IWSC Round 7
Hogwarts Year 5
Theme: Potterwatch (write about a character that struggles to remain honest)
Special Rule: write from the perspective of a half-blood
Prompts:
1— Original Character
2— Invisible
3— A new house
WC: 2248

Angelo

"Look, honey! Our brand new house!"

I heard a woman's disjointed voice in the foyer and laughed to myself from my bedroom — the one I'd inhabited for almost a hundred years. Our brand new house. People always said that when they moved in, but this house was not new, not by any stretch of the imagination. The floorboards talked to each other at night, the walls buckled in distress from supporting a century-old roof, and the wind sang along to the storms that passed by, whistling through the windows that could no longer close all the way.

Yet, to every inhabitant, it was always a brand new house.

"Just for us?" asked a child's voice.

"Just us."

I chuckled again. People always thought they were alone here.

The house had seen many residents over the decades. It was most recently occupied by a pair of roommates, who made it their home after a family of four moved out when a third baby pressed them for more space. It sat empty for some time prior, and before that, it belonged to my family. None of them had known I was here; I was invisible to everyone — except for my father, of course.

My bedroom door cracked open, and the child entered, dragging a small suitcase behind him. He was just a kid, even younger than I was when I died — maybe only seven years old. He had large, tired circles under his eyes and the frown lines of someone much older than him, someone who could use a few more friends. The rattling in his suitcase indicated that he didn't have many possessions, which made me wonder how often he'd moved houses.

"Who are you?" he asked, stopping in his tracks.

He stared directly at me, his gaze a blinding spotlight that jogged my memory of what it felt like to be watched. It had been so long since I'd felt someone's eyes on me.

"You can see me?"

He nodded and began backing away toward the door.

Despite his initial fear, the room suddenly felt fuller and warmer — at least for me. I smiled at the possibility of a friend I didn't have to imagine.

"I'm Angelo!" I said, maybe a little too eagerly.

"I'm Dean."

"Nice to meet you, Dean!"

"Do you live here too?" Dean asked. His shoulders relaxed, and he stopped backing away from me. My giddiness must have made me appear less threatening.

"Yeah. I live here too," I said, even though it wasn't entirely truthful. I didn't think that he wanted to hear how I both lived and died in this very room.

"Cool," smiled Dean, "I've never shared a room with anyone before."

When his eyes sparkled, and his frown lines softened, I knew I had found a kindred spirit in Dean. He needed a friend just as much as I did.

Despite my lack of practice, being Dean's friend was easy. We grew closer, talking a little bit every day, and I learned that we had a lot in common. Dean moved around a lot, sat alone at lunch, and was always the new kid, struggling to make friends. In a way, we were both invisible, wandering about unnoticed.

It wasn't our only similarity. One evening, I overheard a conversation between Dean and his mother that felt much too familiar. They were arguing about something that happened at school — Elliot Wilson's bag had caught on fire, and he accused Dean of setting it.

"I didn't do anything!" cried Dean.

"I think you did, sweetheart." His mother's voice trembled slightly, and my heart sank, remembering how my own mother's words shook when I did things she couldn't explain. "I just want to know why."

"Elliot pushed me!"

"So you set his bag on fire?" she implored. "Where did you get the matches?"

"I didn't use matches," groaned Dean. "It just happened, and I don't know how!"

For a moment, his mother's eyes iced over, a detached expression replacing the warm and nurturing one typical of a parent. Dean saw it too, and my heart clenched for him because I'd seen that look before. When my mother looked at me with fear in her eyes, the sudden lack of love felt lonely and unnatural. It was the same emptiness I felt when I prematurely died, the very reason I turned down the afterlife and came back as a ghost. Like Dean, I still needed my mother's love, and it hurt not to have it.

The icy stare lasted for only a second, but it was too late. Dean was already huddled in his chair, crying, and I wished I could hug him and tell him that I knew how scary it felt to be so angry that a dish breaks out of nowhere. I remember coming home shaking, riddled with guilt because my schoolyard bully, Jack, was climbing a tree, and the branch disappeared from underneath him. I never meant for him to fall and break his arm, it just happened, but I knew it was my fault somehow. I couldn't explain it, and I definitely couldn't tell my mother why I was upset without her eyes turning cold and grey again.

My father understood why these strange things happened to me because they also happened to him when he was a child. He told me all about the special school I'd go to when I turned eleven, where I'd learn to control it, and I would meet more people like me.

But he made me promise not to tell my mother, at least not yet, because it would just scare her. She wasn't like us, and he didn't want to frighten her anymore than he already had. 'She just needs time to understand,' he told me.

Growing up, if I had questions about the stranger parts of my life, I had to ask my father. He had all the answers. But Dean didn't have a father — who was going to explain everything to him?

After the argument, I waited for Dean in our room. A smile spread across his tear-streaked face when he saw me.

"Hi, Angelo."

"Hi, Dean."

He wiped his eyes and sat down on his bed. "She's mad at me."

"Because you set Elliot's bag on fire?"

Dean nodded. "I don't know how it happened."

"I used to do stuff like that," I said.

"You did?"

"Yeah."

