Being Dead Read Free Page A

did you or did you not have a nasty little surprise for me in the pond, and then you turned on the pump once you had tricked me into going in?"
    "You were in the pond?" he asked. "With all the, like, fish poop and frog slime?" For a boy Danny could be awfully prissy. When he saw that I was still waiting for an answer, he added, "I never left my room."
    And whatever I'd seen in the pond, on second, rational thought, wasn't anything Danny could have had anything to do with—he'd been helping tote stuff indoors from the car and the truck, then he'd been arranging his room the whole while since. He'd had no time to set up a joke.
    I would have preferred a Danny joke to just about any other explanation I could think of.
    It had probably been a sick or mutant frog, I tried to convince myself, or some exotic fish. If there could be bottlenose dolphins and hammerhead sharks, who was I to say there was no such species as a finger-finned something-or-other? I hadn't seen what I thought I'd seen, I told myself.
    And I kept telling it to myself all the while I picked my clothes up off the floor of the closet This time I made sure the clothes were securely on the hangers, and the hangers were properly hooked on the bar. And the feet that some of the clothes were damp only meant that I should have changed out of my wet shorts before starting.

    I hadn't made up my mind if I was going to tell my parents about the weirdness of the afternoon—the big problem being
what
I could tell them—when they came home with the second vanful of stuff. It was nine o'clock in the evening.
    Mom walked in complaining about the Honda. "Brenda," she asked, "did you notice when you were driving last night that it had a tendency to pull to the right?"
    Hungry, and hot and tired from scrubbing the grease off the kitchen cabinet doors and from peeling off the Con-Tact paper that the shelves were lined with—Con-Tact paper that came off in one-inch strips—I demanded, "How come you immediately assume I did something to break the car?"
    Hungry and hot and tired herself, Mom snapped, "I'm not accusing you of breaking the car. I'm asking if you noticed that the car was pulling to the right."
    "No," I said.
    I didn't add that I had been too miserable about seeing my friends for the last time to notice much of anything. Well, I had run off the pavement, then back on, but surely cars aren't
that
delicate.
    Dad said, "It probably just needs to be aligned. I'll make an appointment next week."
    No doubt ticked off by my tone, Mom muttered, "It didn't need to be aligned yesterday morning when I drove it" To my father she added, "She isn't even supposed to drive at night."
    Here we go again,
I thought.
    Dad, the peacemaker, said, "It's probably been out of alignment since this spring, when there were all those potholes. You just noticed it today because the car was riding low from all the stuff packed in it" Then he added—his usual complaint—"This family has too much stuff. Come on, let's unload, then we'll go out for pizza. We've got all of tomorrow to finish unpacking."
    "Think Westport has a pizza place?" I scoffed, not willing to make peace that easily.
    "No," Mom said, "I think you'll have to hunt down some elk all by yourself, shoot it, skin it, and cook it over an open fire, because we've moved to Westport just to torment you."
    And she tells
me
not to be sarcastic.

    By the time we got back and had our showers, I wasn't in bed until after 1:00 A.M. I figured I'd be asleep in ten seconds. The last night in our old house, Dad had already drained my water bed, and I had to sleep on the couch. So, even if I hadn't gotten in at three—which was about two and a half hours later than I'd admitted to when my parents asked—I wouldn't have had a good night's sleep. But now here I was, exhausted from a long day's work, in my own cozy water bed, and I started to drift off right away.
    I was so for gone I wasn't alarmed when I felt the mattress jiggle under me.
Traci's