The Smiling Man

The Woods

Though I had already moved schools once, I was moving again after fifth grade. My dad didn't like his job and definitely didn't like the school. I didn't want to leave, or if I did, I wanted to go back to my original school, but he had already bought another house. A house far away from both Matt and Jack. I was going to a school that was smaller than any I had ever been to before. Though, I did know two people that went to the school, not well, but I knew who they were. Two guys that I had met once over the summer, Jake and Brant. So here I was, starting at a new school for the second time. It sucked, but little did I know, the new school wouldn't be the only thing that sucked.

I woke up in a cold sweat at three in the morning. The nightmares started in the summer, when we moved to the new house in the middle of nowhere. Woods surrounded the house, so the smiler and the other person, toothless, could stand at the edge of the woods and just stare. It ate away at me in my older years. I started to understand that I was being watched, but still couldn't tell my dad, it would ruin him. We would move. I couldn't do that again, not after already moving houses once. So I kept quiet, telling no one. The only person who knew about them were Jack and Ryan. I lay awake until the piercing sound of my alarm went off and I turned it off immediately. I got my phone and took a shower, and I heard my dad open my door in my room to wake me up, but like the past few weeks, I was already up taking a shower. I got ready for school and saw that my dad was already getting into the car, so I rushed out.

"Ready?" he asked, as I hopped in the car. I just shook my head, of course I wasn't ready to be forced to make a new group of friends at a new school, definitely when I was being watched. We pulled into the new school, and I hopped out, not saying bye. Not on purpose, I was just still too tired to do much interaction. I didn't even notice him waving through the window as he pulled out. I walked into the new school, and immediately felt uncomfortable from the amount of eyes staring at me when I walked in. They were all staring at the new kid, but oddly enough, they stopped after a second or two and went back to their normal conversations. I heard foot steps from the cafeteria, which was on my left.

"Colton? Is that you?" I heard Brant say as he ran up to me with Jake and another person I didn't know..

"Yea, it's me, haven't seen you since Katelyn's birthday party," I said to the both, trying to hide my excitement that I was already recognized by two people at a new place. Katelyn was a girl that I knew because my dad knew her mom. She didn't go to this school though, she went to a school that was a few miles away in the next town over.

"You've met Jake of course, but this is Derek," he said, gesturing to the guy behind Jake. I waved and he waved back and we all started laughing.

I pulled out my schedule they copied too, seeing what I was doing. They all already must of known they were in the same class, but I wanted to see if I was with them. Luckily enough, I was. I silently cheered in my head.

"We're all in the same class," I said, hiding my excitement well.

"That's actually kinda odd since there's three classes we could have been put in," Derek said, with both confusion and laughter in his voice.

"Don't think about just be happy that Colton isn't in a class with nobody he knows," Jake said, and we all laughed again. I looked out the giant glass doors in the front and saw someone behind the road that was beside the school. A person that had a giant smile across their face. A person that had never terrorized me at school, or anywhere other than at someone's house. So I looked back at the three kids I now knew and started to walk to my first period class with them when the bell rang.

The whole day I was uneasy from the events that had been happening and seeing the smiling person outside of my school. I hadn't really gotten a real laugh in because of how tired I was. Once I started thinking, I convinced myself that what happened that morning was just a hallucination because of my sleep deprivation. Only once did someone ask about the dark circles under my bags, so I thought that they couldn't be to bad. I was wrong, people were just too polite to point it out since I was the new kid. I was glad that Brant and Jake had become my friend so fast, since they were what you called the popular kids in our grade. They introduced me to a few new people, but I stuck with them pretty much the whole day. The days turned into weeks, but I hadn't seen any of people that stood outside my windows. After a while, Brant asked if he and Jake could come over that weekend, and I gladfully let them. I still hadn't slept much and I wanted more people to start coming over anyways. That way, I had reasons to stay up late. I asked my dad that wednesday and he said yes quickly. He was just glad I was making friends, I think he was worried that since I joined in sixth grade, I wouldn't make many friends and I would be a loner. I explained to them the woods surrounding my house, but said nothing about toothless or the smiler. I didn't want to lose my friends that fast. I still wore long sleeved shirts so no one would see the deeply cut four. They had cut it the deepest in fourth grade, and the scar was faded, but still visible. I told them I had never explored the woods, and they had shock on their faces.