That’s when my heart starts beating behind my eyes and my mouth feels like there’s too much saliva inside, creating a serious spit tsunami warning. His eyebrows crinkle and he’s all, “Huh?” I spit a wad of hair from between my lips, straighten my glasses and say, “ ’S up.” And instead of the slow-motion bouncing locks, a big clump lands in my mouth instead of all flowy and perfect down my back. Except my hair isn’t shiny and wavy and blond, it’s more limp and dull and the same brown as the smiling poop emoji.

I take a giant step up to the counter, flicking my hair like the girls in the shampoo commercials do. She gives me a nudge forward and says, “You’re on.”

“Ah…totally awkward and completely embarrassing,” she informs me. “Define weirdness,” I tell her, pushing up my horn-rims at the bridge. “He’s more my type than yours anyway,” I tell her. Mags is getting the SKIP A STRAW, SAVE A TURTLE slogan. They have to be fake because he can’t be much older than I am and everyone knows you can’t get a tattoo until you’re eighteen. He’s wearing a long-sleeved Fun City T-shirt pushed up on his elbows, displaying two fake sleeve tattoos. He’s tall, with long black hair hanging out of a knit skullcap, and has pale white skin and more eyeliner than the models in Manhattan coming from a photo shoot. We watch the snack bar boy as he waits on the family of five in front of us. (This book may contain a sharpie mark on the top or bottom edge and may show mild signs of shelfwear.“I feel like he’s getting a sense of it,” she assures me. Karma hopes that her what-ifs don’t make her give up the ghost before they can find a starring spirit to help their show go viral-and possibly even get them a season two. But her dad made Karma the head of research for the docuseries, so she, Mags, and a mysterious local boy named Nyx must investigate every strange happening in the historically creepy Stanley Hotel. Unfortunately, staying at a haunted hotel isn’t a walk in the park for someone with a big case of the what-ifs. If they succeed, the show will be a hit, they can pay rent on time, and just maybe, her mom will come back. Their mission: find a ghost and get it on camera. Karma and her best friend, Mags, join her dad’s Totally Rad film crew at a famous haunted hotel in Colorado over her spring break. So when she asked her trusty Crystal Mystic if the call asking her dad to create a ghost-hunting docuseries was her dad’s big break, it delivered: “No doubt about it.” Because the universe never gets it wrong. Karma Moon is a firm believer in everything “woo-woo,” as her dad calls it.

Karma Moon by Melissa Savage