Infinite

Secrets

𝄆 ♫♪ 𝄇
I've got so many secrets
Hidden behind these walls
Keep wondering if my parents would love me
If they saw who I've become
Oh, oh
Does it really matter,
All the things I've left behind
I've got so many secrets
And things I want to hide
Oh, oh
𝄆 ♫♪ 𝄇

Mari stared the CD as if it were worth more than anything in the world. She had plenty of CDs, and her CD player never gathered dust with how many songs she played in her room. Even with her step-mother's strict quiet rule, she didn't live without music. Scratch that. Couldn't live without music.

"Hey, did you ever find that CD of mine I accidentally left here just before your mom died?" Mari remembered, though she suspected Julie hadn't found it. If she had, she would've given it with the Sunset Curve CD.

"Sorry, I haven't seen it. I'll look again, but Carlos also might've taken it for his collection." Julie shrugged, wishing she could give her best friend back the CD with her music on it, but that wasn't possible. She knew how much the CD meant to Mari. How hard they'd looked when she first realized it was missing.

"It's alright. You don't have to look again. I just figured I'd ask while I remember." Julie understood where Mari was coming from.

"Sorry. I'll see you at school tomorrow, right?" Julie confirmed, which lifted Mari's spirits. After a year, she finally had her best friend back. Finally, things could go back to normal in Mari's world.

"Guys, are you thinking what I'm thinking?" An idea had popped into Luke's mind, one that would make Julie's friend's world if they managed to accomplish what he had in mind.

"It would be really nice to have a pizza right now?" Reggie thought more with his stomach than anything else, in case that wasn't clear.

"That's not... okay." Alex just shook his head at the more immature of his two friends, not following his train of thought at all.

"No. I'm thinking that we need to find Mari's lost CD. If she's anywhere near as talented as Julie—" A fact that Luke already knew, but couldn't admit, "—then we owe it to a fellow musician like her."

"And here I thought you were just pining over her because she was pretty," Reggie joked, but Alex definitely seemed interested in Reggie's stab at their bandmate. He hadn't noticed that Luke was transfixed by the living girl, but he realized, when he thought about it a little harder, that it was true. Luke truly was interested in her.

"I just want to help out a fellow musician. That's all." Luke truly didn't understand the complexity of his own feelings, but he did know that, after seeing her beautiful performance, that Mari deserved to have the whole world screaming her name as she played on the biggest stages anyone had ever seen.

The boys agreed, but definitely didn't believe that it was all just for a "fellow musician". Reggie and Alex exchanged a look, which was to meet up away from Luke and place a bet on when he would figure it out. After searching for over an hour, longer than anyone would've guessed their attention spans to be, they gave up. It was clear they weren't ever going to find it.

"I can't believe we just wasted an hour of our time," Reggie complained. "I could've done so many things in an hour."

"It's just an hour. We're here for the rest of eternity." Luke hopped on the couch, sighing. He was disappointed, but reality didn't always work in everyone's favor.

Luke pressed play, but what came out of the CD player wasn't anything near what he was expecting. The piano and violins perfectly complemented the silky voice coming from the CD player in the music studio. All three of them couldn't believe what they were hearing, but couldn't stop listening.

Mari's song was about wondering if her parents would still be proud of her after everything that's happened, and after all the secrets she felt she had to keep. It struck multiple chords (literally and figuratively) within the ghosts. They all had wondered the same thing more than once.

The CD stopped playing, leaving the room in a dead silence that none of the boys wanted to fill. So, that was how they stayed for several minutes. Silence. It was extremely uncommon, but the CD was also not expected either. The emotion that filled them was something they hadn't felt in a long time. It was as if everything that happened with their parents just happened the day before instead of twenty-seven years ago.

"Wow." Alex didn't know what to think, but he did know what to feel. That wasn't just the thing Mari wanted to say, but what he wanted to know himself. "I, um, need to get some air." He couldn't breathe, or at least feel like he could, and needed to get away. And it wasn't just because of that song, though it was the catalyst.

"Dude, just poof out." Alex had been trying to open a door, which was proving to be an unsuccessful task.

"Don't tell me how to ghost!" Alex's chest drew in closer, pulling the panic and humiliation into the horde of emotions he felt. After poofing away, he just wanted to forget, or at least process and rid himself of the feelings plaguing him. It was like being rejected by his parents all over again.

But, it wasn't just Alex that felt those emotions. Reggie also did, and not in a very different way. He'd watched his entire family fight and fight and fight, and he watched them destroy each other. No one in his family cared about him, much less what he did or didn't do in his life. It hurt, but he found a family with the two guys that had become ghosts with him.

"I'm gonna go, too. Get my mind right." That wasn't something Reggie often did. No, ever did. He kept his emotions bottled up and locked behind a jokester wall and music.

"Okay." Luke wasn't paying any attention to anything Reggie had said or what Alex had said before he left. Reggie didn't mind, since it seemed the song had a huge effect on them all. The bassist poofed away next, feeling as though Pasadena was the right place to go. After Julie had mentioned it the very first night, he thought about it constantly, though, and it seemed that time had come to go there and explore a place that had been on his mind not only for the last day, but for months before he died as well.

Reggie appeared in the middle of a street lined with places that reminded him of his childhood. Before his family moved to Los Angeles when he was eight, they lived in a small town that hadn't changed in, what seemed to be, a century. He couldn't remember where that was anymore, but it was a place that still held the air of childhood innocence that wouldn't be found anywhere else. No fights tainted those memories, and he was happy there were some memories that weren't painted with anger or fear.

"Oh, girl, that looks so fab on you! If I could rock stripes, I would." Reggie turned around, intrigued by the women behind him. It was yet another scenario where Reggie forgot he was dead.

"Well, you look good in just about everything else, so don't even try that with me." Reggie watched as two girls, no older than himself, walked out with a few pieces of clothes in their arms. "You did leave money and the tags for those, right?" That confused him, since it didn't seem common to leave money and clothes tags to pay for what they were taking. Why would a normal, living human being need to do anything like that?

"I did. You're lucky they're never open on Sundays so that we can get away with this." Reggie hadn't noticed, but they were right; the door was visibly locked with a padlock on the inside of the door. He was confused, before realizing that the girls must be ghosts like him.

"Look at that cute guy. He must be new to Pasadena, because I've never seen him before." The taller of the two girls, who had blonde hair and green eyes, whispered to her friend, who was five inches shorter and brown hair and brown eyes.

"Yeah, no kidding. And I'm loving the leather jacket." It finally occurred to Reggie that they were talking about him.

"You're really pretty, too." Reggie's suave comment threw both ladies off. They both shared a look before poofing away and leaving him in the middle of the living-people-filled street.

Author's Note: Okay the first part is really cute. Luke's crusade to find Mari's lost CD makes me wish I had a boyfriend. I do not. And probably won't for a while. The second half though... Did you guys guess that Reggie would actually go to Pasadena? Or find other (lady) ghosts in Pasadena? They do become a little more important later. Vote and let me know what you think in the comments. All the best, MistyRider921.