“I suck at this,” I said quietly.
Dad smiled. “Nope. Pretty much the opposite, actually. You did a great job.”
“Maybe with the research,” I admitted. “But I’m talking about being on camera. I hate it.”
“You might hate it,” Dad said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean you’re bad at it.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I guess we’ll find out when this goes online. Can you, um . . .” I fixed my gaze on my shoes, my face growing warm. “Can you make sure Jess edits out that thing I said about, um . . .”
“I will.”
“Thanks,” I said to my feet. Dad didn’t say anything else, and I had the feeling he was waiting to see if I wanted to talk about it. A few seconds passed with nothing but the sound of Oscar talking in the background. Then I blurted out:
“Aren’t you mad that Mom’s already getting married again?”
Dad exhaled like he’d been holding his breath forever. “No,” he said at last, and I looked up.
“Seriously?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my voice.
He smiled. “Okay, truth? I was. I was hurt, and I was mad. But I’m not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because, I . . .” Dad hesitated, gazing out over the cemetery. “I wouldn’t trade this adventure you and I are on for anything. And I want your mother to be happy, too. Once I realized that, there was no point in feeling hurt and mad anymore. Does that make sense?”
I nodded, because my throat was too tight to respond. It did make sense. It really did.
But I was still hurt. I was still mad. And maybe it made me a terrible daughter, but I still didn’t want to be a part of my mother’s wedding.
CHAPTER THREE THE LETHAL BITE OF THE INTERNET TROLL
Post (draft): Flavia and Ana Arias
Publish? Yes/No
“JUST publish it already, for the love,” Oscar pleaded. Instead, I moved the cursor over to the video again.
“I just want to watch it one more time.”
He moaned loudly, but stopped the second it began playing. I had to admit, Jess and the others had done an amazing job editing our video. It started out with about half a minute of exploring the cemetery while one of Flavia Arias’s songs, a slow, haunting ballad, played in the background. My explanation of her story came next. We’d watched this video seven times already, but my stomach still squirmed uncomfortably when I suddenly appeared on the screen. (Flash! Sickening Strapless.)
Of course, I wasn’t actually wearing a dress. Video-me wore a new T-shirt Grandma had bought me the day after Thanksgiving: black, with Frankenstein Say Relax in neon green. The letters kind of glowed in the dark.
I didn’t look nearly as nervous as I remembered feeling, either. And I did sound like I knew what I was talking about, so that was cool. The Ouija part came next, and Oscar leaned forward, watching himself so intently, I almost laughed.
Jess had edited out the part where I’d started talking about my mother, thankfully. Pretty much everything else was there. The video switched angles a few times, then stayed on Mi Jin’s overhead shot when the planchette started flying around the Ouija board. I had to admit, it did look legit.
The last part was Oscar speculating about what the message from Ana could mean. “She loved her mother’s songs, but she hated the fame that came with them,” Oscar said, looking straight into the camera. “‘I want out’ doesn’t make much sense as some sort of message from her ghost . . . but it could be an echo of her consciousness. On the next episode of Passport to Paranormal, we’ll be investigating the site of a residual haunting. This message from Ana could be something similar. Stay tuned to Kat’s blog for more about where we’re filming next, here in Salvador. And if you have any theories about Ana Arias, we’d love to hear about them in the comments!”
As much as I hated to admit it, Oscar’s weird reporter voice worked. He was really charismatic on camera, especially compared to me. It made me even more self-conscious. (Not that I’d ever tell him that.)
“That was my idea, to plug the next episode at the end of the video,” Oscar said. “Jess loved it.”
I pressed my lips together. “I know. You told me last night. Twice.”
“I heard her telling Roland that she changed her mind about us,” Oscar went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “She thinks Fright TV is right, that adding us is really going to help the show.”
“Somehow I doubt Roland agrees,” I said, touching the trackpad on Dad’s laptop. “Okay, here we go.” I clicked Yes, and a second later, a new post appeared on my blog. “Ugh. It’s up.”
Oscar finally tore his gaze from the screen and looked hard at me. “Seriously, Kat,” he said. “Why do you hate this so much? It’s not like you to get freaked out about . . . well, anything.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a photographer. I just like being behind the camera, not in front of it.” There was more to it than that, but I didn’t know how to explain the way my skin crawled when the cameras were filming me, like my skeleton was ready to leap out of my body and make a run for it. “Anyway, why do you like it so much? You’re way more into this than I thought you’d be.”
Oscar’s eyes flickered to the screen. “It’s just . . . it’s fun, that’s all.” He clicked the refresh button and scrolled down to the comments, which still said 0.
“We literally published it ten seconds ago,” I told him with a grin. “I’m thinking people will want to actually watch it before they leave comments.”
“We should put a link in the P2P forums!” Oscar said suddenly, pulling the laptop closer. “I’ll do that right now.”
I got to my feet and grabbed a pen
