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 her 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
