Chapter 9
“So, you’ve stayed in a haunted hotel before, but have you ever stayed on a haunted boat ?”
The Queen Mary looks just like the Titanic : big black hull, tall smokestacks jutting into the cloudless California sky. I’m going to spend the next twenty-four hours pretending I’m some early-twentieth-century socialite, smoking fancy cigarettes and wearing the finest pearls. Mentally, at least. Physically, I’m wearing a pair of jeans, Doc Martens, and Skroll branded knock-off Ray-Bans from last summer’s company barbecue bash because I lost my actual sunglasses early this morning.
Meanwhile, Hayden’s sunglasses are the same shape, yet not ugly and branded. He wears them all too well, and I hate the way his arms flex as he hauls our bags across the parking lot.
“No,” Hayden confirms. “Never a boat. I hope that you provoking the ghosts doesn’t make them sink it on us.”
“Right? There’s totally not enough room for both of us on a door. How do I look?” I ruffle my hair to try and get ready for the camera, and my sunglasses slide off my face yet again.
Hayden pauses like I’ve caught him in a trick question. He censors himself before he can say anything. He bites one side of his lip. Like the night at the Roosevelt, I desperately want to know what he wants to say, but I’m also afraid of what it means.
“Very lovely.”
“Is that sarcasm?” I ask.
“Nope, not one bit.” He spits it out too fast and pivots even quicker, hitting Record on our camcorder. “Tell us where we are, Hallie.”
I spent the car ride memorizing facts about the ship and leaving the spooky stuff to Hayden. I explain a quick history of the ship, from its construction to its time as a troopship in World War II, and then renovation into a hotel as we make our way through the parking lot. We avoid filming other people, but as we step into the elevator, we certainly catch their attention. I can’t imagine why.
We’re a chaotic mess of two overnight bags, a large bag of camera equipment, and Hayden in a shirt that says, “The Birds Work for the Bourgeoisie,” which I do not understand. And I have blue hair. We take a few discreet shots of the lobby, still decorated like it’s from another time. Hayden confirms the room we are staying in—the most notoriously haunted one—and when the concierge raises her eyebrows, he follows up with, “Yes, we really do want the evilest room here.”
Hayden pats my head and assures me he’s making up for disappointing me at the Roosevelt. My hero.
With our keys, we trek down to room B340. The room smells of old carpet and wood, a faint twinge of must and salty sea air. The floors creak under each step as we move inside. Hayden stops dead in his tracks.
“Sorry,” I mutter, rubbing the spot on his back I’ve stumbled into. Hitting him is like hitting a brick wall, and that should not turn me on, but it does. I’m thinking about walking into him while half-dressed, and the touch of his bare chest beneath my fingertips.
Suddenly, his halting makes sense. The room is small , a main cabin with a dresser, a TV hanging from the wall, a small couch, and a very dinky bathroom.
And only one bed.
My lips zip together, eyes darting back and forth from the bed to the couch. There’s no way in hell either of us will fit on the couch, and the thought of sleeping in a bed with him sends a tingle down my spine and a sudden heat to the pit of my stomach.
“Oh,” is all he says.
“Yeah…”
Hayden steps farther into the room, setting our bags on the bed and looking to the couch. “I’ll take the couch. Or the floor or something. It’s no big deal.”
“You don’t have to do that.” I don’t want him to sleep on the scary carpeting or volunteer his spinal health for the cause, but I also worry about what it’ll do to me if we share a bed. It’ll smash the boundary walls I’ve tried to keep up between us.
“We can…figure that out later, I guess.”
“Sure, no need to worry about it yet.”
I can only imagine what the comments on this new video will look like. Based off our first episode, we have a fair number of fans wondering if we are together . Nora read the most entertaining comments at lunch one day, then promptly hunted to see if anyone had written fan fiction yet. I made her promise to never tell me if she finds any.
At the Roosevelt, we’d been in the same room, but not the same bed. Tonight, there’s a chance I’ll know what it’s like to sleep next to Hayden. I’ll feel the mattress move as he breathes or turns over. I don’t know how to cope with the feelings it might bring up. Because despite everything , something keeps drawing me closer to him.
