"Let it go," I say to my older brother Franz as he continuously pulls my rubber band out of my thick, brown hair." He rolls his eyes at me and gives it back. It would've taken an Eternity to get it back if I had not threatened to tell our Dad. He tells us to get our shoes on and my brother gets up. I kind of sit there. I don't know why it just feels right to not get up.

     "Come on, Alice!" my Dad says impatiently.

 I get up even though something still doesn't fit, like trying to put two puzzle pieces together that would never fit no matter how hard you try. After a very long and annoying drive to who knows where, we finally arrived. My brother sighed like it was such a hard job to annoy me.

     "You know it is not that hard to just stop," I said to Franz."

    ""Stop it you two," my dad says loudly almost like a yell. That scares us so we stop.

    My dad's job is to guide tourists around a museum, but not any museum--- a ghost one! He loves stuff like that. 

    At first I didn't even look up, but when I did I was surprised and confused because my Dad took us to the museum where he works: How They Died

He said that they had a new and tragic ghost story about a boy in their latest exhibit. I'm surprised they're done with that. It's only been a few weeks or time flies. I catch up with Franz and Dad because I was too busy daydreaming. I get a cold feeling when we walk in. 

       "Ah, doesn't it feel great in here?"     

        "Yea," I lie.

         "Hey. Brian." I hear someone say out of the corner of my ear.

    "Hey Paul," my dad replied cheerfully. After what seems like an hour of them talking only about the ghost boy, he is finally done. His job is so annoying because it is just one more thing for kids at school to make fun of me for.  Why does this always have to come back on me? My best friend (or so I thought) told me that we couldn't be friends because of my dad's job. Then my other friend moved. I can't lose another one. 

    "Hey! Do you know if they have a section on Jacob Marley?" says a girl who looked to be about twelve years old. 

    "I don't think so, but we can look around," my dad answers. 

    "Hey Alice, can you help her find her way?" I look her way with the most tired face, but I decided it was just one thing and I could get my steps in instead of standing there. It would also get me away from Franz who's being a weirdo like usual. So I took my opportunity. When I looked over at him he was trying to get his tongue to touch his nose. She smiled and we went our way. 

    "So, Jacob Marley," I say. 

    She answers with a long sigh. "Yes, it's a school project."

,

    "Are you into ghosts ?" I say trying to change the subject. 

    "NO! Not at all!" she says so loudly I think my eardrums will die. 

    "But that might just be me" she says quietly enough so my eardrums might live another day. 

 I finally get the courage to answer as she looks bewildered at my horrified face and me covering my ears. I answered, "Me neither. I think that they are a myth."  I say still in a little bit of shock from that yell. "I don't think we have section on Jacob Marley" finally getting to the point of why we walked around the whole entire museum twice ---yes twice. "But I bet if we can go to the library I can help you find a few books on him," I say like a know-it-all. She answers with an "Ok" and says "We can go now." I ask my Dad and he gives us both money for the bus. 

When we get to the library I ask the girl what her name is because even though we talked the whole bus ride we never got to that. She looked at the floor and answers with a tiny squeak, "Kalli."

 "I love that name," I beam.

 She answers," REALLY? No one ever says that."

"I wonder why? My name is Alice, by the way. Let's get to the part that we came here for."We looked for an hour and only came out with five books. But at least I helped Kalli with her project for school.  

When I got back to the museum, my dad said it was time to go home.  I was in my room scrolling through all my texts. I felt like I was being watched. I don't know why I just felt like that. 

Then my brother ran into the room.  

I screamed. "Geez! You scared me!" 

"Why are you so jumpy today?" Franz slowly backed out of the room. 

After what felt like hours, my mom called me down for dinner. Sitting at the table I saw that smirk on Franz's face. 

My mom tried to start a conversation like she does every night, but tonight I don't feel like talking. I still felt like something was watching me, and still saw the Gremlin grin on my brother's face. Out of anger, I got up from the table and I sprinted back to my room. 

I was bewildered to see that my room was a mess! There were books on the floor, my desk was flipped over, and my comforter was soaked!

