A little girl charged down the stairs yelling “MOMMY!!!” enthusiastically. She got to the bottom of the stairs to see her mother standing at the table in the dining room. “Mommy!” she repeated. 

“Good morning to you too, sweetie!” The mother smiled gently at the girl. She then started to make her way over and asked the girl “Are you ready for school?” 

The girl nodded her head excitedly before asking her mother “Mama? Will I see Jake when I get home?” 

The girl’s mother looked at her for a moment before responding “Jake? You’ve never told me there was a Jake in your class!”

The girl blinked a couple of times then cheerfully responded “Mama’s silly! Jake’s never been to school before!” The little girl laughed without a care in the world.

The woman paused before telling her daughter “Sweetie, if Jake’s a new student he still might’ve gone to school before, it just might not have been your school.” The mother spoke softly hoping to not upset her child.

The little girl's eyes welled with tears and she sputtered out “Jake’s been here longer than you’ve been alive Mama, Jake said it! Jake wouldn’t lie to me!” 

“Shhh..” the mother whispered to the girl before she reached out, pulled the girl to her, and hugged her tightly. After a while the mother pulled back from the hug, she looked at her daughter and told her “Don’t worry, I’m not mad. I just want to understand because I’ve never heard you talk about any ‘Jake’ before, so I was confused.” 

The daughter sniffled a little bit before looking up at her mother and saying “I never mentioned Jake because Jake said that he would get mad if I told you about him.”

The mother looked at her daughter with a face of concern and confusion. “Now why would he get mad about that? That doesn’t sound like a nice thing to say.” 

The girl looked up at her mother and started bawling once again. In between sobs the mother could slightly make out the little girl saying “Mommy, how could you.. Jake’s not a meanie…” 

“Shhh..” the mother whispered to her daughter yet again. How was she gonna get herself out of this hole now? “Enough about Jake, how about we get you to school? I heard you’re doing something really fun at school today!” 

The girl’s face quickly changed from upset to curious, “What are we doing today?” 

“You’ll have to go to school to figure that out!” the mother smiled and booped the little girl's nose. The little girl laughed and smiled at her mother, before the two went on with their day. 

After time both the girl and her mother forgot about the interaction. That was until a couple of weeks later.

It was a normal night, nothing particularly odd or interesting had happened. The girl's mother had been downstairs cooking dinner and had finished. She wiped her hands on her apron before staring at the stairs leading up to the girls room. She had been thinking a lot when she finally paused and realized just how quiet her daughter had been. Her daughter was not usually this quiet she thought before quickly dismissing it off and justifying it by assuming her daughter was sleeping. She took off her apron and placed it on the table before calling out to her daughter “Sweetie! Dinner’s ready!” She waited a minute and got no response. So she called out again now starting to get slightly worried “Sweetie? Food’s ready!” She started to make her way towards her daughter's room, heading up the stairs cautiously. She got to her daughter's room and she calmed immensely. She could hear her daughter playing and chattering inside of the room. Her daughter must’ve just been too consumed in her own world to hear her call. She opened the door and walked into her daughter’s room smiling and started to speak before stopping dead in her tracks. Sitting there in her daughter’s room was a boy? He didn’t stand very tall, only being a little bit taller than her daughter. He looked around the same age as her daughter. He had pale skin with blonde hair and bright blue eyes to accompany his complexion. This was no ordinary boy though. Something felt off about him. The mother blinked a couple of times before it hit her. The boy was floating in midair! The woman was too shocked to react and just stood there stuttering. 

The daughter shot up off the ground and looked back and forth from her friend to her mother before finally stuttering out “Mama! I told you to knock before entering my room!”

The mother looked at her daughter and coughed a couple times and stood up straight saying “Sweetie, who is this nice young man and why is he in our house?” 

The daughter looked at her mother and looked down towards her feet before whispering to her mom “Mama.. This is Jake..” 

The mother paused before looking at the boy, and remembering what the daughter had spoken to her about. She had assumed that her daughter got the facts confused and lied! It was clear to her now that her daughter must have been telling the truth during that conversation all those moons ago!

 The mother looked at her daughter asking her “Darling why don’t you come over here and stand next to me?” The daughter complied with her mother’s requests and slowly walked over to her mother. Once the daughter was standing within the mothers reach, the mother jumped forward and pulled the daughter behind her before yelling out “WHAT ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO WITH MY DAUGHTER?!” 

From behind her the mother could hear her daughter stuttering “Mama?.. Why are you yelling at Jake?”

Although the mother was focused on her child and was making sure she was safe, she kept her eyes on the boy, afraid that if she dared blink the boy would disappear. She stared at the boy waiting for what felt like an eternity before the boy finally moved. 

The boy's expression changed from upset to almost… happy? He was smiling at the mother before he started laughing. He laughed hard, sending shivers down the mothers spine, and making the daughter start to cry. His laugh was quite right, it wasn’t a joyful laugh it was an annoyed laugh. Almost like he had been expecting this to happen. The boy stood up(?) and looked at the pair, still standing in the doorway, before cheerfully smiling at them and telling the daughter “Guess I’ll be seeing you later!” Before either the daughter or the mother could comprehend, the boy disappeared from their sight.

What went from a few days after the incident, turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, months turned into years. Before anyone knew it the little girl was not so little anymore and was off in the world. She had long forgotten about the boy she had once befriended. That was until one night when she was hanging out with her friends, she got reminded of the boy. “I remember that I met a ghost!” she told her friends quite happily. Her friends had mixed reactions to this news, some responded and asked about the boy while others responded and doubted her. The girl responded to the girls and described the boy to them in detail. As the girl described the boy to the girls their faces went from smiling to horrified. They sat there in shock until the girl finished at which she saw their faces and asked “What’s wrong?” The girls stared at her for a while before pulling out their phones, searching something, and then turning the phone so the girl could see. On the phone sat a picture of the boy from a news article. The caption of the article read “Local boy found dead on the streets. Foul play is expected.” The girl’s blood ran cold before she read further down to the final sentence on the page “This case is unsolved.”