When the Only One Bed shock wears off, we unpack, evaluating our gear and taking the camcorder, EMF reader, and audio recorder with us. We have an appointment to tour the ship at sundown and a bit of time to kill. Hayden and I do our own quick tour, posting photos to our socials that immediately garner more questions about our relationship. Neither of us wants to discuss the shippers.
On our private tour of the boat, we film the history and notable haunts of the Queen Mary and marvel at the gutted insides of the ship, cavernous boiler rooms, and hundred-year-old engineering, and I’m actually enraptured by it.
“I can’t believe that guy got crushed in a door,” Hayden says, recalling one of the tragedies on board we learned about on our tour. He arranges the camera on the tripod in our room. I film him with my phone for some B-roll. “Like, it seems like a bad way to go.”
“If you had to pick a way to die on this ship, how would you want to go?” I tease.
“Peacefully in my sleep, obviously.”
“That doesn’t count. You have to die badly.”
“You weren’t that specific.”
“I am now.”
“Oh, come on,” he groans, sitting beside me on the floor. Our knees brush as he crosses his legs, slipping his boots off. His socks have tiny ghosts on them. Oh heavens, it’s cute. The carpet is rough and tacky beneath my fingers. There is no way I’m letting Hayden sleep on the ground now. Not on this carpet. He will get fleas and bring them home to Cthulhu.
“Your accent’s out again.”
One of his eyebrows rises. “Is it?”
I nod. The harsh a ’s and dropped r ’s flare as we bicker, and I enjoy the lilts his voice offers in his frustrated moments. On the podcast and while we film most of our more straightforward content, he’s managed to cook it down to nothing. When we let loose, it feels like he’s showing me the most authentic parts of himself. Perhaps I like his accent for that reason more than anything else. He also looks criminally good in his Red Sox hats. That may be contributing.
“Is it totally unflattering?”
The fact that he cares sends my stomach flipping.
“No.” I shake my head. “It’s kind of cute, actually.”
We’re silent for a terrible moment before I willingly break the silence by reaching into my duffel bag. That changes the subject real fast. Hayden’s eyes widen like flying saucers, and fear ripples over him. Nothing kills the mood like a Ouija board.
“What is that?”
“We’re going to talk to some ghosties the old-fashioned way,” I cheer as he begins to chant “No, no, no, no.”
“ Hallie, you cannot just whip out a Ouija board like that. You realize you are inviting us to get possessed by a Zozo demon or something.”
“What the hell is a Zozo demon?”
He pushes the box away with a single finger. “You don’t want to know.”
“Whatever, I’ll Google it later.” I unwrap the box, placing the board and planchette down. “Do you want to ask the first question?”
“No,” he spits. “Abso-fucking-lutely not.”
“Fine. Are we rolling?”
“Sadly. This is take one, scene one of ‘Hayden and Hallie’s Found Footage Operation,’?” he says to the camera, clapping to mark the take.
Despite his hesitations, Hayden rests his fingers on the edge of the planchette with mine. His fingertips brush against my knuckles, cool and rough, but enough to set my skin on fire. Instead of brainstorming what I’m going to ask the demons haunting the ship, I’m thinking about Hayden’s hands running up my shirt or his firm grip on my body. I quickly remind myself of unsexy things—people dying of tuberculosis on this boat, how infrequently people bathed back in the day. God, anything to not think about my co-host manhandling me.
“If there are any spirits here with us, which I doubt there are, on account of ghosts being fake, can you make contact?”
Hayden frowns at the Ouija board. A warm spring wind sweeps through the open porthole. My skin flushes as I think about how stagnant it already feels in here. How much worse will it be when we have to share a meager double bed all night?
The planchette does not move (shocking), but no one is going to tune in to see us sitting over a Ouija board I bought on Amazon. The internet demands spicy ghost content. Softly, so softly that Hayden won’t notice, I nudge the planchette toward the “yes” marker on the board.
“It says yes,” I conclude. “In that case, do you have a name?”
“Do not ask its name.”
“Too late,” I say. “What’s your name?”
A horrific noise shudders through the Spirit Box, running beside us. I have no idea what it says, but Hayden scrambles for his notepad. His handwriting is usually legible, blocky, and mostly shorthand (terrifying things only he’d know—CE2K for Close Encounters of the Second Kind, PG Film for the Patterson-Gimlin film).
“How good is your French?” Hayden asks.
