Here Lies Linc Read Free Page A

in
junior high
, you’re embarrassed. You know, you never used to think twice about my job when you were with the Ho-Hos.”
    “I know,” I said, holding back a sigh. “It’s hard to explain. But I think I’d get a lot more out of the day if I could blend in with the other kids.”
    “Don’t any of your friends already know what I do?”
    I let my pent-up sigh whoosh out as I sank down in my place at the table again.
What friends?
Ever since I had switched to Plainview, Lottie kept referring to this mysterious group of “your friends,” even though I had never mentioned meeting anyone new. “What are your friends up to this weekend?” she would ask. “Do any of your friends ride the bus?” As if I had a fresh crop of buddies lined up like rows of corn, just waiting for the pleasure of my company.
    “Nope,” I said quietly. “We don’t really talk about our parents that much.” I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Lottie that so far, I was running on empty in the friends department. I gave myself a little shake and tried to make a joke. “Somehow I haven’t gotten around to telling them my mom is Charlotte Landers,
Dr. Death
. ”
    Lottie’s soft chuckle came drifting over the phone lines. “Dr. Death, huh?”
    “Please, Lottie?”
    “Fine,” she finally said. “I’ll play along just this once, for the field trip. Even though it might be difficult, considering I won’t have seen you for a whole week.” Then she started to wobble, ready to change her mind. “But what if I go to a PTA meeting sometime, or what if I have a parent-teacher conference with Mr. What’s-His-Name? He’s bound to make the connection sooner or later.”
    I rolled my eyes around in their sockets. “His name is Mr. Oliver. And c’mon, Lottie,
PTA meeting
? You?”
    “Oh, all right,” she said. “You win.”
    “Thank you,” I breathed.
    Then I let my mind race ahead. “Lottie? There’s one more thing.”
    “What is it?”
    “Are we going anywhere near Dad’s wall?” I needed to prepare myself. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had felt like visiting my father’s little block of stone.
    Even from a thousand miles away, I could see Lottie sitting on the bed in her hotel room, blinking her silvery gray eyes closed, the way she always does whenever she’s forced to think about Dad.
    “No,” she said after a few seconds. “We’ll be staying in the old part of the cemetery.”
    “Okay.” I found myself nodding into the phone. So far, so good.

W HEN THE H O- H OS FOUND OUT I was transferring to public school, they tried to stage an intervention. Sebastian and Vladka showed up at my house one afternoon at the beginning of September, right before classes started. I sat between them on my front porch steps, looking back and forth while they told me how terrible Plainview would be.
    “I came from that place, remember?” Sebastian said. His face was so sweaty, his glasses kept sliding down his nose. “I know what I’m talking about. It’s just like life in ancient Egypt. You’ll know who the pharaoh is right off the bat. Then you’ve got the high priests and nobles—all the jocks and the good-looking people. And under them there’re the slaves and peasants—everybody else.”
    “You will be a peasant,” Vladka whispered in her leftover Russian accent. She sounded just like a fortune-teller.
    Of course Vladka’s prediction turned out to be right. I was a peasant—a fact that became clearer with each passing day of junior high. So, on the day of the field trip, on a crisp afternoon in early October, I took my place in the front of the bus with the rest of the peasants while the high priests and nobles held court in the back. They yelled jokes across the aisle and laughed and shoved into one another whenever the bus took a sharp corner. Anybody listening would have thought we were headed to Disney World instead of some sleepy old cemetery barely four miles away from school.
    I didn’t feel like