“It’s a serious condition, Tony,” Ryan said. “An invisible, debilitating disability that either gets no medical attention or the wrong kind of attention, from childish idiots like you.”
Tony looked chagrined. Uh-oh, I thought. What’s going on there?
“What’s persistent genital . . . ?” I asked.
“Arousal disorder. PGAD. It causes unexplained, spontaneous orgasms that last for hours, days, or even weeks,” Ryan said.
“Sounds awesome,” Tony said.
Ryan gave him a scathing look.
“This is a little different. Allie’s orgasms happen once a day, starting at 2:01 a.m. and running for about twenty minutes,” I said.
Allie groaned and covered her face.
“If you want to be scientific about it, those are the facts,” I said.
“Hypnotism!” Tony said.
“Not that again,” I said.
Tony had been excited a few months back about web videos showing a guy hypnotizing women to have an orgasm when he gave them a keyword. Ryan eventually let Tony try it on her, but it hadn’t worked. Of course.
Or had it? What if Tony had hypnotized Ryan into being interested in him? (Because talk about unexplained phenomena.) But that was a different problem for another time.
“Never mind him,” Ryan said. “Lately, Tony has trouble distinguishing between fact and fantasy.”
“That’s funny coming from you.” Tony folded his arms across his chest.
I raised an eyebrow. “Anyway. PGAD or hypnotism, that doesn’t change what I saw with my own eyes. I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but it was real and it was weird.”
“Look, it’s clear something’s going on, and we want to help,” Ryan said. “But I think you should see a doctor, Allie.”
“Medical or psychological?” Allie asked.
“You aren’t imagining this. If I hadn’t noticed it, you wouldn’t even know it was happening,” I said.
Ryan gave me a look, like she was still trying to figure whether I was gaslighting all of them.
“David?” Allie asked.
“What?” I asked.
“What if this has been going on for a while? I’ve been so tired lately. It’s been hard to focus on school, swimming—everything.”
I frowned. “For how long?”
“A couple of months?”
“Succubus!” Tony said.
“What?” I turned to him. He had Google open on Allie’s laptop.
“Hey, I didn’t say you could use that.” Allie slapped Tony’s hand away from the keyboard. He grinned and kept reading.
“A succubus is a demon that has sex with men while they’re sleeping. Oh, but wait, I wonder if there’s . . .” He typed for a minute. “Incubus. That’s the male form.”
Allie paled. “Nephilim,” she whispered.
“Huh?” Tony asked.
“They’re in the Bible,” Allie said. “They’re fallen angels.”
Ryan rolled her eyes. “Now we’re talking about angels?”
“Not angels,” Tony said. “Demons.”
“Great, all we need is to perform an exorcism,” I said.
“Or we call the Ghostbusters,” Tony said.
“Oh, honey. They aren’t real either,” Ryan said.
“There’s a group nearby, a paranormal investigations group that looks into reports of psychic and spiritual activities.” Tony brought up the page: Ghost Sweepers.
“No,” Allie, Ryan, and I said simultaneously.
“But they have cool equipment. Psychokinetic energy meters, electromagnetic monitors, infrared cameras—”
“They’re just in it for the YouTube hits,” I said.
“That sounds familiar,” Ryan said.
“Right. And if anyone’s going to get this on video, it’s us. . . .” Which gave me an idea about how I could help Allie and prove that something strange was going on.
“Yeah! Let’s do this!” Tony fist-bumped me.
“Whatever you’re thinking, forget it,” Allie said.
Tony looked at me hopefully. He wanted to make a hit viral video almost as much as I did.
“Forget it, Tony. We’ll come up with something else,” I said.
But I was lying. I thought that getting this phenomenon on video was a great idea, but I figured it had a better chance of working if I kept my plans to myself. Allie couldn’t know I was monitoring her if I wanted to keep the conditions of the experiment as normal as possible and rule out the last little doubt that she was putting one over on me.
“Day, can we talk?” Ryan asked me.
I nodded. We stepped out into the hall.
“You’re not trying something, are you?” she asked.
“?‘Trying something’?” I asked. “What are you accusing me of?”
“You’re not using your sister for some ridiculous scheme to make a viral video?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Ry, why would I do that? You know me.”
She pursed her lips. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Wow.” That felt like a slap to the face.
“Okay, I’m sorry, but I had to be sure. Of course you wouldn’t exploit your sister just to get YouTube famous.”
But that’s exactly what happened, even though I never intended it.
*
I really just wanted to get the ghost on film, to prove to the others—to prove to myself—that it was really real. When Ryan and Tony left, and Allie went to swim practice, I snuck into her room. Instead of trying to hide a small wireless camera, I decided to use the one that was already there: the webcam on Allie’s computer. I always used to bug her to put tape over it, but she was too trusting. She believes the best in people, especially her big brother.
It was easy to install a remote access program on her computer so I could control the webcam and stream it to my PC for recording. But all the late nights finally caught up to me, and I made a couple of mistakes.
When my vibrating cell phone woke me up the next morning at my keyboard, I checked the recording and saw the three most devastating words of my life: “Video upload complete.”
“What? Oh shit. Oh shit.” I fumbled the phone and saw it was Ryan calling. As I hastily clicked to play the video, I answered her on speakerphone.
“Day, what the fuck?” she asked. “You’ve gone too far! How could you do this to your own sister?”
“It was an accident! How bad is it?” I said.
“Bad.” She sucked in her breath. “The worst.”
Then I saw it for myself. The same video millions of people have seen. When I watched it for the first time, more than five hundred thousand people had already seen it on YouTube, and the counter was going up by the second. Thanks, Reddit. It even had a hashtag on social media already: #moaningmyrtle. I don’t know who came up with that; it’s awful, but it stuck until Allie had been identified. Then the really bad names started.