I told him about that disappearing branch and the familiar feeling of knowing I had caused it. I recounted the time I made Jack's tongue swell inside his mouth until he had no choice but to stop taunting me, and the day he found his sandwich filled with rocks and chipped his tooth on one of them. I told him how Jack eventually became so afraid that he stopped bothering me altogether.

Dean pondered me for a moment before asking, "How do I control it?"

"There's a school," I said. "You'll go when you're eleven."

"What's it like?" he asked excitedly.

"I don't know," I shrugged. "I never went."

Dean nodded in understanding, and I knew I didn't need to confirm why I never attended school — I'd never made it to my eleventh birthday.

Fidgeting with a loose thread on his bed, Dean kept his eyes down when he asked, "How did you die?"

"I got the flu."

It was only a partial truth, but it was the official one on my death certificate. I didn't think Dean should know the whole story: that it was a rare sickness, one 'of the magical sort' that only people like my dad and I could get. People like Dean. He was already wary of his magic, so there was no need to scare him further.

"There was no cure?" he asked.

"Not back then," I said.

But there was a cure — it just didn't get to me in time. It wasn't something that any of the non-magical doctors my mother hired to help me could figure out, and she never trusted the other doctors— the 'healers' — that my father brought in. By the time she relented, it was too late.

"I bet your parents were sad," said Dean.

"Devastated." I shuddered at my final memories, my parents sobbing over my bed, begging for more time with me.

"Is that why you came back as a ghost?"

I nodded. At ten, entering the afterlife alone would have been like taking an international vacation by myself or putting on grown-up clothes and going to my dad's job. I just didn't belong there, not yet.

"Was it nice to see them again?"

"It was great," I said with a bright and hopefully convincing smile, masking the pit in my stomach caused by the true memory of returning home to my grieving parents.

I didn't like thinking about my vanishing excitement when my father tried to hug me, but there was nothing to embrace, and I slipped through his arms like water draining from a fishing net. I didn't want to remember how my heart broke when I stood before my mother, and she saw right through me, unaware of my existence and unable to respond when I told her how happy I was to see her again.

"Dean, who are you talking to?"

His mother was at the door, having overheard Dean's half of our conversation. Her voice was shaky with trepidation, and she sounded like my own mother speaking with my father after my death. 'Why are you always talking to yourself?' she'd ask him. 'You've been acting so strange ever since Angelo…' Her voice would trail off; she could never say my name and 'died' in the same sentence, not until she accepted I was gone.

But I wasn't gone. I was right there, talking to my father.

"Don't tell her about me," I whispered to Dean.

Dean ignored my request. "I'm talking to Angelo."

I groaned when he gestured to me, and his mother's eyes narrowed into the empty space where I sat.

"Angelo? Who's Angelo?"

"He's a ghost."

Her jaw clenched, and she took a step back. "No, he's not. Ghosts aren't real, sweetie," she said, a surprising lack of conviction in her voice.

"Yes, they are! And he's right there!" yelled Dean, and his mother stiffened and crossed her arms, just like mine did when my father pointed at me from across the room. 'He's back. He came back to be with us. I know you can't see him, but please believe me…'

"You have a wild imagination," said Dean's mother. "No one is there."

Her eyes were cold again, almost fearful. But there was more to it — her refusal to humor Dean's 'imagination' sounded like a religious parent shushing her child for questioning God or the wife of a convict covering her ears to avoid hearing the evidence of her husband's crimes. It was dripping with doubt.

It reminded me of my father trying endlessly to convince my mother I had returned. At first, she responded by changing the subject whenever I came up in conversation. Then, she donated my old clothes, emptied my bedroom, and repainted the walls. When my father insisted I was still there, and I wasn't a memory she could paint over, she burned the photographs, as if doing so would prove to my father that I was truly gone. Her acceptance of my death was too firm, an overcompensation that suggested my father's attempts to sow doubt were successful.

We have to face the truth," she would say, with just as little conviction as Dean's mum telling him ghosts weren't real. "We have to learn to move on."

In time, she moved on, leaving the old house and its painful memories while my father stayed behind, still busy making new ones.

"Your mum believes in ghosts," I stated once she had left. "She's scared of them."

"But she can't even see them," said a confused Dean, as if that weren't the very reason she'd be afraid.

"Could your dad see ghosts?" I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer. His mother was too skilled at shutting down ghost-talk for Dean to be the first person in her life to require it.

Dean shrugged, "I dunno. Never met him."

"Well, mine could," I said. I smiled at the memory of my extra time with my father, when he'd come into my room at night to read bedtime stories, ignoring the fact that I couldn't sleep anymore. He'd explain how to make the perfect Old Fashioned, or how to fix a car, even though I would never grow old enough to drink or drive, and he'd show me how he used a wand because I never got the chance to learn. Dean's dad was probably just like mine. "I bet yours could too," I added.

"Maybe," said Dean, smiling through his response. "I'm glad I can see you."

His words warmed me right up. I had forgotten how much I craved a connection with a peer, a longing that strengthened as I watched my father grow old, pass away, and eventually continue into the afterlife where he belonged.

Dean was part of a different world, one he knew nothing about. But it wasn't just Dean who didn't belong; I didn't either, and finally, we both had someone to make life — and death — a little less lonely.

"I'm glad you can see me too."

Thanks for reading! I hope you liked this story. I had fun writing it!