Afro jungle beats blared from speakers while Christophe, who had donned a chef's hat and apron, shook his tush to the groove. He filled a zip lock bag with graham crackers and hammered them into a crumble with a Christophe branded rubber mallet. He emptied the sweet rubble into a pie dish. After a pirouette, he removed a sauce pan from a double boiler in which he had just melted six bars of high quality Peruvian dark chocolate and poured the brown goo onto the graham crackers. A heaping of gold flakes was showered on for good measure.

Sadie, Jordan, Autry, Gigi, and Moss watched unimpressed and with more than a little disdain, but every time they thought Christophe's elaborate beverage was near completion, another long stretch of new steps and procedures unfurled before them. Separating egg whites and frothing them. Rimming the UFO shaped glassware with his gold and chocolate graham cracker topper. Steaming whole milk. Taking a hit of nitrous oxide before spraying the whip cream. Shaving nutmeg with a nail file. Dangling roasting sticks in which he toasted marshmallows over the open gas range. He carefully measured Creme de Cacao, Baileys, and marshmallow vodka into a shaker and marimba'd them.

He of course was live streaming the whole operation. When the convoluted drinks were prepared, he handed one to each of his guests. He picked up his mini tripod and cheersed his audience, "L'chaim, ya weird turd dogs!"

Moss slammed down his drink splashing the the milky brown beverage all over the counter, which startled Autry into the type of jump scare one experiences at a haunted attraction. Moss pointed one of his sausage fingers at the beverage and declared, "I'm not drinking this shit. Why are we here? And if this is a fucking prank..."

Christophe shot Moss a sneer and retracted his mini tripod and pocketed his phone, "No prank and no cameras from here on out."

Gigi scoffed, but Christophe assured them that it truly was, "Just us."

"What's this about?" Jordan asked.

Christophe lifted his s'more-tini to his nose and savoured the campfire aromas, "I cryptically texted you and elaborately duped Sadie because..."

"Christ on a stick," Said Sadie, "You didn't need to order one-hundred pizzas to get me here, Christophe."

"Oh I think I did. Because you especially needed to be here and I knew you weren't coming unless..."

"How'd you know I wasn't going to come?"

Christophe's cheeks flushed. Profound disappointment dripped on his face as he scolded her, "Because you didn't once like one of my party promos. You didn't share one reel or comment on..." Christophe felt himself getting worked up. He shook it off before it ratcheted even higher. His silly grin returned, "I brought you all here because..."

For dramatic effect Christophe took the longest and loudest sip anyone had ever taken of a s'more-tini.

"Christophe!" Jordan interrupted the never ending sip!

"...because I need to tell you a ghost story. Hence the s'more-tinis."

Sadie laughed at the ludicrousness of it all, but the others squirmed, uneasy.

Autry nuzzled into Jordan's shoulders, "I hate ghost stories."

"Then you'll really hate this," Christophe said, elbowing Gigi with a wink which wasn't returned in kind.

"Get on with it." Gigi demanded.

"Fine," Christophe cleared his voice, but this time he wasn't messing around. Sadie detected that he was covering up an earnest fear, "When Ingrid was declared missing I saw a huuuuuuuugggggge bump in my socials."

It was true. When Ingrid went M.I.A, Beachwood became an industry of gossip and speculation. And no one capitalized on this more than Christophe. He released mountains of video essay and confessional content during this time. While no one was posting touching in-memorium to Ingrid, Christophe's none stop social-media frenzy was universally looked on skeptically. A large faction of Beachwood students were convinced that Christophe was hiding something. Even the police had labeled him a person-of-interest, which Christophe leaned into, releasing a whole line of 'person of interest' merch, branded with a fake mug shot of his own photo-shopped creation.

Sadie remembered that in those early days Christophe was met with sideways glances in the cafeteria and a wake of whispers trailed him wherever he went.

"Everyone thought I killed her. And I would be lying if I hadn't wanted everyone to believe it, because I was getting 10,000 new followers a day." Christophe continued.

The content that hit the biggest during those turbulent days was when Christophe was interrogated by two detectives. What no one knew at the time was that he was already cleared of Ingrid's disappearance. So, while the seemingly hidden camera video began in the Principal's office, with an intense inquisition by the Beachwood Sheriff's department, it turned on a dime when one detective grabbed Christophe by the collar and screamed, "You really think you're a smooth criminal, don't yah?" And then there was a Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal needle drop and Christophe and the two detectives performed a well rehearsed choreographed dance. Turned out that 56 year old Detective Cunningham had an insane moonwalk.

