There was in fact a small white boy sitting crisscross in the grass ahead of us. He was hunched over with his arms tucked up to his sides. Beside him there was a paper lunch bag.

  “Are we supposed to eat the kid?” Jake whispered in a sort of awe.

  “Or maybe we just take his lunch,” Tyler said.

  “How’d he get here?” Ava asked. “Maybe he’s trapped like us.”

  “Hannah, are you sure you asked for food and not, you know, a little kid?” Tyler asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. There’s a pretty big difference between children and food... for me anyway.

  “Hey kid!” Ava shouted and started running towards him.

  “What the HELL!” Jake lunged to hold her back and missed. “Why is she always running off?”

  But we couldn’t just let her run toward some random kid alone in this place. So, we chased after her.

  So much walking and running and standing. I was exhausted. Once we reached Ava and the kid, I collapsed.

  “Hey little guy,” Tyler was saying. “How’d you get here?”

  The little guy in question might as well have been a statue for all the answers he was giving. Jake snapped in his face, and he didn’t even flinch.

  Jake threw his hands up in disgust. “Great! Just great!”

  Then he made the mistake of reaching for the kid’s lunch bag. The boy sprang to life, snatching his bag away from Jake who had jumped a mile in the air. Ava shrieked and Tyler stumbled back.

  “Hey!” A voice from behind us shouted.

  I twisted on the ground to see who it was.

  A little girl with brown pigtails that bounced with every step was advancing on us with a look that could kill.

  “Stop messing with him! Can’t you see he’s sad!”

  Jake raised his hands guiltily and stammered, “I didn’t- I wasn’t tryna-”

  The little girl stomped over to Jake and shoved him... But her hands went right through his body like he wasn’t even there.

  Jake looked down at his stomach, where he should’ve felt the push, in confusion. A little boy appeared out of nowhere, sprawled on the ground behind him.

  The boy scrambled up off the ground, stuck his tongue out, and then ran off. I watched him run but a couple steps away he just disappeared.

  Tyler’s jaw dropped to the ground, and she stared at the girl. Ava was rubbing her glasses on her shirt and squinting at the girl. Jake gazed at the girl in astonishment, absentmindedly patting his stomach. Whoever she was, she had our full undivided attention. And that’s including the little boy’s. He was staring up at her like she was an angel.

  “Sorry, some people are just jerks,” she said to him. It didn’t look like she was even aware of our existence.

  The boy nodded with his mouth hanging open.

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  “My name’s Abigail,” she extended a hand.

  “Colin.” He wiped his nose with his hand before reaching to shake Abigail’s. She withdrew it quickly.

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “Ok.”

  “Come on! I wanna show you a frog on the jungle gym!”

  “Ok!”

  And they ran off together, leaving the boy’s lunch sitting there. Just as the bully had, they both disappeared after taking a few steps.

  We were left standing alone in the emptiness. The brown paper lunch bag was the only evidence that the children had been there at all.

  “What was that?” Ava asked.

  Jake finished patting himself down and turned to look intently at the abandoned lunch. “If I grab it, do y’all think that little ghost girl will come back?”

  I scanned the grass around us. My brain still couldn’t grasp the sudden appearance and (the even suddener) disappearance of those kids. What the hell was the journal doing?

  Jake took tiny little steps forward and then snatched up the bag. We all glanced around fearfully. Would the little girl come back? Had we just triggered her wrath?

  Nothing happened.

  Jake let out a deep breath and then opened the bag. “No fucking way,” he said.

  He turned the bag upside down and out fell three peppermints and an unwrapped pickle.

  “Is this the journal’s idea of food?”

  “Jake what if that’s all the food we get? You just dumped that pickle on the ground,” Ava hissed.

  Jake winced but knelt to pick the pickle of the ground. It looked disgusting but he wiped the grass off with his shirt. “You want it?”

  Ava glared. “No.”

  Jake shrugged and took a bite. “If this is all we get then I’m taking it.”

  Tyler spoke up. “Remember how that tombstone said mom?”

  I nodded. You could still see the sad old tombstone from where we stood.

  Jake took a loud bite of the pickle, obviously disinterested in our conversation.

  “What if the tombstone is for the little boy’s mom,” Tyler said. “That little girl, Abigail, said he was sad. Maybe it’s because his mom passed away?”

  “The journal is showing us stuff from this kid’s life,” I said, realization dawning on me. “Does that mean-”

  “It’s his journal!” Tyler said. Everything was starting to make sense.

  “Huh?” Jake mumbled. Ava didn’t seem to be following either.

  “How could it be the boy’s journal? It’s so grown-up sounding,” she said. “And creepy.”

  “We could ask it,” Tyler said.

  We sat down in a circle and I pulled the journal out again.

  I wrote, ‘Is this the little boy’s journal?’ It felt like the journal was playing games with us. Making us chase after clues and look like fools. I hated it, but mostly it made me feel very uneasy. It seemed as if we were at the complete mercy of this thing. We had to be careful how we talked to it.

  Slowly the answer came: ‘Yes, in a way. And yes, he is a little older now as Ava seems to have realized.’ I turned the journal so the others could see.

  “It said my name?” Ava whispered. “How does it know my name? I never wrote it down!”

  “It’s magic,” Jake said which shut Ava up, but she still wore a troubled look.

  “It’s like a psychotic ad campaign,” Tyler said. “It’s showing us memories and things from its past owner to show us what its capable of.”

  I thought back to what the journal had said when I’d asked it what it wanted from us. The way the ‘you’ had stood out in red ink. It sent a chill down my spine. I nudged the journal further away from me.

  “Ok but if it wants to show us what it can do why is it showing us a creepy tombstone and a boy getting bullied,” Ava said.

  Tyler didn’t have an answer for that. “I’ve got no clue, but maybe we should just keep talking to it, keep wishing for things and it’ll keep showing us memories.”

  It all sounded very wishy-washy to me.

  “Wait,” Jake sat up a little. He’d finished his pickle. “We can just wish for anything we want?”

  Tyler shrugged.

  Jake reached for the journal. “Leme hold it for a sec.”

  “Wait don’t give it to him,” Tyler said, unnecessarily. “What are you going to wish for?”

  Jake frowned, “Just some more food. Those peppermints aren’t going to cut it.”

  Tyler, Ava, and I held a silent meeting with our eyes. Ava didn’t seem to care what happened and Tyler wasn’t indicating that I shouldn’t give Jake the journal. So, I did.

  He rubbed on the cover and muttered.