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Chapter Four
I spent the following day thinking hard about Michelle’s
reaction to my new found interest in the paranormal. We had the
coveted “best friends since kindergarten” label that girls always read
about in books or saw in movies but couldn’t actually maintain.
She’d always been supportive of anything I did, even when I decided
not to go away to school so I could stay home and make money to
help out my dad. But now that I was standing up in the face of
something she knew terrified me, rather than being happy and
encouraging me, she was being overly cautious.
Granted, ghost hunting wasn’t exactly the same as school or
a job, and not that long ago I had been reacting the same way to it.
But if I was telling her that it was okay, then she should have trusted
me. I had never done anything overly stupid in the entire time she
had known me, which was a good three quarters of our lives. I mean,
sure, there had been the one time I smoked because my longtime
crush Aidan Jenkins offered it to me. And there were other times
when I had a little too much to drink at a football game and spent
the rest of the night puking at her house. But those were honest
mistakes that probably ninety percent of kids will fall for at some
point. For the most part, I had always been smart and level-headed
and capable of making my own decisions.
In retrospect, maybe it was the opposition that pushed me to
text Tucker. Maybe I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t need
anybody’s approval. Ghost hunting was interesting to me and I
wanted to learn more about it. And all I had to do was type, “Hey,
when can I come along for an investigation?” and send it his way.
Rather than texting me back, he called me up about half an
hour later when the store was empty and told me that his group had
a local investigation scheduled for Friday night. I was welcome to
tag along because he was in charge of it. Normally on a Friday night
I would have been working the late shift at the theater, but since
Thursday was a midnight release of a major superhero blockbuster,
my schedule had switched a little. I had the green light to go.
“Count me in.”
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