by reminding him I have no idea what the fuck he is talking about.
He has so many books in his place and it’s going to take me a minute to find what he’s looking for. The shelves stretch from floor to ceiling and are alphabetized. What kind of man alphabetizes his books?
One I am turned on by, clearly.
The books on his shelf are either well-loved or not acknowledged at all. Some are crisp, with firm covers—likely self-published or a small press, based off the titles. I don’t imagine there’s a wide market appeal for something called Bigfoot and Stonehenge: The True History .
“Good lord, you have a lot to read.” I turn to Hayden.
He smirks, his pencil bitten between his teeth, before it falls and he frowns. “I don’t get bored. To be fair, a lot of people send me books, hoping I’ll promote their work or something.”
“Do you?”
“If it’s good.”
I return to my hunt, hitting the h ’s. Haddock. Hall. Hamilton. Hargrove.
I backtrack.
Hargrove.
I examine the spines, my fingers running over the titles in front of me. I recognize them from school libraries and entire shelves at the bookstore. There are several editions of the same book for select titles, some older and worn, others in special-edition covers. It looks like a whole collector’s shelf.
Tugging one from the bookshelf, I survey the cover. Serpent Who Smiles . I’d read it in high school for a horror unit, and while most other students resorted to SparkNotes, I actually enjoyed it. And then slept with the lights on for a few days. They didn’t call him the Master of Horror for no reason.
I flip to the author photo and bio. The man staring back at me has dark wavy hair and bright green eyes, a youthful handsomeness that I feel like I’ve been staring at like a nine-to-five job lately. My eyes drift above the book to where Hayden sits on the couch. Waves of chestnut hair. Bright green eyes.
“Uh…were you going to mention that your dad is Everett Hargrove?”
Hayden glances up, hunting for his words. Of course, the clues have been here from the beginning. His name, a father who’d gotten him into this stuff, a nice apartment. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. It’s not a detail he advertises. When I’d first looked Hayden up, I hadn’t scoured the internet too deep. There’s no mention of his father in his bio for The Out There .
He swallows. “You never asked.”
Our eyes meet. The same solemn clouds linger in the room with us as when he mentioned his mom at the Roosevelt. His mentions of family have been so scant I never thought to fill in the blanks. Come to think of it, he hasn’t mentioned much of anyone . He sure talks about historic members of the FBI and CIA like he knows them personally, but he hasn’t mentioned any friends or romantic partners.
I wonder if, in a way, he’s like his own kind of cryptid. Isolated. Elusive. Something that takes some hunting to learn about.
“I guess not.”
“Did you not…Google me? How did you find my email if you didn’t?”
“I…” Something in his tone doesn’t sound pleased, and if it’s something I could have Googled, how could he blame me for uncovering it now? “I just looked up The Out There , and it went right to your website. Your website is very informative. I didn’t feel a need to go to your Wikipedia page or anything.”
Now I’m wondering what is on there. Does he have a “Personal Life” section? Controversies? I’ll have to find out later.
“Oh. I guess I figured you knew.”
“It makes sense. I see how having the Master of Horror for a dad would get you into all of this.” I gesture to the wall of odd books behind me. When Hayden doesn’t have anything to follow up with, I search for my next line. “Your dad’s a great writer.”
“Was.”
Was. Past tense yet again. When any famous person dies, the internet floods with loving sentiments and acknowledgments of the gravity of their work. When the Master of Horror died several years ago, every writer I knew had something to say.
For all those people who’d been inspired by his work, who felt like they knew him through the pages of his books, it didn’t compare to how well Hayden knew him. My throat dries as Hayden stands up and paces across the room to me. He leans against the bookshelf, arms crossed in front of his chest. His breathing’s heavier but controlled. I don’t know how to read his emotions now. It looks like right now, the wound is still held together with shoddy stitches, ready to tear open.
“Hayden, I’m so sorry.”
His lips tighten, and he shrugs. “Thanks.”
I thumb through the titles on the shelf. He must have a copy of every one of his father’s books. It’s hard to tell; there are too many to remember every title. I stop near the end of the row, slipping a hardly touched book from the shelf. Hayden watches in silence as I run my fingers over the jacket of his dad’s final novel, Phantom Lake .
“This one, though. This was my favorite. I read it while trapped in an airport for a whole day during a polar vortex. It was the only thing that kept me from committing a homicide or ending up on the No Fly List.”
His eyebrows rise above his glasses. He adjusts the backward Red Sox hat on his head. “This one?”
“What? You have a least favorite of your dad’s books?”
