Yawning, I sit up in bed, stretching and blinking in the early sun. My best friends had left earlier in the week and i was once again on my lonesome. Well, of course there was always Mason, but he was….interesting.

7:35am

mason:

_“are we going again today?”_

_sigh. _can’t even brush my teeth first.

Mason and i met in the 4th grade when he moved here from NJ. His mom was a druggie (according to the town’s gossips) but my mom knew her from the rehab center she worked at briefly and she was nice enough. Mason is a weird kid who’s always been fascinated with ghosts and the supernatural. I don’t believe in such stupid things, but my mom told me to try and befriend him because he doesn’t have any. Now seven years later, he’s still weirdly obsessed with ghosts and he grew on me slightly. Not in the way you think. More like mold

Anyway i text him back

7:49am

_“sure, meet you there”_

__

The wind is blowing as I lean against the all too familiar oak tree planted in the middle of the town graveyard. My safe space. I shiver and pull up my cardigan and see Mason jogging over with his round glasses and clumsy posture. “Hey!” he says. I nod in polite greeting and we start walking one of the trails. “I found more the other day” he rattles on about the “Extraordinary nature of the town ghosts” As we pause at a fork in the road and look which way to go. (Left we decided) Every so often he stops talking and I add in a “oh really?” or a “cool” Mason may be annoying but his knowledge and facts are fun to listen too. Don’t tell him I said that.

Now here’s where you gotta hear me out;

We live in a land where the footprints of “ghosts” linger. Our town has weird superstitious about ghosts and spirits and there’s foot prints all over town. They look wet, as if someone stepped in a puddle and walked along all the roadsides. If you ask me, it’s a dumb kid that runs around at night but even still, Mason likes believing in it and it keeps the conversation off me and my family so i go along with it. Supposedly, the graveyard is where the footprints start, I’ll admit it _is _pretty creepy but very typical. This town was founded in 1666 and apparently the footprints have been here forever but i don’t believe that. It’s simply impossible.

pulling my cardigan more snug around my shoulders, we wander off the trail and into the woods. Trees getting thicker as we clamber in deeper. We trace the foot prints back to a bigger oak tree than the one I leaned on. “What should we be doing now?” I ask, turning towards Mason.

“Hey, Abbs?”

His voice is higher than normal.

“Yeah?”

“Look”

Bare footprints. Behind us. We both have shoes on.

We run. It follows. Faster.