Christophe followed this viral smash with a new line of Smooth Criminal Cleared Of All Charges Merch. It became a thing and soon he was performing Smooth Criminal karaoke in the cafeteria everyday at lunch as the student body clapped and cheered along, totally forgetting they had basically condemned him as a murderer only a few days before.

"So I wasn't too bummed," Christophe went on, "The plan was working. Maximize and monetize any situation. Accused of murder. Monetize! Cleared of murder. Monetize!"

"No one ever accused you of murder and Ingrid isn't dead. She ditched town and no one cares." Jordan sighed.

Christophe arched his eyebrow, "You're right. The story got boring. The consensus narrative was that Ingrid joined Rajneeshpuram. People forgot about the investigation and Ingrid and her vow to kill us all and their eyeballs needed fresh content."

"While everything about you is terrifying, when is the scary part of this story?" Gigi asked, sipping her s'moretini and two plumes of vape escaped each nostril.

Christophe ignored Gigi and prattled on, "The twenty-four hour gossip cycle moved to Mr. Henderson and Jemma's affair, which I covered closely as you might remember and everything chilled the arf out. At least on the socials. For the IRL me, it was not chill. The opposite of chill. It was chilling!"

"The opposite of chill is not chilling." Gigi snapped, rubbing the throbbing vein in her temples.

"Chilling in the scary way not the I'm chilling way, which is the opposite, thanks, yer done, Geeg, yer hashtag-done!"

Christophe settled into a more spooky narrative style. He got quiet and that hint of fright Sadie had noticed earlier was bubbling closer to the surface. The dark bags under his eyes became more apparent and he seemed pale now that his ring-light had been turned off. Sadie could tell that what ever was scaring Christophe, had really gotten to him. She rubbed away the goosebumps that snuck up her arms. Christophe took off his chefs hat and crumpled it in his hands, "I'm alone here most of the time you know," Christophe's eyes darted around the room, "But I started to feel... like I wasn't alone."

The mover's racket seemed far off now and Sadie suddenly felt an unnerving loneliness, like being in the woods alone and feeling like something is watching you. Christophe explained that his uncanny experiences reached a head in early November, "I was completing my evening ritual. Sprawling out, taking in the epic vistas, live tweeting Love is Blind and enjoying my fleshlight."

"Eww, Christophe!"

"Don't judge my self-love, Autry! A fleshlight is a glorious experience. But what happened next certainly was not. I sensed I was being watched."

Christophe explained that he could sense something within the large glass walls of his enormous palace. He went into detail about how the whole room was reflected in the towering panes of glass, "It felt like an alternate world. A mirror world. And I saw myself. And beyond my reflection I saw something watching me from inside the window."

"You mean outside the window." Gigi corrected.

"No, I mean like inside the window. Not outside at all."

"What was it?" Sadie asked, trying not to look scared.

"Eyes!" Christophe said so loudly that Autry jumped, spilling her brown sugary drink all over Moss.

"Fuck, Autry, really!" Moss recoiled from Autry and to Sadie it looked like he was winding up to slap her.

"Take it easy, Moss, it was an accident." Sadie said, wondering how Autry could be with such an ogre.

Moss was about to get up in Sadie's face, but Christophe steamrolled the conflict by continuing his story, "It's okay, Autry. It was scary. And those eyes I saw, I kept seeing them. Everywhere. In every glass surface. Just watching me. And there's no shortage of glass surfaces in this house. I like to have eyes on me, as you know, but this was creepy Alfonso Fernandez."

"Alfonso Fernadez?"

"A.F... as fuck. Jeeze, keep up guys."

Christophe recounted how one night he couldn't sleep and was wandering the halls, eating a mini-box of Cap'n Crunch when "Evil as fuck eyes that will haunt me long after I'm dead popped out right over there." He pointed to the window and shuddered, "And yeah, I pissed on my Crocs. Right over there!" He pointed to where Sadie was standing and she moved away accordingly.

"Yeah, I pissed all over my feet. Like a full bladder and I have a very healthy stream." He couldn't muster any of his usual comedic energy, he looked small and scared, "Those eyes. I still can't get them out of my dreams and I certainly can't get them out of my house."

"So your house is haunted?" Jordan asked skeptically.

"Only recently," Christophe added, his paranoid eyes drifting to the glass walls that encased them now, "And I think you can all guess who's haunting it."