A few hours later, after Brielle has swept, dusted, and organized a lot of the loft, Julie walks in for the first time in a year. The first thing she does, much to Brielle's surprise, is pull the white sheet that has been draped over the piano for the past year. Brielle has never even so much as had the idea to pull it off, only using the keyboard that has been in the loft every once in a while and sometimes the guitars up there.

"Brielle, you up here?" Julie asks, finding her friend staring at the instruments with admiration. "Did you find anything?"

"I just found this old CD. Looks kind of cool." Brielle pulls out the black CD with the name Sunset Curve on it in white, handing it to Julie. Popping it in the CD player, they both listen to the song on there, before starting to hear screams. Both girls cover their ears, weirded out by the fact that there is screaming of any kind considering how the first few seconds of the track sounded.

"Whoa! Whoa! How did we get back here?" Luke asks, realizing where they are, while standing next to Reggie and Alex, who are both disoriented as well. Julie screams, racing all the way to her room while Brielle just sits on the pullout couch, frozen with fear. Usually, when new, older guys came into her life, it wasn't a good thing. The boys are all screaming since Julie was screaming at their presence, but they quickly stopped soon after they realized it was just two normal girls, not scary witches or anything.

"Are you okay?" Brielle just sits on the couch, still frozen in her spot, unable to react to what is going on. All that went through her head was "new men. you move you get hit" and her brain just stopped intaking new information. "We're talking to you."

"Is she some kind of big doll or something?" Reggie walks over to her, before attempting to shake her and realizing that his hand goes straight through her body, before leaning on the bed, trying anything to move her, and figuring out he could in fact touch her on her foot long enough to shake her.

"Hey, what... what are you doing?" She asks, finally snapping out of her daze, and is honest-to-god scared for her life.

"Are you okay?" Alex sits next to her and she just scooches away from the boys all sitting on her bed.

"Get away from her." Julie demands, holding a cross, and the three guys get off of the couch, easing Brielle's mind somewhat. "Who are you, and what are you doing in my mom's studio?"

"You're mom's studio? This is our studio. Trust me, my... the grand piano is new and... and... and... wait, that's my couch!" Luke exclaims, jumping next to Brielle, who is pretty close to tears from fear. "That is definitely not my six string. Can you give me just one second? Just... give me a second. Thank you." Luke pulls in his three friends, trying to figure out what's going on. They think only an hour or so has passed, since it's still dark out, but it's been twenty-five years. "Guys, what is going on? How did she get her stuff in here so fast?"

"Maybe... maybe she's a witch. I mean, I could touch the blonde girl's foot. And there are chairs. On the ceiling." Reggie rationalizes, although not very rationally.

"Okay, there's no such thing as witches." Alex just looks at him like he's an absolute idiot, because his comment was definitely dumb.

"You sure? I used to think there was no such thing as ghosts." Reggie counters with a very valid argument.

"That's fair." Alex realizes, but he and Luke still know there's no such thing.

"Okay, so we're going with witch?" Luke asks, very confused by the whole conversation.

"We're not witches." Brielle interjects. She is very good at eavesdropping, mostly because that's how she stays alive.

"They're just scared. Let someone with a softer touch handle this." Alex turns back towards the girls, asking them a very, very dumb question. "Why are you in our studio?" Julie tries to put her cross through Alex and it doesn't work at all.

"Oh my gosh. How did you do that?" Julie asks, while Brielle just watches her friend, knowing the results beforehand.

"Clearly, you're not understanding... She doesn't get it." Brielle just kind of looks at him, shocked it took him that long to figure that one out. "Okay, look. We're ghosts, all right? We're just three ghosts, and we're really happy to be home. so, thank you for the flowers. They really brighten up the room."

"We're actually in a band called Sunset Curve." Luke interjects.

"Tell your friends." Reggie winks at the two of them, causing Brielle to freak out.

"Julie?" Brielle asks, starting to go back into her panic mode that she entered when the boys arrived.

"Hey, they can't hurt you, okay?" Julie says, sitting next to her and rubs her back.

"They... they grabbed my foot." A single tear slides down her face, which means she is scared beyond belief. Brielle is a tough girl, but she's been through so much that has scarred her that it's hard to be in specific situations.

"Last night was supposed to be a really big night for us." Luke interrupts the conversation, not even noticing Brielle literally shaking with fear and sadness. "It was gonna change our lives."

"I'm, uh... I'm pretty sure it did." Alex reminds him. Julie pulls out her phone, googling the band's name.

"What's that? What are you doing?" Luke points to the smartphone, confused out of his mind. Then again, he's from the 90s, where landlines and cord phones were still a thing.

"It's my phone. I'm googling Sunset Swerve." Julie says, typing the name into google.

"Sunset Curve." The boys all chorus, still very much making Brielle panic and hyperventilate while Julie focuses on the boys.

"Whoa. There is a Sunset Curve. You did die. But not last night." She continues reading off of her phone. "Twenty-five years ago?"

