Page 82 of Haunted

“You know,” I say slowly, “that is a very good question. And the honest answer is that I think the camera became the person I talked to. The viewers, the people who listened. And the comments under my videos were my conversations.”

The auditorium is very quiet.

A young woman with acne raises her hand. “You called India home. But you’re here now. Where is home?”

I think of Lance’s apartment. The roses on the windowsill. The spices in the cabinet. The way he checks on the flowers every few minutes, like he can’t believe they’re real.

“Home is where you wish you were when things are bad,” I say, “and where you wish you were when things are great.” I pause. “And that isn’t always tied to a place.”

The young woman smiles. “Do I take it you’ve got a person you call home, then?”

And I smile back. “You’ll have to subscribe to the channel to find out.”

The room laughs. “Next question, please.”

I field the rest of the questions on autopilot. The students want to talk about algorithms and monetization and brand partnerships and platform responsibility, and I answer all of it with the competence of a man who has been doing this for nine years and could do it in his sleep. I don’t care what impression I make. I just want to get through it. Afterwards, I sit quietly while Ryan Otto tells us brand partnerships and the optics of creating the right digital footprint. The class is noticeably cooler to him. I start doodling on the back of the notes Lance made me print out.

“You okay?” I ask Ryan in an undertone as we pack up. “They didn’t seem to be as engaged with you.”

He smiles at me. “You told them, It’s okay to have an adventure. I told them, don’t be stupid on the internet,” he says. “Mine’s the vegetables. Yours is the dessert. I might need to change up my presentation for Saturday.”

“They came after me, too. And good luck reviving your…tank dude.” I collect my things and stand up, scanning the crowd for Roger, but he’s already gone. It disappoints me a bit, because for a moment, I was starting to imagine myself as a local here. Someone with friends, or at least acquaintances, that I bumped into from time to time.

I’ve spent nine years building a life that fits in a backpack. Every six months, I packed up and moved to a new country because a visa told me to. I called it freedom. I called it adventure. I built a brand around it and made enough money to keep going, and I never once asked myself: going where? Toward what? And the one time I tried to make my visa into something permanent, it backfired.

I sit on a bench and look at the campus and think about what it would mean to stop running. Not to go back to being Parker Bishop—that boy is gone, and good riddance—but to be Jonny Bishop in a place where people still remember Parker’s name.

But I’m not seventeen anymore.

What would it mean to stop running? To have a kitchen with my spices in the cabinet and roses on the windowsill and a man who comes home at six and needs to be fed and loved and occasionally told to stop being a Marine?

It’s a different life than the one I’ve spent ten years preparing for. And I don’t know, honestly, if I can fit myself into the space Lance Broussard has been holding open all this time. The ordinary life is the one thing I was never built for, and it’s the only thing Lance has ever wanted. Jonny on the Spot has no job history, no skills, no education. He wasn’t built to survive extended contact with the everyday world. And if anything breaks the illusion for Lance Broussard, it’s going to be the moment he wakes up and realizes that I am, and have always been, a ghost.

Chapter twenty-nine

Lance

Jonny is in the bedroom when I get home, unpacking the last of his stuff from Shelley’s. His smile lights the room and I have to lean on the doorframe to steady myself, because the sight of this man putting his clothes into my drawers is something I have imagined so many times that seeing it in the flesh feels like a hallucination.

Then he unzips a suitcase, and it’s all I can do not to sink to my knees in horror at the shittiest packing job I’ve ever seen. I watch, mute, as he grabs bundles of underwear and drops them into the drawer I’ve cleared out.

“You can’t bear this, can you?” he says, carelessly flinging an odd sock on top of his boxers.

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I say, but my voice comes out strangled.

He laughs and stops taunting me. “You want to do it for me?”

“Oh, thank God.” I fall upon the suitcase like a hungry animal at a buffet table. “There’s a trick to this,” I say, picking up a pair of his underwear. I take him through the basics of folding according to regulations. “See? It takes up almost no space now.”

“That was the least sexy handling of my underwear I’ve ever seen,” Jonny says.

“It’s not supposed to be sexy,” I say.

“Isn’t it?” He drops his voice and takes another piece of clothing out without looking at it. It’s a pair of pants. “Try with these.”

I grab them out of his hand, trying to maintain my dignity and not laugh. He leans over and kisses me mid-fold. “I missed you,” he whispers. “Sometimes when I was lonely, I would think of you and imagine that I had gotten your email.”

“What would you have written?” I whisper.