A Very Red Love (BoyXBoyXGirl)

Chapter 2: Looks Are Indeed Deceiving

Some things are destined to happen. Fate, I suppose, acts in strange ways. When my parents got the call from their real estate agent that an apartment was available near my dad's workplace, they jumped on it. I was on the younger side at the time; my parents didn't want to tell me that a boy had committed suicide there and I was to have his room. Not a very pleasant welcoming gift.

Well, neither were the incidents that followed.

Whenever my parents turned the stove on to cook something, the knobs would turn to the highest setting and burn everything. Every candle that they lit flared like a torch, to the point where it took a fire extinguisher to put one out. Then all of the lighters in the apartment went missing, only to appear underneath my bed days later. We were all at a loss as to what was going on; my parents figured they were just mishaps on their part, nothing more.

But then I met Sirys. He was a quiet, frail slip of a boy at the time, with dull brown hair and equally dark eyes. His mother would ask mine to babysit while she did...whatever it was she did. She never said much, so my parents never asked. Just another common case of parental abandonment. They never really knew what to do with him, so they would put him in my room with me for the majority of the day. It was awkward at first, even for a chatterbox like myself, but eventually he opened up just enough for us to pave the way toward a friendship.

"Richie is still here, you know," he said one day, in the middle of us playing with my Legos.

I furrowed my brow. "Richie?"

He nodded, brown hair falling over his forehead. "The boy who lived here before you. He died about two years ago." He nodded to the corner of the room, where my bed sat. "Right over there."

I dropped the Legos I was holding. "He d-died? What happened?" I eyed my bed with growing alarm.

"He was pyrokinetic. One day he got really sad, I guess, so he set himself on fire with his powers." Sirys talked as though discussing the weather, all the while locking plastic pieces of Lego together.

I gasped, horrified. "How do you know all of this? What do you mean, he's still here?"

Sirys looked at me solemnly. "Because he told me. He's sitting on your bed right now."

"You're lying," I said, narrowing my eyes. "There's no such thing as ghosts. You're just messing with me, aren't you? Well, it's not funny!"

Suddenly there was a loud crash; my lamp had toppled off my dresser and onto the ground, shattering into dozens of pieces.

Very quietly, Sirys said, "Richie doesn't like it when people get mad."

Every muscle in my body froze. I could only stare at the fragments of my lamp on the floor in shock. Finally I summoned the effort to swallow and say, albeit very shakily, "H-How do you know h-he's h-here, anyway?"

Sirys gave a one-shouldered shrug, continuing to play with the Legos.

"How do you know?" I repeated stubbornly.

He paused for a second, then lifted his eyes to me. "I just do."

I put my hands on my hips with an indignant huff. "What kind of answer is that?"

"The only one you're getting." He looked down again, then sighed softly. "Here, do you want to see him?"

I blinked a few times. "See him?" I asked, confused. "See him how?"

Without a word, he leaned forward and pressed two fingers to each of my temples. "Like this," he said quietly.

Immediately I felt cold, deathly cold, as though ice-like hands were gripping every vertebra of my spine. A series of shivers wracked their way through my body; my eyes were locked on to Sirys, and his own stared back at me with incredible intensity. A shaky breath left my body and materialized as a cloud in the air, a clear sign that the cold gripping my body was hardly imagined.