Page 19 of Theoretically Straight

“What are you doing down here?”

I’m still trying to catch my breath as my brain finally registers that I vaguely recognize this guy from school. He’s one of the ones Elise saw at the pizza place.“He’s the cute curly-haired boy I had a crush on in ninth grade before I found out he was gay.”Crap, what is his name?

“I could ask you the same thing. Did you follow me?”

“I saw some movement, and I, I thought it might be… something else.”

“Something else?” I repeat, raising an eyebrow as I study him for a moment. “What, like a ghost or something?”

He shrugs. “Maybe.”

Then it hits me. “Are you a Triple H fan?”

“Yeah, actually. It’s the only reason we came in the first place.” Even in the darkness, I can see his face light up with an enthusiastic smile, which instantly makes me grin back at him. The pale backlight from my phone screen casts shadows across his features as he leans closer, and something about his smile excites me.

“Cool, me too! So, you can probably guess what I’m doing,” I raise my phone to show him the camera is still open, ready to record.

“You’re trying to record a ghost? On your phone?”

I nod eagerly. “Or a demon, or just… Anything weird, you know? Can you imagine the views?”

“On what? TikTok?”

Uh oh. I know what’s coming. The mocking, the condescending “TikTok is trash” comments, the disdain that people have when I express that I care about something as trivial as TikTok. I nod a little less eagerly this time, bracing myself.

“That’s a great idea! With the right shot, you’ll totally go viral!”

Oh.That’s…different.

“Do you have anything so far?”

I blink a few times, trying to recover. “Oh, uhh–yeah, nothing yet. I just got here, but I think we need to head that way, right?” I gesture towards the main hallway. “That’s where the fire started.”

Curly-haired boy looks at me incredulously, his eyes glimmering in the phone light. “How do you know your way around this place?”

I glance down at my phone, suddenly feeling nervous again. “My friends and I did our research ahead of time. We knew the tour guide wasn’t going to let us down here.”

“Nice, that’s smart,” he says softly, still sounding impressed. “You really planned this whole thing out, didn’t you?”

Once again, I just nod. Something about him makes me more nervous than usual. Maybe it’s because he’s a stranger, and even though he’s being extremely nice and maybe even supportive, I have no way of really knowing his intentions.

Or, more likely, it’s probably because I’m in the restricted basement of an extremely creepy and possibly haunted old church, literally hunting for ghosts. It’s a mystery.

“Oh, I’m Caleb, by the way. You’re Theo, right?”

I look back up at him in surprise. He knows my name? Should I have known his?Crap.“Yeah, I’m Theo.”

“Cool, let’s go catch ourselves a ghost!”

Stumbling around in the dark basement of a haunted church with a cute boy is not how I saw my Saturday panning out, but hey, I’m not complaining. Even if the boy is impossibly straight.

“The fire started near here,” Theo says, pointing down a narrow corridor that branches off the main hall. He holds his phone up higher so the light shines farther. “The blueprints we found said these were the classrooms.”

“You looked up blueprints?” I ask, mimicking him and raising my phone over my head to illuminate the dusty space. “You aren’t messing around, are you?”

Theo shakes his head. “Nope. I want this more than anything. I mean, come on, man. How dope would it be if we capture something? If we get enough views, Hudson may even ask us to be on the show.”

“That would be insane. He’s literally my favorite. I’ve been watching him since middle school when he was just making videos about urban legends. If I got to meet him, or hell, get the chance to talk to him, I’d probably pass out. Not to mention he’s, like, so hot–” I catch myself, biting down on my lip. “Sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about that.”

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