Chapter Ten (Part 1)

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The last week of term feels like it's never going to end, and we're all on our toes after Ava's ritualistic burning of the Ouija board. Everyone's heading off to some old country manor house to play Scooby-Doo on the weekend, and Carmen and Tom are currently in the process of trying to convince me to join them.

It's a trip organised by the paranormal society, and as Tom technically signed me up for it in freshers, there's nothing stopping me from going, apparently. I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume that the place isn't even haunted, as nowhere that's meant to be haunted ever really is, and even if it was, I'd rather avoid that potential trainwreck.

"C'mon, mate, you're the only one not going, you've gotta come!" Tom pleads as if I define his existence. "Carmen has promised you a quickie round the--" Tom's sentence is cut short by Carmen's elbow in his abdomen.

"We just think it'd be a fun thing to do as a group before we all go home for a month, y'know?" she says.

I guess she has a point. Considering the whole deprived orphan scenario, I'm staying in the flat over Christmas break because I don't have a home to go back to. I've only ever had brief stints living with foster parents, so I hardly have any ties anywhere. Not to mention the fact I'm paying a full year's rent for this place, so I might as well make the most of it.

"Felix?" Carmen says, reminding me of the current conversation.

I shrug as I stand up from the sofa. "Nah."

"What is it with you and ghosts, man?" Tom groans as I stop next to them beside the kitchen island. "Can't tell if you're scared of them, or if you are one."

I laugh as I steal a strawberry from the opened box sitting in front of Carmen. She swats my hand away, but it's too late. I wink at her as I leave the kitchen, and head into my bedroom.

Annabel is listening to an audio book when I enter, and she barely looks up at me as I wander in. She's been quieter than usual since the revelation of what I saw in my vision, and I wish I could promise her that my life isn't a result of a sacrifice of hers, but I can't. I mean, I don't really know that. I'm about to try and discuss that in some shape or form when I hear a knock on my door.

"Yep?" I ask as I open it, and I'm surprised to see Jamie standing there. He's barely left his bedroom since we were at the pub a while back.

"Um, sorry--I, uh, there's a lot of Maths on your course, right?" he enquires.

I wave my hand a bit. "Eh, sorta."

"I was just wondering if you'd be able to, uh, aid me in completing some coursework."

I tell him sure because hey, why not? Jamie briefly heads back into his room to grab some stuff, then returns with a pile of papers and a textbook in his hand. I've no idea where this sudden bout of sociability has arisen from because on the rare occasion he shows himself in public nowadays, all he ever really does is stare blankly at nothing.

I've tried breaking through to the guy, considering I'm the only one aware of his grandmother's death, but he's snubbed me off each time. I'm pretty sure I've developed a bloody soft spot for the guy, considering our matching home circumstances, which sucks balls. I hate it when I feel things.

I wave Jamie over to my bed as I slump myself onto my desk chair, then swivel it over to him. He's pulling a strained expression as I rest my legs on the end of the bed, but I'm not quite sure what's so distressing about my feet, so ignore it. It's probably the hole in my sock. I'm about to ask him what this coursework is all about, but he gets there first.

"Aren't you going to switch that off?" he asks.

"Huh?"

Jamie nods behind me, and I swivel back around to see Annabel sitting on my bedroom floor with her legs crossed. I experience what I can only assume is a brief heart attack because I think Jamie has somehow spotted her, but then I realise she's playing the audiobook out loud, so to him there's just some random audiobook playing on my bedroom floor. Annabel must have heard Jamie because she switches it off seconds after him commenting on it.

"Sorry, forgot it was on," I mutter. "What kinda maths are we talking here? I'm--"

"How did you do that?" Jamie interrupts, looking even more distressed.

"Do what?"

"Switch that off? You didn't touch it."

Oh, shit. I glance back at the floor, and shoot Annabel the hardest glare I can muster up. She then conveniently vanishes. I swear to god. She used to mess up like that a lot when I was younger and she was new to this whole ghost thing; she once got extremely pissed off at me when I was ten or something, and I was playing in my foster family's garden at the time, so she decided to telekinetically throw mud at me for fifteen minutes straight. My explanation to my foster parents involved an elaborate tale about a stray dog trying to steal the washing. This is easy compared to that.

"It's an app," I reply, waving my phone.

Jamie nods his head, but I'm not sure he's bought it as he continues to watch me suspiciously. We promptly begin discussing coursework, which only contains pretty basic maths, to be honest. There are a few tricky formulas, but after I explain everything once, he clicks onto it immediately, as if he already knew the answers anyway.

"Can I ask you something quickly?" he asks as we're mid-way through a question, so I shrug. "What are your memories of your parents like? I don't mean to pry, you don't have to answer, I just--I'd just turned fourteen, and I've forgotten some things, and I'm worried I'll forget a lot more."

I scratch my head. "Pretty vague," I half-lie. "But, I mean, I was eight so it is kinda different."

He nods. We continue with the question we're tackling, and we've only just started the next one when Jamie changes the subject again.

"What happened?" he asks. "I mean, how did they, uh... you know."

I'm starting to get the feeling this visit isn't about coursework. The little shit is using it as an excuse to talk about dead parents. Classic move. He continues to ramble on about something or other, telling me I don't have to answer about a million times. I know it probably makes me a sick bastard, but I always want to lie and formulate some really bizarre story that makes their deaths sound like some kind of adventure film because the reality of it is such a cliché.

"Car crash," I say, "nothing interesting."

"Plane," Jamie replies, to which I raise my eyebrows. That's different. "Dad was a pilot; we owned a small plane. He misjudged the landing."

Bloody hell, someone must have a big inheritance. At the realisation of how inappropriate of a thought that just was, I apologise to Jamie as if he can read my mind.

"You going to ghost house?" I ask him in an attempt to change the subject, only to realise that what I just asked is probably even more inappropriate than my inheritance thought. "Uh, I mean, y'know, the trip everyone's going on."

Jamie shakes his head. He looks so damn deflated, and my sympathy for the guy is slowly melting my brain. I think he just really needs to get out, even if that does mean visiting some bullshit haunted manor that only remains standing thanks to the gullibility of the paying public. I lean back slightly in my chair, and say nothing for a while.

"You go, I go?" I offer.

"Pardon?"

"I'll go ghost hunting if you come with," I elaborate. "Carmen and Tom keep nagging me about it, plus I figure it's something we can all do as a group before we piss off for a month." I lower my legs from the bed, and roll my chair closer. "And no offence, mate, but you need to get out of this flat before you throw yourself out of it."

I assume Jamie will flat-out say no, and that this is going to take some hard-core convincing, but to my surprise, he nods. It's the subtlest nod I've ever laid eyes on, and he seems as excited as someone who's just been offered to watch paint dry for a week, but it's a nod nonetheless.

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