“No bueno,” I reply.
“It was definitely a French ghost.”
“Right. Ghosties, can you spell your name for us?”
I rack my brain for any French names. Jacques? Louis? Amélie? I guide the planchette subtly to the j , but Hayden interrupts the process.
“Can you tell us if you died on the ship? Did you die in this room?”
There’s another crackle of life on the Spirit Box. My pinky toe feels uncomfortably cold and I brush it off as pins and needles, but for a brief moment, I do wonder if there is a ghost with a foot fetish in this room with us.
I shoot the planchette over to the “yes.” Hayden gasps.
For someone so smart, he is alarmingly gullible and easy to scare. This is precisely why I cannot let myself believe any of his theories. If I start somewhere, like believing in ghosts, where will it lead me?
One day, it’s ghosts. The next, I am wearing a tinfoil hat and trying to steal the Declaration of Independence.
“Were you a passenger here? A soldier, maybe?” he muses. “I mean, I think I would haunt a place if I died and never got to my final destination. It’d be sad to be a transient ghost. You don’t even haunt a house. You’re just…stuck here.”
“It’s very millennial. Even in death, we can’t get a house.”
“How did you die?” Hayden asks.
“ Nudes ,” the Spirit Box yelps. Hayden sets his pad on the floor.
“Excuse me?”
“Death by nudes,” I say. “Obviously.”
“It could be noodles,” Hayden says.
He flips his pad where he has written “Nudes” and then “Noods?” below it.
“Yes, that is far more acceptable, thank you, Hayden.”
Finally, the fear clinging to him breaks into a laugh. He leans his head against the edge of the bed, scrubbing his hands over his face. He saves these moments for us, cutting them from episodes, usually. He frames himself as a generally cool and determined host, but I like these parts best. There’s no role, no narrative to hide behind. Just Hayden.
“Just once, I want a helpful ghost!”
“Keep looking, dude. They’re not real.”
“They’re real, Hallie. They’re just unhelpful! Are you really not buying any of the stuff we’re finding?” he asks. “ None of it? Of course, there’s nothing groundbreaking yet, but you’re not even starting to warm up to it?”
I purse my lips together. I can’t say I’m a believer yet, but my number of groans per episode has decreased, and I’m happy to play along.
“Nope,” I assert. I have an image to keep up, after all. It’d blow the whole false flag operation wide open if I confessed. But considering I spent the past few minutes moving a planchette around the Ouija board, I’m not buying what we’ve found tonight.
We take EMF measurements around the room and down the hallway before logging off for the night, saving our footage and preparing for bed. I scroll through our social media comments as I lie in bed, liking the positive ones to show engagement . The dark and curious parts of my brain lead me to the Noobie Brothers Instagram page. They have more followers than we do, but as I scroll through the content, they don’t have eager commenters. They mostly have grown men insisting they are playing it wrong, which they are—on purpose, of course. I’d much rather have eager teenagers shipping me with Hayden than gamer dudes leaving angry messages. I hope Skroll sees it the same way.
Hayden emerges from the bathroom, ready for bed, and without any prompting, he leans back on the tiny couch. He attempts to settle himself, tossing a few times, scrunching his legs up, but every position looks highly uncomfortable. In fact, all of this is tragic to watch. This bed is big enough for both of us.
I’m so used to the person next to me feeling like an anchor drowning me that I didn’t want to sleep beside anyone for a long time. But Hayden is different. He feels like an anchor in the good ways—grounding, keeping something where it ought to be, and reassuring me with the knowledge that I won’t go adrift.
“We can share the bed.”
Sleepy, hooded eyes flicker up to me. As always, glasses or not, he can find me. “No, it’s all good. I’ll be fine here.”
“You should be able to get a good night’s sleep. Let the ghosts keep you up, not the back pain. I don’t mind.”
I don’t mind. “Mind” is the wrong word. I am excited, nervous, terrified for what this is going to be like. But I do not mind . After a moment’s consideration, he paws for his glasses on the coffee table and slides them onto his face. Hayden steps into the bedroom and slowly pushes the covers on his side of the bed back. I try not to watch as he eases himself onto his back with a relieved sigh.
“Okay, much better.”
