I would be lying if I said I had high expectations of what my degree course would be like, but I didn't think it would be this bad. I've just finished my first week of lectures and seminars, and I'm bored half to death. I was hoping the stereotype of civil engineering students learning about nothing but bridges would be diminished when I arrived at uni, but apparently not.

We've been reassured by countless lecturers in tweed suits that we will explore other things, but I can't say I'm holding out much hope. I'm not even sure why I chose this degree. I thought it'd be useful, but I'm wondering if choosing something more creative would've been better for my sanity. A degree in drumming or something, that would be cool. I hope that's a thing.

I'm pondering over my poor life decisions as I stroll in the general direction of my flat when a car horn almost makes me wet myself. A bright red Mini Cooper pulls up beside me, and I stop in my tracks. The passenger seat window is cranked down, and peering over it with a pair of round sunglasses on is Carmen. In the driver's seat sits Ava, who gives me a soft smile.

"Get in loser, we're going shopping," Carmen says with a wicked grin on her face. Ava laughs, and I've got no idea what's going on. Carmen lifts her sunglasses to the top of her head. "No seriously, we could really do with a bit of help. Ava's picking some stuff up from home, and we need a bit of muscle."

I shrug. Why not? I'm just flattered to have been referred to as muscle, really. Carmen hops out of the car and jumps back in, this time sitting in the back to allow me to squeeze myself into the passenger seat. I knew Ava lived quite locally, but I didn't realise she had her own car, let alone one this nice. Both the outside and inside of it is spotless, and as it's the classic model, it sure can't have been cheap. As we make our way out of the city and towards the suburbs, the girls start talking about Jamie's dip in the lake last week.

"Ava reckons he pissed off some dead guys, so they pushed him," Carmen says from the backseat. "What do you think. Ghost or no ghost?"

I shrug. I do a lot of shrugging, don't I?

"Do you believe?" Ava interjects. We stop at a red light, and her eyes bore into me.

I have to stop myself from shrugging for the umpteenth time. "In ghosts?" I ask, to which she nods. "I dunno."

Carmen announces that she does, but Ava says nothing. Her dark eyes continue to gaze into mine, and I get the feeling she knows I'm hiding something. Ever since she failed to read my aura, she's been spending a lot of time watching me. Then again, she stares at everyone. The traffic light turns green, she mutters a groovy, and accelerates forward.

It takes just over half an hour to reach Ava's house, and I initially think she's having us on. After driving through a narrow country lane for a few minutes, an old English country house begins to slowly emerge through the trees. Its beige bricks have yet to be exposed to the strangling grasp of the modern world, and being three storeys tall with too many windows to count, it's enormous. Foliage crawls up the house's walls, and from afar the vines resemble serpents clinging to the bricks for dear life. Ava pulls up outside the porch as if we've arrived at her house, and it takes me a moment to realise that we have.

"You live here?" I ask, dumbfounded.

"It's like, whoa, yeah, big, I know. People always say so."

I can't stop gawking. Carmen's mouth is agape, and as we glance at each other, I know she's wondering why Ava willingly lives in our small flat when she has Buckingham Palace barely half an hour away. That's sure as hell what I'm thinking right now, anyway.

Ava hums to herself as she leads us inside the building, and once I catch a glimpse of the main hallway, I actually think I might develop heart palpitations. In the centre of it is a grand staircase leading the way to the upper floors in a dizzying spiral, its wooden steps perfectly polished. Portraits of people wearing old-fashioned clothing and long beards frame the walls, and exotic plants and flowers cover any remaining floor space. For the second time, Carmen and I turn to each other in amazement.

We follow Ava up the staircase, and as I scan the cream walls, I can't help feeling like the people frozen within the portraits are staring at me. The next hallway, while not as grand as the downstairs one, is still impressive. The walls are almost bare, but the exotic plants remain to fill the long space.

Ava leads us through a door, and we find ourselves standing in her bedroom. I'd be fairly confident on betting that her four-poster bed is bigger than my entire bedroom at the flat, and all of her furniture, from her wardrobe to the chest at the bottom of her bed, looks like it's come straight from and eighteenth century lord's house.