I could feel my heartbeat like it was in my hand. I knew my room was not like this before dinner! I looked through everything just to find bigger messes everywhere I searched. I thought my brother was pulling some kind of prank on me. I ran out of my room, down the stairs and slapped the stupid grin off my brother's face. Franz was mad. My mom was shocked, but too scared to say or do anything. But my dad who was neither scared nor shocked, yelled at me like there was no tomorrow. 

I ran. I felt so stupid. After dinner I tried to apologize, but he would not listen (not like he would anyway.) 

A few hours later I was texting my long distance friend everything that had happened: how I slapped my brother, how my dad talked to me about it, how he called the plumber, and that nothing was wrong with any of the pipes. I insisted it was a ghost, but why would they believe me? I knew it. I knew that it was a ghost and not just a coincidence.

I wanted to tell someone, but who? No one would believe me. I wanted to tell someone, but I could not hold it any longer... so I went to the bathroom and told the mirror! It would be the only thing that believed me. When I returned to my room I was astonished to see my curtains torn; there were 9 numbers written on my window.

               923208148

What could all of these random numbers mean? I had no clue, but I knew I needed to find out. First, I needed someone to help me. Second, I knew exactly who. I know you might be wondering who. Kallie.

I had helped Kallie, so maybe she would be willing to help me in return.     One of my most impressive traits is my memory.  And since I lived in a small town, it shouldn't be too hard to find her. Then it clicked. I remembered that she lived in my neighborhood. She was glad to help~ just not too happy it was for a ghost.

The next day she and I went to the library to begin researching. I didn't want to figure out who or what the ghost was as much as I wanted to unscramble the nine letters on my window. So we didn't get ghost books, we got books about English and codes. Kallie was better at taking notes and I was better at reading. Together, we got more work done and a lot of notes each in their own category.

In one of the chapters I read about how you can use numbers in correlation to letters; so A would be 1 and B=2 and so on. I told Kallie to write this decoding method down so we could try it later. After a while, we had recorded at least ten methods! Quickly,  we went back to my place to try them out. Kallie and I had forgotten how annoying my brother was. Every single time we were trying to decode something, he came into my room and distracted us. By dark, we had tried only two decoding methods (which were both not right). We were so tired we decided to pick up again in the morning. 

The next morning Kallie came over again and we got right back to work. By lunch time we had tried four more methods which were also not correct. Frustrated and starving, we went downstairs and searched through the fridge for food. We both agreed on the leftover spaghetti and meatballs. I separated it into two bowls and as I opened the microwave to heat it up I gasped, there was another set of numbers.

        011551521

Kallie and I looked at each other surprised.

Kallie shouted in anger, "NOW WE HAVE TO START ALL OVER."

We both saw it so much differently now that there was a second set of numbers. All of those codes that we tried before could all be right! After that we weren't hungry we just wanted to construct the numbers together.  We sprinted upstairs and were astonished to see a third set of numbers. I was bewildered, what could 014092018 mean?  Now we had not one-- not two-- but three pairs of numbers we had to build together. 

923208148

011551521

014092018

We were back on page one with all of the methods we recorded but we had to start somewhere. 

        method one: a is 1 b is 2 etc. 

             I W T H N H 

             A O E O U

             N     L  T R 

 that wasn't it, I felt like giving like just living knowing something paranormal was trying to connect and talk with me.

I finally realized that Kallie wasn't sitting right next to me like I thought she was. She couldn't have gone far, but when slowly started to get up to go find her, planted right on my door was yet another set of numbers:

            020016020

Even though I knew that I needed to find Kallie I needed to figure out what the numbers meant even more. With the set of numbers I had acquired that meant method one made sense! It spelled out," I WANT TO HELP NOT HURT."

 I was ecstatic. I figured it out! I had to find Kallie.

I ran down the stairs only to find Kallie eating the lunch I had prepared about an hour ago." I FIGURED IT OUT!"

 She started jumping in joy before I could even tell her what it meant. Apparently she told me she was going to go eat, but I was so hyper- focused in my research I didn't care. After a celebration I finally told her what I had figured out. When she went to go eat I found another code and all together it spelled:  "I want to help not hurt."