“Well, no, but…” Finally, he breaks into a smile. It’s tired and half-hearted, but it’s a flash of the Hayden I’m growing to like. “It was the last one. He was so sick by the time it came out, we couldn’t even really celebrate the release. Still a bestseller. Most people don’t want to talk about the content, just that it was his final book. I don’t know. I like to think it was good because he wrote it, not just because he died.”
“Was The Out There his idea?”
“Kind of.” Hayden shifts in front of me, rubbing the back of his neck. My eyes trace along the inside of his bicep. I notice something new about his tattoos each time I study him. Today, it’s a small, odd-looking mermaid swimming in the waves around the ship on his arm. When I look up at him, there are words on his lips, but he’s weighing each of them carefully.
“I got bullied a lot as a kid. I’m sure that’s impossible to imagine.” His voice breaks off into a teasing laugh. As easy as it is to picture him far thinner with his big glasses, I hope anyone who messed with him realizes the kid they shoved around had a serious glow-up. “I was weird and shy and had a hard time making friends. Whenever I came home sad or upset, my dad would plan something for us to do that weekend. He’d rent a cabin in the woods for just the two of us and we’d go on these monster hunts.”
He slides his glasses over his hat, and it feels like a curtain rising before a Broadway show. He’s allowing himself to be on display. But this is not the quirky personality behind the microphone at all. Off mic and off camera, Hayden has a quiet presence. For all his height and muscle, he’s never once intimidated me.
“Now, of course, I know he was full of shit on a lot of these hunts. He’d tell me to be on guard for the Pope Lick Monster up in the woods of Massachusetts—”
“Absolutely foolish of him. Everyone knows the Pope Lick Monster—” I jest, leaning against the bookshelf with him.
“Resides in Kentucky,” Hayden glares, holding back a laugh.
“Of course.”
“But I didn’t know that when I was ten. It was the one time I felt like I wasn’t so weird after all. He always knew what I needed without me ever having to ask.” He twists at the watch around his wrist. “The podcast wouldn’t exist if not for him.”
“And we wouldn’t be here if not for him either.”
“Yeah.” This is the first I’m hearing about Hayden’s life outside of The Out There , and I want more. I want to understand everything about him because I’m constantly shocking myself with how much I’m liking every part of him. We couldn’t be more different, and yet…
The look in his eyes tells me he wants to say more too, but he doesn’t know how.
“So, how’d you go from hunting the Licking Guy to running a podcast?”
Hayden frowns. “Licking Guy makes him sound so nonconsensual. Eight years ago, when he first got sick, it was just the two of us. After their divorce, my mom moved to San Francisco with her new husband, so…We had this old brownstone in Boston that we lived in to be close to the hospital there. He had the LA apartment for when he came out here to work with his film agent. I was just starting college and I skipped the dorm experience so I could take care of him.”
“When you were eighteen?”
“Nineteen,” he corrects.
It’s still so young to give up the most exploratory years of life to care for someone else. It’s a sacrifice not many would make. It isn’t a sacrifice many could make.
“It’s still a lot.”
He toys with the bottom of his shirt, picking at a loose string. Today’s T-shirt is worn baby blue with two crows and the caption “Attempted Murder.” “ALS isn’t an easy way to die, but he made it for five years. I needed a job that let me work from home, so I did other audio engineering jobs remotely—student films, indie albums—until I started the podcast. I was only ever away from home for a few hours at a time near the end. I could always pause recording if he needed something.”
Hayden says it like it’s nothing. He says it with the same obviousness as when he talks about his more confident theories. There’s no doubt in his voice when he says it was the clear and easy choice to be at his dad’s beck and call.
“I’m sure he really appreciated having someone there to help him.”
“Yeah.” Finally, he breaks into a shy smile, rolling his eyes. “He’d always tell me to go out and have fun. Go to parties, fool around…do normal kid stuff. He’d threaten to hire temporary caretakers so it got me out of the house. It was like he hoped that, one day, I’d come home a drunk mess or get caught smoking pot.”
“Did you?”
“Not really. I mean, I’d occasionally take a night off to go out for drinks or spend time with my girlfriend. Even then, I was always waiting for my phone to ring in case a nurse would need me to explain something or something would go wrong. I never wanted to do anything that made it hard to switch gears if I had to.” Hayden’s glasses slide back onto his face. “So, sadly, no passing around a dirty bong in someone’s basement.”
“You weren’t missing much,” I assure him, but it doesn’t make up for years of time given entirely to someone else. Time he won’t get back. “It takes a strong person to do what you did. Your dad was lucky to have such a good kid.”
“I was lucky to have such a good dad,” is all he says.
“Do you think he’d approve of the direction the show is taking?”
He allows a crinkle of a smile to pass between us. Then he steps closer. “He’d approve of whatever made me happiest, so yeah, I think he’d like this. I think he’d like you, too.”
