I approached my new school early in the morning dreading what might come my way, as usual. Except what isn’t the same is that this school that I’m slowly approaching is in fact new to me. Today is my first day, in a new state, in a new school, and with new people.  I climb the steps up to the entrance already getting looks from the other students. “Who’s that, fresh meat?”, I already hear some girl snidely remark. “Great”, I think, “ I’m already making new friends.” I walk in the front door and immediately bump into someone and drop my things and he drops his as well. I sigh and began apologizing profusely for not looking where I was going. We gather our stuff and I look at him. He was taller than me, which isn’t a surprise since I’m shorter than nearly everyone. He had fairly long, blonde swoopy hair that it looked like he straightened. He said, “ Nah, it’s totally fine. I’m probably clumsier than you are to be honest. My name is  Devin Corgan by the way.” I laughed and said, “ Well that sounds like a challenge, and my name is Octavia.” We both decided to walk around together before class started. We were talking and laughing and he said, “ I can’t believe I haven’t seen you around are you new here?” I reply, “ Yeah I just moved here a couple days ago actually. I moved up into this old Victorian house on the edge of town.” “Really? No one has lived in the old Roberts place for a couple of years. Some people say it’s haunted but I say that’s a bunch of bullshit in my opinion.” “Awesome my house is haunted, I’ll add that to the list of things that are new to me,” I think to myself. The bell rings for class to start and I say, “ Oh, I haven’t gotten my schedule yet. I guess I will see you around.” He says, “ I better see you around, hopefully we will have some classes together, or at least lunch. We can chill at my place if you do, I live right around the corner.” We then parted ways and I headed toward the front office of the school to pick up my schedule. I don’t know what I’m signed for since my parents registered me, so hopefully my classes are adequate. I find my counselor’s office and get my schedule.
“1st period: AP World History, 2nd period: Art, 3rd period: Advanced Language Arts, 4th period: Adv. Chemistry, 5th period: Lunch, 6th period: Geometry, 7th period: French, 8th period: Yearbook,” my schedule reads out.
  “ God I hope I have Devin in some of my classes,” I think as I walk to my 1st period class. I walk in late, obviously, and the teacher has already given me a look of distaste. I approach her and tell her that I’m new here and apologize because I am late. She accepts my apology and seats me next to the girl I saw earlier, whom is eyeing me up and down. I look over at her and she smirks and mutters something to her friend that is on her opposite side. Her friend looks at me and giggles trying to contain her laughter. “Well I can tell this class is going to be a blast,” I snidely remark to myself. Following first period my other classes roll by until lunch when Devin bumps into me, on purpose this time. “ Give me your schedule I want to see what classes you got stuck with.” He takes my schedule and reads over at least twice and says, “ We have lunch, geometry and french together, sweet. You should come chill with me at my house now, we have extremely long lunches especially on our block days.” I say “ Ok cool, let’s go.” Then we journey our way over to his house. He wasn’t kidding when he said he lived right around the corner. Literally 5 minutes of walking and we were there. His house was very quaint. It was a purplish color and had a steep gabled roof. We walk inside and his two dogs immediately run up to me and start barking insistently completely ignoring Devin. I bend over and pet them softly, stroking their long fur. Devin plops down on his couch and pats the seat next to him and then precedes to turn on the television. He puts it on American Dad and we start talking.
“So tell me about yourself Octavia. I want to know everything.”
I reply, “ Well, I grew up in a small town in Texas.”
“Southerner ”, he interrupts, “ I thought I heard a little bit of an accent.”
I laugh and say, “ Yeah I lived there all of my life until I moved here. You see my father is really close to his family and they lived there. So, we did as well. Well until s*** hit the fan.”
“What happened? Devin asks.
“ Well my father got into business with his sister and they became business partners. What my aunt failed to tell my father was that the company was already going down in the toilet and we had to declare bankruptcy because of it,” I say.
“Damn, that’s messed up,” Devin says.
“Yeah it is,” I reply, “ But everything has gotten better since we moved here. It’s kinda nice to be away from the family. Definitely less drama that way.”
Devin chuckles, “Yeah I understand that, I haven’t seen any of my family in a couple of years.”
We continue to talk, learning more about each other until we have to return to school. We get to our geometry class and I sit next to him and we continue to talk and people obviously giving weird looks. Apparently Devin never talked to anyone before me, at least that’s what he said so, that would make sense as to why people were giving us strange looks. Class ends and we head to our next one together and people still continue to be nosey. Eventually, the day ends and Devin asks if he can walk home with me. I say, “ I don’t see why not nobody is ever really home because my parents work pretty late so you can come over and hang out for a while.”
