Page 1 of Hard to Pretend

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Iwouldbethefirstto admit it. I thought things would change when my best friend, Jonas Koetter, got a serious boyfriend. I thought our group of five would suddenly become a group of six, and that his boyfriend, Silas Morgan, would be at every Thursday night hang out. I worried things would never go back to the way they were before.

I would also be the first to admit how relieved I was to be wrong.

That Thursday, we’d gathered at Goliath. It had been our other best friend’s, Eli Graham, choice of venues, and he claimed that it had been necessary. He’d had a bad day, and he said it was the only thing that would cheer him up. His roommate and the fourth member of our five man crew, Holden Murray, had claimed that Eli was full of shit, but we’d all agreed anyway. Even the quietest member of ourgroup, Matthew Bennett, had been up to a night at Goliath.

The music blared around us as we sipped bottles of beer and caught up on anything that hadn’t made it into the group chat. Given the way we were constantly blowing that thing up, I was always surprised that we ever had anything to talk about. And yet, despite years of friendship, we’d yet to run out of conversation.

That night, Jonas was regaling us with stories about his new apartment.

More specifically, about the fact that he was pretty sure Silas’s apartment, which he’d just moved into, was haunted. He claimed he heard noises in the middle of the night, which Eli was quick to explain away as something with the plumbing or loud neighbors. Holden, on the other hand, was encouraging Jonas’s theories. Matt looked torn between science and superstition. He always wanted to believe in things that couldn’t be explained.

I was less torn. I believed in ghosts, but not the type that haunted houses. I believed in the ghosts that haunted people, memories that you couldn’t let go of and mistakes that kept making their presence known even years later, because the repercussions were ongoing. Jonas and Silas were proof that those kinds of ghosts could be exorcised. I was lucky enough to have very few of those haunting my life.

“Okay, but how do you explain the creaking then?” Jonas asked, issuing another challenge to Eli. “Everynight, middle of the night, we hear creaking in the hallway like someone is walking around.”

“Again, neighbors,” Eli answered without missing a beat. “You said they have a dog? Maybe their dog is walking around.”

“That would come from the ceiling though,” Holden pointed out. He was grinning ear to ear, and his green eyes sparkled with the kind of mischief I’d seen a thousand times before. I doubted that he believed in any of this himself; I think he just wanted to annoy Eli.

Which… valid.

“They’re in another room in bed,” Eli pointed out, turning his head to face his best friend. They were, as always, sitting side by side, closer than anyone else at the table. “I’ve heard you think some noise was coming from the bathroom when it was coming from the neighbors on the other wall when you’re in bed.”

“Or maybewehave a ghost,” Holden suggested, raising his eyebrows.

“You are ridiculous,” Eli muttered. He turned his attention back to Jonas. “You’re ridiculous, too. Ghosts don’t exist.”

“Actually, there’s no proof that they don’t,” Matt piped up. “There’s no proof that they do, but there’s also no proof that they don’t. At most, you can say that you don’t believe in ghosts, but you can’t definitively say they don’t exist without some kind of tangible proof.”

“Have you ever seen one?” Eli questioned.

“I haven’t seen Mount Everest, but I know it exists,” Matt countered. “There are pictures of things that could be ghosts. They could also be lens flares or a spec of dust catching the right light, but saying they don’t exist because you haven’t seen them—”

“Ha!” Holden exclaimed. “Debate your way out of that one.”

Eli looked like he was about to start. I groaned. “Can we please change the subject? Jonas, if you think your apartment is haunted, call whatever the real world equivalent of Ghostbusters is or get to know your new ghost roommate and hope it’s more Casper than Poltergeist.”

“A priest?” Eli suggested.

“A psychic?” Matt proposed.

“A few teenagers with a Ouija board?” Holden tossed out.

“Absolutely not,” Eli, Matt, Jonas, and I all said at once.

“No Ouija boards. My mom wouldn’t even let those things in the house when I was younger. She said if you mess with Ouija boards, you’re welcoming anything into the house.”

“Superstition,” Eli muttered.

“Then why are you so against them?” I shot back.

“I was saying absolutely not to theteenagerswith a Ouija board,” Eli explained. “They alwaysmove the pointer.”

I laughed. Of course that would be Eli’s issue with the proposed solution.

Matt took advantage of the silence to suggest another round. He left the table to get them, and Eli started talking about the next project he was starting at work. He seemed excited about it, even though it sounded like most of the other construction jobs he’d been on.

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