Ghosts {L.P.}

3:10

Ｇｈｏｓｔｓ Ａｒｅ Ｃｏｎｆｕｓｉｎｇ

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|• 1:47

Riya surveyed the crowd, gripping the neck of the guitar so hard she was positive she was about to snap it in half.

Luke, Alex, and Reggie had been an anomaly from the second Riya had met them. After all, what type of ghost just hung out in the middle of the street by some run down building, the least they could've done was go haunt the building from the inside. Or what type of ghost would poof in to some random girl's apartment just because she had a nice voice. Especially what ghost could just have their instrument poof into their hands as easily as they could once breathe.

Or, the greatest mystery of all, what kind of ghost could Riya physically touch. A ghost she could feel almost as well as she could feel any other living person. Luke, Alex, and Reggie were already a massive mystery in her book, and they just had to become even more intriguing by turning visible to the entire school while they played music to them all.

Riya could feel her palms beginning to turn sweaty, all the stress she had been going through in such a short amount of time couldn't be good for her.

Footsteps interrupted Julie's awkward chuckling as she clung to Riya's hand like a lifeline. The guy in charge of the audio visuals ran on stage, seemingly just as disturbed as the rest of the crowd if not more, after all, if anyone knew anything about tricks of light and disappearances, it would've been him.

"Hey, where'd the rest of the band go?" Julie and Riya shared a look before the former went back to her awkward laughter, trying to come up with some sort of cover story about why they had a trio of disappearing musicians who played with them.

"Wait. Were those holograms?" A member of Dirty Candy dressed in all purple spoke up happily, Julie sighing deeply before plastering on the fakest real smile she could muster to try to give the member of Dirty Candy the right in the situation.

"Yes!" Julie confirmed excitedly, finally releasing Riya's sore hand so she could wave her own around to emphasize her words. "Yes, they were holograms. I plugged it into the ceiling projector before the show. I'd explain it, but it involves algorithms and science stuff. Tell them Riya." Julie nudged the near-frozen Riya, forcing her out of her thoughts.

Riya held on to the guitar even tighter, the strings burning into her palm while she tried gulping away her fear and replicated Julie's previous actions, though her smile was significantly more obvious that it was more forced than the one Julie was using.

"Uh, yeah! Programs and algorithms, HDMI, binary and... other computer stuff." Not one person in the crowd seemed to know a lot about computers or programming in general, because they all cheered as if Riya had just said the most genius thing ever, which she hadn't.

"Okay, people," Principal Lessa's booming voice cut through the cheers, quieting the bustling crowd. "Show's over. Let's get back to class, please."

The watchful students didn't protest, rapidly filing out of the auditorium. There had been enough trouble with an unannounced show, no student wanted to get into even more trouble.

The realization suddenly donned upon Riya, she had just played the closest thing to a concert in a high school setting, not only that, but said show had been unsanctioned and therefore could get her in trouble.

Riya had never gotten in trouble before, at least not in a sense of her breaking the rules, more in the way her teachers put her in detention for scaring other kids with saying there were people there when there wasn't anyone according to them. Riya wasn't looking forward to dealing with the consequences, just thinking about how her father would punish her made her skin crawl.