Final Girl by Michelle Schusterman (beach books .TXT) 📕

Dad’s contract.

Relief flooded through me, and I actually laughed out loud. He must have signed it and brought it to the Fright TV meeting this morning. Finally.

I grabbed my coat and headed to the lobby to meet Oscar, feeling ten times better than I had when I’d woken up. No more stress dreams about Dad leaving P2P and making us move back to Ohio. Maybe I’d actually get some decent sleep tonight.

The Montgomery apartment building took up almost half a block and loomed high overhead, all sparkling white stone and gray marble gargoyles. A doorman stood stiffly at the entrance, pulling the gold-and-glass door open after we gave him our names.

“The Coopers are expecting you.”

“Holy . . .” Oscar trailed off, gazing around the lobby. “I knew they were rich. But I didn’t know they were this rich.”

I shoved my hands into my coat pockets. “Maybe because Jamie and Hailey don’t, you know . . .” I stopped as a woman descended the grand staircase at the far end of the lobby. She looked like she was on her way to a photo shoot: thigh-high leather boots, gray sweater dress, and a dark yellow cloak with an almost laughably enormous hood. Oscar and I watched her cross the lobby, the heels of her boots clacking loudly.

“Because they don’t look like that?” Oscar finished.

“Yeah. I bet their mom does, though.” Over two weeks in New York, and we still hadn’t met Jamie and Hailey’s mother. Apparently, being the editor-in-chief of Head Turner fashion magazine meant you spent a lot of time traveling and attending fancy events without your kids. Hailey had complained about their parents’ busy work schedules on more than one occasion. Although at least their dad brought them on some of his trips.

Oscar shook his head. “Man, I wish they’d asked us over sooner. We could’ve spent the last two weeks hanging out here instead of at the hotel.”

“Yeah,” I said, pressing the up button on the elevator. Honestly, I’d thought it was kind of weird Jamie and Hailey hadn’t invited us to their apartment until the vlog came up. It was probably just my imagination, but it was almost as if they hadn’t wanted us to see where they lived for some reason.

As we waited, Oscar glanced around and pointed to another elevator on the opposite wall. The door was an ornate brass gate, and instead of a digital panel showing the floors there was a brass sign sticking out just over the doors that said “Floors: 1st to 28th” in old-fashioned script.

“That must be it,” he said. “The haunted one.”

It had been Hailey’s idea to record the next episode of our vlog, Graveyard Slot, in her own building. She swore the manually operated elevator the building’s owners had kept during renovations was haunted by the ghost of its first elevator operator. Oscar and I had agreed to film here, because it was a good story. And more importantly, all of the other supposedly haunted venues we’d looked into—theaters, bars, hotels—had wanted to charge us a fee to film an investigation there. A really, really high fee.

“Well, yeah,” Mi Jin, the show’s intern, had said when Oscar and I griped to her about it. “You don’t think all the places we’ve filmed just let us do it for free, do you?”

Luckily for us, the manager of the Montgomery, had said yes when the Cooper kids had asked if they could take some video of the building’s elevator for a vlog, free of charge. Then again, you’d have to be a serious miser to charge your tenants to film their own elevator in a place like this. The Coopers’ apartment probably cost thirteen times whatever our rent was for the house in Chelsea.

Oscar and I rode up the elevator in silence. He kept yawning while I checked my backpack for the tripod. I thought about asking if he was still having trouble sleeping, but decided not to. Clearly he was, and I didn’t want to make him cranky right before we filmed. I had enough anxiety of my own to deal with—or at least I would once I turned on my Elapse. Ever since I dropped it in a pool at the site of a residual haunting in Brazil, it had carried the same feelings of nervousness and panic that lingered around that campsite. Not exactly a feature I wanted in a camera, but the Elapse had been a gift from my grandma. And it was the nicest thing I’d ever owned. Even if I could afford a new one—which I definitely couldn’t—I hated the thought of giving up this one.

“Okay, 2206 . . . there it is.” I led the way down the hall, suddenly nervous for a whole other reason. I knew Mr. Cooper wasn’t home because of that meeting at Fright TV . . . but what if Mrs. Cooper was here? I knew exactly two things about Jamie and Hailey’s mom: She worked in fashion and she hated Ouija boards. Which pretty much guaranteed there was no way she’d like me.

Not that I should care. But Jamie and I were . . . well, friends. Friends who went on dates. Had he told his mom about that? What if he introduced me as his girlfriend? I wasn’t, at least not yet . . . was I? Did I want to be?

The door flew open, and a woman exclaimed: “Kat! Oscar! So nice to finally meet you!”

I gaped at her. Which was really rude, but I couldn’t help it. This was not how I’d pictured Mrs. Cooper. She was wearing torn jeans and a green flannel shirt. No makeup, no jewelry. She looked young—like, maybe even Mi Jin’s age, although that wasn’t possible. Definitely way younger than Mr. Cooper, though.

And she had brown skin, like me.

That’s what was making my brain short-circuit. Because my mom and grandma were white, and I’d been on the other side of this situation a hundred times. Watching people blink in polite confusion, looking back and forth between us, trying to work out if we were really