"What? No, no, no, no. Th-That's impossible. After we floated out of the ambulance, all we did was go to that weird dark room where Alex cried." Reggie recollects, before Alex tries to save his manliness by saying that they were all in that zone.

"But that was just for like an hour." Luke looks to his bandmates, still kind of confused. "We just showed up here."

"I'm just telling you what my phone says. See, here, you died in 1995. It's now 2020." Julie reads, and Alex comes to the realization that Julie is correct.

"Wait. So... so it has been twenty-five years. I have been crying for twenty-five years? How is that possible?" Alex lashes out.

"Julie, I think I need to go home." Brielle says to her friend as she finds one of the thousands of articles on Sunset Curve.

"No." Julie holds her friend's arm to keep her from leaving.

"Thought you were afraid to come out here." Carlos comes sauntering in all manly. "You talking to, oh Brielle. Hey. Dinner's ready. How's your ghost friend?"

"Hi, Carlos. I think I'm gonna go home for dinner. But I'll see you around, okay, bud? And we can discuss your game tomorrow, how does that sound?" Brielle says, pulling herself together for her honorary little brother.

"Okay, cool. See you." Carlos says, walking away.

"Brielle, please. You can't go home." Julie pleads, but Brielle's mind is already made up.

"Look, I promise I'll come back if it's bad okay? But you need to go eat." Brielle shoves her friend off the bed as she scooches to the edge, leaving her with the guys.

"Wait, what's your name?" Julie turns around, kind of upset that Brielle is going home and that the boys are here.

"It's Julie." She says, and Brielle responds with her own name.

"I'm Luke. This is... this is Reggie. And that's Alex," Luke introduces his bandmates to the two girls. "What's your deal, anyways?" Luke asks Brielle as she stands up, before crashing back to the floor. She pulls up her jeans and pulls off her shoe, sock, and starts peeling away at the fake skin surrounding a prosthetic foot. "Hold up. What's that?"

"A prosthetic foot." She mutters, trying to realign it so she can stand, easily fixing the issue in a few seconds.

"A... a prosthetic?" Alex asks, and Brielle nods, before making it all look like she's a normal girl.

"No swimming, running, or trampolines, but it's life." She says, shrugging and standing up.

"Well, we're not letting you go back home. You heard Julie." Luke just stands in front of her, even though they can't really stop her.

"I'll be just fine." She walks straight through him, heading back to her house, trying to listen for the familiar sounds of glass breaking and screaming. It usually takes up to a minute to hear them, but she starts hearing glasses start to break not even five seconds after arriving.

"I promised Julie I would go back. Please, just don't let the guys be there when I get back."

Back at Julie's house, Julie is eating dinner with her father and brother and an extra plate they can now say was supposed to be for Brielle instead of their mother. They're eating leftovers, again, just as their aunt arrives with a home cooked meal.

"Leftovers, again. I brought my pasteles and arroz con pollo. I'll put it in the fridge and you can have it tomorrow." Aunt Victoria wraps the food up and sets it in the fridge before seeing the place setting that was technically originally for Brielle. "Who is this for?"

"Brielle was supposed to join us, but she went home instead." Julie frowns, shoving more spaghetti in her mouth.

"Oh, alright." She frowns, before mentioning Julie being kicked out of the music program, something she had yet to tell her dad.

"I forgot to mention. Julie and Brielle have been cleaning out mom's studio. Hopefully, we can get the house on the market and get some offers soon." Victoria's face lights up at the sound of that, since she's the one who was egging Ray, Julie's dad, to move away to help them "move on". She misses her sister as much as Ray misses his wife and the kids miss their mother. The five of them were so close, and have only gotten closer since her death. But of course, now is when the boys decide to roam the rest of the house, freaking Julie out, but she keeps her mouth shut. But not shut enough.

"You need to leave." Julie whispers, but since no one else sees the ghosts, they think she's talking to her aunt. "I mean, you should be at pilates. Thanks for the food, tía."

"It's nothing. And now that you're no longer in the music program, you can concentrate on classes that matter." Ray and Carlos look at Julie, genuinely shocked with the fact that she's not doing the one thing she loves to do, or at least used to love when her mom was around. "You got the email from the school, right?"

"Yeah. We're still discussing it." Ray says, giving Victoria the perfect cue to leave, and she heads out to pilates, while Carlos tries to delay the inevitable. "Why didn't you tell me? You made me lie to your aunt."

"Sorry. I was going to tell you after dinner." Julie looks down at her half full plate, disappointed in herself.

Author's Note: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and any other holiday you're celebrating this week! If you want, comment a gift you got (from Santa, your parents, siblings, or whoever else). So, what do you think about the prosthetic foot? The one she has is actually a real design (or real according to Google), which is why Reggie could touch it, since it's not alive (I can make up my own rules, don't tell me otherwise). I was definitely excited to write this chapter, just to see how Brielle reacts to the boys differently from Julie. Vote, comment, not that I can make you guys do anything, and hope you guys enjoyed this chapter.

Loves,

mistyrider921

~❣~