We walked a couple of miles to reach my house. It sounds like a long walk but it really isn’t it took about 30 minutes to get there. We walked up the road to get up to the ancient house. “Mind the mess,” I say as I’m opening the door, “ We still haven’t finished unpacking yet.” We walk inside the entrance and he says, “Wow it hasn’t changed at all since the last time I was in here.” I say, “ What are you talking about?” He says, “People used to treat this house like a spook house, so, people would be dared to go in alone and spend the night. I was one of them a couple of years ago right after the last family moved out. Apparently they couldn’t take it any longer. So a month or two after they moved when the house became good and scary again a couple of my old friends dared me to the stay the night. I would never back down from a dare, so I did it. Needless to say, it was quite terrifying. I heard many noises echo throughout the house which I played off as just rats. Until someone touched me and I began to run through the house screaming and crying. I thought I was hallucinating I saw dead people everywhere in the house, wherever I walked someone was either following me or lying in the room ahead of me. Then the rooms began to blur together and it kept looking like I was walking into the same room over and over again. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore so I jumped out of a window because I was terrified of going crazy, and then I went home.” I say, “Wow that’s pretty intense, I hope I can survive the night.” He chuckles and looks out of a window, “ Yeah I’m sure you will. I didn’t mean to scare you if I did.” “Nah,” I say, “ I love scary things so this house is perfect.” We hang out for awhile and then he decides to go home around 7 at night. I then put on a horror movie, what else would someone watch in a haunted house? I doze off somewhere in the middle and wake up to a loud bang. “Mom? Dad?” I call expecting it to be them. I look outside and see no cars in the driveway, so it couldn’t have been them. So, I walked through the house searching for the source of the sound. I go upstairs into the study and find a chair knocked over. “Hmm, I wonder what could’ve done this,” I think. I then go back downstairs to finish my movie or at least rewind it back to the last point I remember. I then hear a loud clang coming from the kitchen right after I sat down. I walk into the next room looking around to see what it could be. All I found was a butcher knife on the floor, which is a weird spot for it to be. Regardless, I didn’t care. It didn’t really bother me. I ended up finishing my movie and then went to bed. My room was on the third floor of the house. It was very spacious and I could live up there and treat it as an apartment. It was one big open room with a couple of large windows and a balcony. I crawled into bed and went to sleep.
The next morning I woke up and was very tired. I had a hard time sleeping and I also had a really weird dream. To me it seemed that it was exactly what Devin described when he said he spent the night in this house. Except I was there with him experiencing everything with but without the effect of hallucinating. Although he mentioned many dead people that he saw whilst walking throughout the house I only saw one dead person. Definitely not as many as he talked about. The person I saw however,  jumped out of the window in my room and ended up crumpled in a pile underneath the window 3 stories down. I’m not sure who it was but they had the most painful expression and then changed to an expression of peace before they jumped. Needless to say, it was a very strange and interesting dream.
I got out of bed and got ready for school and then I began my walk. I got to school quite early which I was very proud of, 30 minutes early in fact. I wandered aimlessly throughout the school and then began looking around to see if Devin was there yet. When I didn’t find him I went to my first class. Then the classes began to roll by again and when lunch came around I looked for Devin, and I couldn’t find him anywhere. So, I decided to just go over to his house and see if he was there. I rung the doorbell and an older woman in her late 40s answered the door. “ Excuse me is Devin home?” I asked. She looked me up and down, started kinda shaking and looked behind me with the blankest stare and said, “Devin never came home.” and then she closed the door in my face. I took a couple of steps back, dumbfounded at the idea that he didn’t come home last night. I then walked back to the school thinking everything over and then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked over my shoulder to see it was none other than Devin himself. I ask, “Where have you been? Your mother is like really upset because you didn’t come home. It was honestly quite frightening.” “Oh, you went to my place?” He replied softly. “I am never really home when my parents are. So, I just think that she thinks that I ran away or something.” “Jeez that’s pretty messed up man why would you do that to her?” I ask him. “I don’t know,” he says. “Well are you coming back with me to the school?” I ask him. “Nah I’m just going to ditch the rest of the day there’s no point in showing up for only three classes,” he replies. “I guess that’s true,” I say, “ Well I’m going to go back then. I can’t ditch otherwise  my parents would flip out.” He laughs and says, “Ok see you around then.” We then parted ways him going in one direction and me in the other. I go up to my next class and go up to the teacher and tell her that Devin isn’t going to be here. She gives me a weird look and says, “I don’t have anyone named Devin in this class.” I make a weird face and say, “ Yeah you do I sit next to him in class everyday.” “Octavia you don’t sit next to anyone in this class,” she says. I give up and retreat back to my seat. I sit down and contemplate what is going on. “First Devin’s mom acts weird and then the teacher says I don’t sit next to anyone in this class. What the hell is going on?” All of my next classes go quickly and then I head home and immediately get to bed.
I wake up the next morning and get ready like I usually do and walk to school. Everything seems normal, but I still don’t understand what in the world is going on with Devin. I get school and walk into my first period with girl following right behind and she gets up close to me and says, “Where’s your “boyfriend” that no one else can see?” I look at her and say, “You don’t know him either? I don’t know how you couldn’t he’s pretty recognizable and on top of that nearly every other class I have with you, I also have with him.” She laughs it off and says, “ Oh really what does he look like and what is his name?”
“ His name is Devin Corgan and he is tall with long blonde swoopy hair, and piercing green eyes.”
She stops and becomes solemn.
“Devin Corgan?...Devin Corgan killed himself by jumping out of a window in an old house a couple years ago.”
“ I’m pretty sure it’s the house you’re living in now actually.”
“ He left a note telling his mother that he was going to never come home.”
“ She’s practically hysterical now.”
“ It is impossible that you are talking to him.”
“ He is dead.”