I woke up the next morning (night? I honestly had no idea what time it was, but it honestly felt like I’d gotten the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had) to the sound of someone banging on my door. I opened my eyes lazily, taking a moment to remember why I was in a mostly monotone room. I pushed myself off of the memory foam mattress unwillingly and headed toward the door.
On the other side stood Caitlin, looking more excited than I’d ever seen her. “It’s a hit!” she nearly yelled.
“What’s a hit?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I was trying to recall the last night, but it was like it was all done in a half-asleep haze. Probably because that’s exactly what happened.
I saw the ghost in the car. We watched the video. We posted the video. I stayed up with Luke and Liam for a bit while they monitored the response, until eventually Liam had walked me to my room because he said I looked like I was dead on my feet. That’s what happened.
“The video!” Caitlin enthused. “Or, I guess I should say, you’re a hit! I’ve been reading through the comments all morning, and this is officially the most comments that we’ve ever gotten in the first twelve hours. And reading through, almost all of them are positive! The audience loves the drama of having one person who can actually see ghosts, and they seem to love you as a character! At this point, I don’t think we’d have any problem selling you as a permanent member of the team!”
Slightly down the hallway, a door cracked. “Any chance you could keep it down, Cait,” Liam said. He looked slightly worse for the wear than he had last night - there were dark circles under his eyes, and his hair had gone from stylishly unkempt to standing up haphazardly. I hated to admit it, but he was still pretty handsome that way. “Some of us were up until pretty late, making sure we didn’t get flooded with trolls.”
“And some of us were up early to check the status of our newest video,” she chimed back in a sing-song voice. “And I’m delighted to say that Andi here is a hit!”
“No shit,” he said, running his hand over his face. “If they didn’t like her, I would have been having serious concerns about our audience.”
“Well, you never know what our audience will believe and what they won’t,” she reminded him. “Telling them that someone is a psychic is a big ask, but they seem to have gone along with it. That said, we definitely have some work we need to do if we want to make her a permanent member of the team. We may need to change up the optics for the next video, especially if we’re planning on dropping the video with Circe before it.” I felt the weight of her stare as she looked me up and down, as though she was trying to examine every inch of me from the audience’s perspective. “The goth look really helps a lot, considering it fits the vibe of what we’re going for,” she said after a moment, “but there’s a definite nervous energy about you that our audience picked up right away, and that has a subset of them questioning if you’re ready to do ghost hunting yet.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“I’ve been ghost hunting my entire life,” I reminded her.
“Plus, it was her first time on the channel,” Liam pitched in. “It can be disconcerting to see all of the cameras, especially if you’ve got the pressure of a channel that already has millions of subscribers.”
“And we all know that,” Caitlin said, “but our audience doesn’t. Admittedly, that’s mostly our fault,” she said, giving me a little sympathetic smile. “We didn’t do a great job explaining the situation after all, so you just seem like a rando who wandered onto the set and is trying to get their 5 minutes of fame. We can’t really do anything about that, though - if we try to add that into a video now, they’re going to think we’re covering for her instead of being sympathetic.”
“What if we did a TikTok about it?” Luke suggested.
“Hmmm…maybe?” she said. “When we get on location, we can film a little introduction that explains that you’ve seen ghosts forever and that we invited you on the show, and maybe that will help. Although there’s probably going to be a fair amount of hate in general. The audience hates any woman who comes onto the channel.”
“They don’t hate you,” Liam argued.
“I’ve been here since the beginning, so I don’t count,” she countered. “Plus, I have absolutely no chemistry with either of you, so I’m safe for the people who want to pretend that they’ve got some shot with you even though you’ve never met.” Caitlin looked to me and then her eyes flicked to Liam. More specifically, they flicked to how close we were standing. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the same can be said for you, so you might get some additional hate from that. It’s an unfortunate truth about being in the spotlight as a woman.”
“The fans are going to have to get over it,” Liam said.
“Well, good luck telling them that, I suppose,” Caitlin said. “I wouldn’t want to be on the losing end of the battle for anything.” Her eyes focused on mine, intense yet sympathetic. “I sure how you don’t have any skeletons in your closet, because those are going to be unveiled in moments.”
“Well, I don’t know if we could think of a better welcome to the team than a light threat,” Liam said with a weak smile. “We’re still glad you’re here, though. Seeing ghosts makes this whole thing a lot more interesting. Now, I’m going back to bed, and we can talk about moving your stuff in the morning.”
“Oh, you’re definitely not going back to bed right now,” Caitlin said. “You’re going to get up and start packing, because while you guys have been fooling around, some of us have been working to keep the lights on. If we’re going to keep up this level of hype, we need to be at the airport in two hours.”
“Two hours?” asked Luke. She nodded and turned dramatically to leave. “Fuck.”
“But we haven’t even gotten a chance to do our research about the place!” Liam protested.
“Do you ever?” she asked without even turning back. “We’re going to the Veil of Thorns. You’d best prepare yourselves as much as you can.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Liam said, suddenly sounding more awake than he had moments earlier. Caitlin flipped him off behind her and kept walking, and Liam sighed. “To quote her own description of herself, what a dramatic bitch,” he said.
“Yeah,” Luke agreed, “but that’s exactly what we love about her isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately,” Liam agreed, and we all went to our rooms to pack.