Page 123 of Theoretically Straight

“Sorry,” I mumble sheepishly. “Old habits.”

“No sweat,” he insists. “So, do you have any questions for me about what we’re going to discuss?”

I shake my head. “No, I think I’m good.”

“Great! I’ll just stick to those questions, then, if that’s okay with you.”

“Yep, sounds good.”

“One minute!”

Hudson claps his hands together. “Excellent—you’re going to be great! And again, this isn’t live, so if we need to do a retake, it’s okay.”

I turn to look at Caleb again—just one more time to calm my nerves—when another familiar face catches my eye instead.

There, standing in between Caleb and Harrison is a shorter woman with olive skin and dark, wavy hair bundled up in a massive red puffer jacket. She catches me staring, so she smiles and waves at me.

No way.

I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m not hallucinating.

Mom?

“Thirty seconds!”

I stare back at her, dumbfounded.She came.

My parents have known about this interview for weeks. They were aware of it even before The Pumpkin Fair Disaster and all the fallout that directly followed. I never directly invited them to watch the interview because they’ve never expressed any real interest in Triple H or my videos before, so why would they care?

I definitely did not invite Dad. We’re still not on the best of terms. It’s certainly better than it was at the beginning—he’ll actually look at me now, and we’ve made small talk a time or two over the past couple of weeks—but neither of us seems ready to reconcile, and I’m mostly at peace with that.

Even though Mom and I are getting along far better than Dad and me, I don’t remember asking Mom to come tonight. She knew I was excited about it, but she never gave any indication that she planned on showing up. Maybe Grace told her to come. Grace wasn’t able to get out of her shift at Cathy’s tonight, but maybe she convinced Mom to go on her behalf? But why? No one outside of the Triple H crew is allowed to film or record any of this, so…what difference would it make?

Did Mom just come because…she wanted to?

“Ten seconds!”

Maybe Mom is here because she wants to be. She’s here to support me.

“Five, four–”

Because, despite everything that’s happened, she really loves me.

“Salutations, Haunties,” Hudson begins, and I quickly shift my attention back to him. “It’s your good friend, Hudson, back with another tale of high strangeness for you! We’re here in a little town in Georgia that you all might remember from a few weeks ago called Specter!”

I take a steady breath, trying to subtly straighten my posture and pretend that I wasn’t about to start crying about my mother when I’m supposed to be participating in an interview with my celebrity idol.

“You may also recall that a certain TikTok garnered a lot of Haunties’ attention because the user really captured something incredible down in the basement of Saint Catherine of Bologna Catholic Church. As soon as I watched the video, I just knew I had to fly down to Georgia to check it out for myself! But while the team discussed whether or not we wanted to do another episode on this habitat, we received a message from that TikTok user, and it turns out he’s a fellow Hauntie! So here we are on the grounds of Saint Catherine’s, getting ready to do some good old Triple H exploration! But before we get into that, I’ve got our viral videographer Theo here to talk to us for a bit about his experience here all those weeks ago.”

I give the camera a slight wave and a shy smile before turning my attention back to Hudson.

“Thanks for agreeing to come on the show, Theo!”

“Of course! Thank you for having me.”

“So, let’s jump right into it! Tell us how you came to be in the basement of Saint Catherine’s on that fateful night!”

“Well, my friends and I had just listened to the Saint Catherine’s episode the night before, so we wanted to come check it out for ourselves. Specter doesn’t get noticed much, so it was extra exciting for us. We had heard rumors about this place being haunted, but we’d never been, so we figured we would try to do one of the haunted tours. The guide wasn’t taking us down to the basement as part of the tour, so I kind of ventured off on my own to see if I could capture anything.”

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