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Julie feels a little dumbstruck when she finds the first letter. It lies abandoned on the coffee table in front of the TV, a pen strewn carelessly atop of it, as if whoever had written it was in a rush to get somewhere else. The lettering is easily discernible as Carlos’ handwriting and as Julie doesn’t plan to snoop, she doesn’t mean to read anything written on that piece of paper. And she wouldn’t have, had the “Dear ghosts,” at the top of the page not caught her eye.
“Huh.” Julie picks up the letter, focusing on these first two words she’s already read, so as not to invade her brother’s privacy. She’s curious though, and it seems very tempting to just read whatever her brother addressed to her friends.
“None of my business,” she decides finally, putting it back down again and sliding it beneath the pen. “He’s allowed to have his own secrets.”
As she walks away, she can’t help but mutter: “I thought he still believed our house to be creepy haunted, not I-can-send-them-letters haunted.”
While confused about it at first, the letter doesn’t take up all that much of her brain space. She’s got a lot of other things to worry about: school, band rehearsals, friends, guys who want to date her, … A random letter that Carlos wrote to the ghosts he thinks are haunting that house does not take priority over those. Plus, it’s not even the weirdest thing Carlos has done when it comes to ghosts. He’ll move on to something else soon enough. She even starts to forget about it.
That is, until she takes a break during a band rehearsal. She lowers herself on the couch while sipping on her water when her eye catches on a similarly colored sheet of paper with her brother’s handwriting. The headline reads “Dear Ghosts”.
“What’s that?” she asks. Julie doesn’t think it still counts as snooping in her brother’s affairs if the ghosts that the letter is addressed to tell her about it themselves.
“Oh,” Reggie leans over her to see what she’s looking at, “your brother leaves them around for us sometimes.”
Julie gapes. “He’s sent multiple?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve been working on sending one back, but there are too many steps involved,” Luke says, “we have to get the paper from somewhere, then the pen, and then write. That is, if we can agree on a text.”
Alex grimaces. “We managed to send him a smiley face on a post-it note though.”
“That… sounds a little creepy.”
“Yeah, he was a little spooked.”
Julie pinches the bridge of her nose. She knows that she will regret what she’s about to say.
“Do you want my help with answering his letter?” She stops. “So you don’t have to send him any more creepy post-it smileys.”
It doesn’t take long for her to be covered in the weight of three ghost hugs. She still doesn’t quite get how the rules work for when she can touch them and when she can’t, but she does appreciate the universe letting them hug her at this moment. “You’re the best,” one of them mumbles into her hair.
Their rehearsal quickly forgotten, they spend the rest of the afternoon lounging on the couches and dictating a text in the boys’ case, writing it down on paper in Julie’s.
Finally, Julie softly places the sheet of paper on the table in front of them. They look at it in silence.
“Won’t Carlos know it was you who wrote it?”
“Hm, yeah,” Julie tilts her head in thought.
“Maybe we could sign?” Luke suggests.
Alex nods. “We already have the pen and the paper right here, we should be able to sign our names.”
“Okay!” Reggie leans over to grab the pen, “then let’s do this!”
Julie watches them take turns, struggling but managing to write it down at last. Alex even puts a “P.S.: We can’t write very well, so Julie wrote this down for us.” below their signatures.
He sends the other boys a self-satisfied smirk.
“Whoa, you’re becoming good at this,” Reggie remarks.
“I’ve been training with Willie.”
Luke nods in approval.
“So where do I put it?” Julie asks finally. “So he will find it and know it’s from you guys?”
“You can just give it to him,” Luke says, “he’ll know that you know about the letter anyway once he’s read it.”
Julie looks to the other two, but both of them nod.
“Okay.” She gets up. “You coming with me?”
The three of them shuffle after her as they follow her outside and then back into the house.
They find Carlos in his room, the door closed. Julie knocks, gripping the letter tight.
“What’s up?” he asks when he opens the door to see his sister in front of it.
“I have a letter for you,” Julie says cheerfully.
“A letter?” Carlos furrows his brows in a way that makes Julie believe he’ll call her weird.
She rolls her eyes. “Just take it.” She shoves the letter in his hand. When he looks down at it, his eyes widen. He takes it and closes the door in her face.
“You’re welcome!” she yells through the door but retreats to her own room.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her friends walk through Carlos’ door to follow him into his room. She knows they’ll come back to her once Carlos finishes reading.
And soon enough, she hears the tell-tale sound of three ghosts poofing into her room.
“He started writing his reply,” they say, all smiles. She thinks it went well. Carlos’ satisfied smile at the dinner table confirms it. As do the letters she continues seeing around, as well as the replies she helps write down until her friends are confident enough that they can manage writing a whole text by themselves.