Page 35 of Meet Cute Reboot

“He’s telling the truth,” I say.

“If you don’t mind...” Luke angles my front-facing camera toward the ground. “I don’t want them to see my house.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I record our feet as we walk up the driveway and around to the back door. We enter through a mudroom that’s occupied by a very large dog.

“This is Korg,” Luke says as the dog eagerly paws my jeans. I crouch and give the audience a good look at Korg’s smoky gray coat and floppy ears. He licks me on the cheek in greeting.

“No, Korg. Bad boy.” Luke grabs the dog’s collar as I stand. He leans into view. “Cassie doesn’t like dogs.”

“I don’t dislike dogs. I just don’t like slobber.” I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand.

“Korg is a slobberer, and he doesn’t care who knows it.”

“Great,” I say and then flash the audience a stiff smile. “Oh. Hi JuJu5. It’s great to see you too. You subscribed?” I raise my free hand to my head. “That’s awesome. Come back and tell me how your first date goes.”

Korg runs into the kitchen, and Luke follows him.

“I’m going to flip the camera around, okay?”

I start recording from my back-facing camera as I enter the kitchen. It doesn’t live up to the house’s promise of grandeur. The cabinets look like they were born in 1980, and the counters are dull with stains here and there. A large island takes up most of the room, a big slab of gray composite that Luke hasn’t bothered to decorate.

“One of your cabinets is open,” I say, but Luke is already on it. He walks over, inspects the hinges. Opens and closes the door. Tries to jiggle it, but it’s firmly attached. “I forgot to tell you about my third ghost that haunts the kitchen. Well, it may only haunt this particular cabinet. I won’t know until I take a sledgehammer to it on demo day.”

As an owner of a ghost tours company, I believe in ghosts. Obviously. However, I don’t believe every story I hear. I require proof. An open cabinet door is not proof.

“I don’t think cabinets can be haunted,” I say.

“This one is. It opens by itself. Byitself,” he repeats to our live audience, leaning forward for emphasis.

“The hinge must be loose.”

“The hinge isn’t loose. C’mere. Feel it.”

I walk over, swing the door a few times, shrug. “Maybe it’s warped.”

Luke hogs the camera. “It’s haunted,” he says definitively.

I laugh and take a step back. “You’ll have to get an exorcist in here to give you an opinion.”

“Do they give estimates? Because I may have a dead Civil War soldier and an angry ghost cat in need of rehoming too.”

“You’ll have to ask them,” I say.

Luke gestures to his cabinets like Vana White. “Clearly, the kitchen needs a little work to keep up with the Joneses. I’m thinking white shaker cabinets, quartz countertops, glass tile backsplash. That’s what my interior designer suggested, anyway. Let’s move on to the family room.”

Korg circles my legs as I head to the double-wide doorway leading to the next room. I record everything, including the apparition on the couch that almost makes me toss my phone into the air.

“Mom!” Luke hollers. “Stop doing that. You don’t even have the TV on. What are you doing here?”

“I’m having a vodka tonic. Or two. Or three. Your father called.”

Luke leaps over to me and swipes the phone out of my hand, clicks it off, and then tosses it onto the leather sofa.

“Luke!” I say a little too loudly. My adrenaline is still spiked from the surprise encounter with the ghost of Luke’s mom. “We were doing a Live!”

“Not anymore.” Luke stuffs his hands in his pockets.