Most people would be, at the least, incredibly unnerved by having to spend the day at a supposedly haunted house. Me? I'm just bored.

            I frown at the dusty old room I'm standing in, wondering if the dust motes and spiders in the corner of the half-shattered window are enjoying watching my anticlimactic visit to their humble abode. If they are, they don't show it. The thought makes me frown some more.

            When Nick came to my house that morning and told me he wanted to check out the Warren House, I'd treated it like an act of providence, as if the gods had opened the heavens and given me a surefire chance to prove to him that ghosts were, in fact, real.

            No dice.

            It's been two hours and all we've found is room after room of dust, rust, and other rotten detritus from a century and a half of abandonment. With each floor that we clear, my smile disappears, and Nick's only grows. He loves proving to me that old spooky houses are just old spooky houses and nothing more.

            "Stella!" Nick calls from the hallway, and with another glance around the room—although I'm not sure what I could have missed—I emerge onto the landing. Nick's leaning against the wall waiting for me, a cocky smirk on his face.

            I narrow my eyes at him, holding up a hand to stop the prideful tirade that is to come. "Don't you dare."

            At that, Nick's smirk stretches, as if he is the Cheshire Cat and I am Alice and this is all just a trip down the rabbit hole. "Don't I dare do what?" he asks as we descend down the rickety old staircase. "Flaunt yet another failure in your face?"

            "Nick."

            "Expose the fact behind your beloved fiction?"

            "Nick, don't."

            "Or don't I dare prove you wrong yet again?" Nick says, hopping from the third to bottom stair onto the entryway. A mushroom cloud of dust erupts from the place of impact. Nick smiles up at me, a mischievous glint in his dark eyes. "Take your pick, Stell."

            I sigh weakly, mostly because I don't want to inhale another lungful of nineteenth century dust but also because Nick is right. He has proven me wrong.

            This time.

            "You know, this is one of the most haunted places in Willow's Crest," I try arguing. I wave my hand around the room, as if displaying it. Look at all the dust and the rot and don't forget the termite-ridden furniture! "Maybe the ghosts just weren't biting today."

            Nick snorts in contempt as he makes his way to the door. "Are the ghosts suddenly mackerels?"

            I jerk my finger towards him, wishing in that moment that I was a witch with the power to strike him down with a bolt of energy. But alas, I was just me: seventeen-year-old Stella Sawyer, the local girl with an affinity for the paranormal and an intense fear of actually proving it exists. "Careful. If a ghost suddenly drags you up the stairs and pushes you down them, I might just scream and run away instead of speaking at your funeral."

            Nick gives me a look as I sashay out the door. Stepping out of the Warren House and into its surrounding woods is a lot like stepping out of one horror movie and into the next: not pleasant. It doesn't help that there are dark slate gray clouds moving in, serving as our cue to leave.

            "You'd scream and run away regardless," he says pointedly.

            I don't turn around to argue with him; I just keep walking as I call over my shoulder, "Last chance, Williams! Your eulogy could be beautiful."

            Nick jogs to keep up, towering above me like one of the giant willows our town is named for. "Would you really write me a good one?"

            I press a hand to my heart as if I'm touched. "Damn right I would." I take a few steps, then stop. "If I was in a good mood."

            We go on like this as we navigate our way through the woods back to Nick's car, parked on the main road that cleaves the Willow's Crest Forest Preserve in two. Nick slides into the driver's seat, and I flop into the passenger side, immediately digging out my phone as Nick veers back onto the road.

            He steals a glance as he ups the speed. "What're you doing?"

            "Texting Jase," I mutter, my concentration wholly on the words that my fingers cannot barely keep up with. You said the Warren House was a hotspot, you lying son of a—

            Nick steals another glance, his eyes flying open as he tries to grab for my phone. "Don't yell at Jase, it's not his fault you're deluded."

            "Hey!" I exclaim, yanking my phone out of Nick's reach. "Focus on driving and stay out of my business."

            "Your business is my business," Nick states, and he's right. That's what happens when you've been best friends since the third grade and share a strange passion for anything frightening.

            Begrudgingly, I erase my scathing message from the text box and instead, say headed back from the Warren House, meet us at Cliff's. I add the period so Jase knows I'm pissed, but I'll be lucky if Jase even responds by next Tuesday. Him and communication don't exactly mesh. Frankly, he would have done well with a messenger pigeon.

            I lower my phone, message sent, and look out the window as Nick steers out of the forest preserve and onto the main road that'll take us back into Willow's Crest proper. It isn't long until the seemingly endless trees and meadows and creeks turn into outlying suburbs and houses and kids on bikes. A cookie-cutter town nestled between an ocean and a forest, both having claimed more souls than its entire population.

            And yet it's all ignored.