It’ll be fine. It won’t be weird at all. He’s at least wearing pajama bottoms (a grossly cute pair of UFO-print pants) and a T-shirt. Hayden fluffs the pillows behind his head a few times before slipping his glasses off again.
Lying in bed with Hayden now feels strangely intimate. Fresh out of the shower, he smells like his usual musky amber, with a twinge of plain hotel soap, and his hair smells like the generic shampoo in the bathroom (“Lemon verbena!” he’d announced earlier, citing how all hotels had lemon verbena shampoo and it might have been a conspiracy). I can point out every one of the freckles on the bridge of his nose that are almost too light to see, and my fingers long to trace over them.
This will be a game of sleeping as far away from one another as we can, building a pillowed wall between us. The thought of waking up close to him, feeling him breathing, knowing the little sounds he makes in his sleep, will undo me. My entire body shivers at the prospect of warm breath against my back or spending a night falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.
“You good?” he asks.
I nod. Our eyes meet in the middle. He can study the blurred canvas of my face, splotches of blue watercolor in his vision, but he can’t see me studying every angle and feature of his face.
“You know, this show is so much better because of you.”
His words catch me by surprise—they’ve come from nowhere, but after years of feeling insignificant, I don’t know how to respond to something like that.
“Oh?”
“I mean it. I never thought about having a co-host. I love the podcast, but doing it alone isn’t easy. It’s a lot of work, and it’s…isolating. It’s hard to imagine doing this alone now.”
Swallowing the tears in my throat is a valiant task. “Thanks. You built some pretty good stilts to stand on.”
He flashes a tired smile. “I try.”
“Now we just have to hope we don’t run out of monsters to hunt.”
“Fear not, Hallie,” Hayden teases, shutting his eyes. “I am a bottomless pit of weird information, so we’ll be good to keep going for at least another ten years.”
“Good. Ten years of convincing you none of this stuff is real.”
“It’s real,” he sighs.
“All of it?”
His eyes shoot open. “Well, not all of it.”
“Tell me one thing you legitimately don’t believe in. Aside from, like, the shitty theories you just don’t like.”
Hayden faces me. I look at the space between us and where his fingers bunch around the comforter. No one has ever felt so close and so far away before. Like we’re magnets determined to find each other, it takes everything in me to not reach out and touch him.
“I don’t think the moon landing was faked.”
“Huh,” I ponder.
“Do you know how many people it’d take to cover something like that up?”
“A lot—”
“Four hundred and eleven thousand people, to be exact.”
“Excuse me?”
“There was a study done. That’s a lot of people. Think about how hard it is to keep a surprise party under wraps. You couldn’t fake an entire moon landing with that many people involved.”
“On that, we can agree,” I say.
“Cool. I’m going to sleep, then, and I’ll try my luck on some other theories tomorrow. Good night.”
Hayden rolls himself over and flicks off the light. The Port of Long Beach and the moon light the room enough to see the outline of his body beside me. Something rubs against my foot beneath the covers and I jolt away from Hayden.
“Was that you?” I gasp.
“What?”
“Rubbing my foot.”
“ No ? That’d be so weird.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Hallie, I am not playing footsie with you. Maybe it’s a ghost.” Hayden reaches for the EMF reader on the nightstand.
“Please do not pull that thing out right now.”
Hayden grumbles and puts the device down. I itch the space on the side of my foot that I felt the touch on and solemnly slink back into bed. Hayden laughs into his pillow, and as much as I’d love to kick him for finding this funny, I don’t. Instead, I laugh too. Then something sinks in.
“I like how you always say ‘good night’ before we go to sleep.”
The idea of someone wanting to wish me a good night shouldn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy. But when Hayden says it, it does.
“Oh,” he says, but there’s no trace of judgment in his voice. Surprise, yes, but not judgment. He huffs a small laugh. “Then I’ll stick with it. Good night, Hallie.”
“Don’t let the ghosties bite,” I say.
He laughs for real this time, and it feels like being at a sleepover with best friends. It feels like the sort of relationship I’ve always wanted. I’ve always wanted to fall in love with my best friend—a person I’d stay up past my bedtime with laughing at dumb jokes. Rolling over and saying, “Okay, now I’m going to sleep,” only to do the opposite. I want to fall asleep to the sound of his laugh, the waves, the creaking of an old ship.
I don’t want to fall asleep any other way.