“Even if I don’t buy the spooky shit?”
He is so close, and I feel the same smothering sensation I felt in the hotel bar. It’s like drowning. His gaze just pulls me deeper underwater, and my heart races as he studies me. The silence is stifling.
He clears his throat. “Even if you don’t buy the spooky shit.”
I pass Hayden the copy of Phantom Lake , and he slips it back into place on the shelf just beside my head. He doesn’t back away just yet, leaning against the bookshelf and glancing down at me. My gaze flicks to his mouth as he bites on his bottom lip, then moves lower over his shoulders and biceps. I’m desperate to know if he’s thinking the same things as me—what my hair feels like between his fingers, what my lips taste like, what his body would feel like against mine. I’m just as terrified as I am hungry for what comes next. Just as I imagine what his hands would look like exploring my body, he jolts.
“Ow!”
A sad mewl comes from the floor, and Cthulhu’s fangs unhook from the bottom of Hayden’s jeans. I never anticipated getting cockblocked by a cat named Cthulhu, but “unexpected” is how I’d describe most parts of my life lately.
“That was super rude,” Hayden lectures the cat. “I feed you.”
We break apart as if none of this happened. Electricity fizzles out of the air, and Hayden snatches the book I was supposed to be hunting for before we got sidetracked. I dart back to the couch, feeling flushed and thinking that maybe watching the JFK assassination repeatedly will push these thoughts out of my brain. I put my head in my notebook, steadying my breathing before he speaks again. “And thanks.”
I look back up. “For?”
Hayden leans against the edge of the couch, flipping through book pages. I catch a subtle shake to his hands. Is that because of me? I look at my own hands. We match. “Listening.”
The word feels so heavy between us. Everything in my composure shrinks like a balloon deflating. I linger on how young he looks now. The beard makes him look a touch older than twenty-seven usually, but I don’t see that today. I see someone who gave up all their young adult years for someone else, whose late college nights weren’t just cramming for exams, but were filled with hospital trips and being ready to wake up and help at all times. Someone who’s completely selfless.
“Of course.”
“I don’t talk about it much, so sometimes it’s nice to…tell someone. There isn’t always someone to listen.”
It’s an admission in its own way, one I know Hayden doesn’t take lightly. What he’s said is far easier than admitting he’s lonely. His gaze hovers on me as I chew on his words.
“I learn a lot about people I don’t know from you, but it’s actually really nice to learn about you .”
Finally, it’s like we can both breathe again. Hayden’s eyes drift to the TV, where JFK is seconds away from being taken out by a “magic bullet.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet,” Hayden says.
The Out There
Episode #2: “The Magic Bullet Is Not a Blender”
On this week’s episode of The Out There , Hayden and Hallie dive into the JFK assassination. They break down the facts and the theories, from plausible to preposterous. Was it a lone extremist who killed the president, or something else?
HAYDEN
One of the more creative theories is that JFK was killed by the CIA.
HALLIE
That’s not that creative. See? I’m learning. There’s a “the CIA did it” theory behind almost everything.
HAYDEN
Sure, but the “why” is the creative part, and I’m not sure you’re going to buy it.
HALLIE
Try me.
HAYDEN
So in 1947—which is coincidentally the same year as the Roswell crash—President Truman established a secret organization of scientists and government officials and stuff to investigate UFOs. It was called Majestic 12, or MJ-12 for short. There were twelve people.
HALLIE
If there weren’t, they are super bad at naming things.
HAYDEN
In October of 1963, MJ-12 issued a letter to the members discussing some questions that “Lancer”—JFK’s Secret Service code name—had been asking that weren’t going to fly. They referenced a phrase—“it has to be wet.”
HALLIE
Gross?
HAYDEN
It means to kill.
HALLIE
Somehow, “kill” sounds better. The CIA is out here like, “we love when things are moist.”
HAYDEN
No one loves when things are moist. Well, okay…there are some times where it helps, but…
HALLIE
Have I told you today that I hate you yet?
HAYDEN
No, actually.
HALLIE
So, we’re moistening up the president. Go ahead.
HAYDEN
A month after the moistening, JFK was dead. The theory is that JFK was asking questions about UFOs and aliens and was planning to share what he knew with the Soviet Union. So…they killed him.
HALLIE
Why in the hell would JFK want to give info to the Soviet Union? How does that help anybody? He missed the whole Cold War unit of my sophomore year, clearly.
HAYDEN
Yeah, he must have been out sick that day.
HALLIE
What does JFK gain from buddying up with the Soviets?
HAYDEN
I bet the MJ-12 asked the same question. Then they decided to kill him.
HALLIE
Do you personally believe this?
HAYDEN
I find it compelling.