Page 69 of A Very No Strings Halloween
I pull out my phone to call him, but I find a text notification from Piper.
Piper:Hey! It’s Halloween and I just realized I never checked in with you about the ghost! LOL that was the first time I have ever said that to anyone! Did you end up using the Ouija board?!
“OMG,” I say to myself. This is the text I didn’t even know I desperately needed.
Me:Hey! Can U talk RN?
I am mortified that I didn’t just type out the wordsyouandright now, but whatevs. And now I’m remembering that people her age don’t like talking on the phone. And then I remember that peoplemyage don’t like talking on the phone either.
There’s a knock at the door.
“I’ll get it,” Chelsea says.
“Thank you!”
Instead of replying to my text, Piper calls me. She is truly an extraordinary young person.
I answer immediately. “Piper!”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Nothing, hi, I just wantedto talk to you about the, uh…” I go into my bedroom and shut the door so the trick-or-treaters and their parents can’t hear me talking about a ghost. “I just wanted to chat about the ghost.”
“Did you contact it?!”
“Yes.” I tell her everything I know about the ghost and what happened when we used the Ouija board and what happened yesterday. “It saidTell himon the mirror, Piper. I saw her write it.”
“I totally believe you. Wow, that’s so intense… Hang on one sec, okay?” I can hear her muffled voice talking to someone in the background. “Hey. I have to get back to the party because they’re gonna play a slow-dance song, but it sounds to me like there’s still something the ghost needs from you. They say that Halloween is when the veil between our world and the spirit world is lifted, so if you want to communicate with Lara, now would be a good time. But don’t go without Billy. It sounds like she’s pretty upset.”
I don’t have the heart to tell her that Billy’s at a party without me.
“Yeah, for sure. I’ll be fine.”
“I hope that you and Lara can both get closure soon, Donna,” she says earnestly. And then she gasps. “Oh my God, they’re playing ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ by Shawn Mendes. Gotta go—bye!”
And she hangs up.
I hope she gets to slow dance with a boy who has an amazing butt.
I open the bedroom door and hear Chelsea calling out to me. “Donna! Babe, you gotta come see these costumes—they’re so good!”
I join Chelsea at the front door and say hi to the mom and little boy in the corridor. The mom is dressed as Harry Potter’s white owl, Hedwig, and her son’s costume is a sealed envelope from Hogwarts. They are, indeed, such good costumes.
But the Hogwarts owl post reminds me of something.
Lars once told me that while his wife was sick and dying there was a point where she couldn’t talk anymore, but there was something she needed to tell him, so she wrote him a letter. He was too sad to read it and then he was too busy arranging the funeral. After the funeral he couldn’t find it, and then later he thought maybe it got taken away with a piece of furniture when he sold a lot of the things that were in the house.
That must be it.
The letter must still be somewhere in the house.
I need to find that letter and take it to Lars’s grave.
“I have to go,” I say to Chelsea.
Hedwig and the Hogwarts mail give me the side-eye as they walk away.
“Your costumes are amazing!” I call out to themom and her son. “They’re so good they reminded me of something really important! Happy Halloween!”