Ava pulls her braids up into a ponytail before heading over to the wardrobe and opening its doors. She motions us over as she begins shuffling through racks of clothes. Carmen questions her over her parents as we're sorting through them, and due to my growing belief of Ava's abilities, I'm half expecting her parents to have also kicked the bucket. I quickly find out that's one way we're not similar; her folks run their own business in the city, and work most of the day. Based on this mansion of a building, it must be a pretty successful one.

Once a sizeable pile of dresses has been accumulated, Ava turns to me. "There are a few books I need from the library, would you mind finding them for me?" she asks, to which I nod. "Groovy, thanks! They're pretty heavy, so I don't think I could carry them. Here," she says a she delves into her skirt pocket. She hands me a piece of lined paper. "These are the titles I need. It's the room next door to this one, to the left."

Ava thanks me again as she grabs some of the clothes on the floor, while Carmen picks up what remains. We leave the room, and the girls turn right to head outside to the car, while I turn left into the library.

I didn't expect this room to be small, but there's a library, and then there's this. By this point, you'd think I'd have grown accustomed to every single item in this place looking like it cost no less than a grand, but evidently not. There's not a single wall visible; each one is framed by bookshelves, and in the middle of the room stands an intimidatingly large globe. Circling it are several leather chairs, all adorned with enormous cushions. There are small tables dotted around the room, and placed upon each one is a pile of books.

I glance down at the list in my hand. This might take me longer than I thought.

"Holy mother of Baby Jesus." Annabel.

I turn to see her standing beside me, and slapped onto her face is the stupidest grin I've ever seen. She promptly begins exploring the room, accompanying an impressed gasp with every object she looks at. Annabel has read more books than I could even try to count, and has always insisted that she'd have studied English Literature at university, so this is heaven for her--no pun intended.

I laugh. "Cool, right?"

She turns back to me. "Can we live here, please? Marry Ava, whatever it takes, I don't care."

I don't respond to Annabel, and instead watch her with raised eyebrows as she bounces around the room like a deranged puppy. As I begin my potentially lifetime long search for Ava's books, I start to pick up on a pattern. Every single one is spirit-related. I don't bother opening any of their pages at first, but curiosity eventually gets the better of me. They're written in old English, and some of them seem to even be written in a Celtic language. It's difficult to make sense of much, but I can gauge vague ideas.

"Hey, Annie," I call, gesturing my sister over. She looks up from the globe in the centre of the room, then manifests herself beside me. "According to this, you can make yourself visible to anyone, not just me."

"Does it say how?" she asks as she stands on her tiptoes. I lower the book for her.

"Nah, it claims to be unknown, and extremely rare. Says that most spirits fall into that state of being accidentally, which I guess explains why random people experience ghost sightings occasionally," I reply. "I'm calling bullshit."

"Y'know, for someone who can see dead people, you're quite the sceptic."

"What can I say? I'm very self-critical." I wink at her. "Nah, I don't know, it all just sounds like a load of made up shit to me, like stories parents would tell their kids to scare them or--"

"I told you you talk to yourself a lot."

I jump at the sound of a voice coming from the doorway, and slam the book shut. Standing there with a lopsided grin on her face is Carmen, who probably thinks I'm a goddamn psychopath. I stammer and feel my cheeks rapidly burning, but she just laughs and wanders towards me. When she notices the book in my hands, she reads the title and smiles.

"Ava's into some weird shit, fair play," she mutters. She takes the book and begins scanning the pages. "It's so interesting, though, don't you think? I've always been fascinated by the concept of there being something after all this, something bigger than us."

I don't really know what to say, so I just say, "yeah, dead things are crazy, right?"

Why do I always make myself sound like such a halfwit around this girl?

She doesn't seem to hear me, to my relief, and continues speaking. "The suggestion that we're born, we live, we die, and that's it has always terrified me. I want to feel like things matter, y'know? I was only six when I realised I was going to die. I remember lying in bed one night and, I don't know, it just occurred to me. It was all I could think about for years, and everything I did felt so irrelevant because I thought it would all come to an end eventually anyway."

As if she'd forgotten I was in the room, Carmen looks up at me and shakes her head, as if snapping herself out of her thoughts. She apologises--for what, I'm not sure--and begins reading a passage from the book aloud. It takes me longer than it should to realise that she's reading a non-English section. I watch her in both confusion and awe.

"Welsh," she explains. "My grandfather's from there, and my mum grew up there. Fun fact: she's also Malaysian, and my dad's half Spanish."

"Wow, that's different," I reply, finally able to conjure up coherent sentences. "Makes my family history of Sheffield sound a bit shit, really. Saying that, my grandmother was from Stoke-on-Trent. Exciting stuff, I know."

Carmen's airy laugh fills the room, and she proceeds to read the rest of the page she's on. Annabel is peering over her shoulder to read the contents of the black book, but moves back when Carmen shivers. I say my family derive from Sheffield, but they could have originally been Norwegian pig farmers for all I know.

My mother had no siblings, which meant no cousins or aunties and uncles for me, and only her mother was still alive when the accident happened. She kicked the bucket after a few years, and was too old to be able to care for me up until then anyway. No one could be traced on my father's side, and my grandmother had never met any of his family, so that was pretty much a brick wall.

"My folks are already demanding to come and visit me," Carmen announces as she closes the book and places it onto the pile I've accumulated. "They divorced after having a handful of affairs each, and they're in this constant battle of beating one another to the mark. Being the first to visit me at uni is one of those marks, but I'd rather not see either of them for as long as possible, to be perfectly honest."

Geez, that was candid. I always feel like I should resent people for saying things like that about their parents because I can't even remember mine, but I don't. I figure just because someone has something you don't, it doesn't make their version of it better. It hardly sounds like that in Carmen's case, anyway. I expect to see a glint of sadness in her eyes as she finishes speaking, but there's nothing. She talks about it as you would about the weather.

"Your folks still together?" she continues, and I immediately wish there was a sadness to distract her from asking me that.

I hesitate, but eventually nod my head. I figure it's not really a lie. Wherever they are, I've always assumed they're together. I'm just taking her question in its most literal sense.

"Lucky," she says as she traces her fingers along the spine of a book. "Apparently, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce nowadays. My plan is to live alone on a farm, maybe raise a few alpacas or goats, not sure yet."

"That's very specific."

She shrugs her shoulders. "I like alpacas and goats."

Carmen stays in the library with me for a while, aiding me in my search for the books on Ava's list. Annabel gives us a hand too, but I have to stop her when Carmen spots a book being slightly nudged out by an invisible force. I shoo her away when Carmen isn't looking, to which Annabel protests but eventually obeys. She's never been the best at subtlety. Carmen makes a ghost joke, but doesn't seem to think much of it. By the time Ava enters the room, we're in search of the last book.

"Groovy, thanks!" she exclaims in an overly joyous voice. "I just, whoa, totally forgot about all these. Which ones do you have left?"

She wanders over, her bare feet tapping against the wooden floor, and takes a peek at the list on one of the tables. She nods to herself, then promptly heads towards the back of the room. Within seconds, the final book is in her hands. This one is notably smaller than the rest, and doesn't appear to be so old.

"This one's basically a watered down version of the ins and outs of the reflective world--the spirit world. I thought that maybe some of you guys would be interested in it. The language is a lot simpler, and it assumes the reader knows, like whoa, nothing at all."

"So like ghosts for dummies?" Carmen replies, to which Ava smiles, then nods. "Yeah, I'll definitely take a look at this. Thanks."

As Carmen takes the book from Ava, I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from protesting. I really want to take a look at that thing. Regardless of whether or not Ava has genuine supernatural abilities, my curiosity can't resist it. As we begin loading the books, alongside the rest of Ava's stuff into the car, I consider my options.

I could steal the thing from Carmen when she's not looking, or I could even get Annabel to do it for me, though that would be risky. I could simply ask to have a look at the thing, but I don't want to seem too interested in it all. My head is beginning to hurt, so I figure that's enough thinking for one day. As we're throwing the last pile of stuff into Ava's car, I realise that my head really is aching. A lot.

"You all right?" Carmen asks, to which I wave my hand at to signal a yes.

She doesn't look convinced. We pile into the car, and as I shut the passenger seat door I realise my fingertips feel numb. My skin feels irritated, and my hands are clammy. I'm seriously beginning to wonder if there's something wrong with me. Carmen and Ava are discussing something, but I'm not listening. I can't seem to turn my focus away from the aching in my head or the strange feeling in my gut, or at least I think I can't until I glance back towards Ava's house as we're driving away.

Peering outside the window of the library we were in moments ago is a slender figure with a large frown, and deep black eyes. Its head turns as the car does, and as suddenly as it appeared, it's gone. That explains that, then.