Free A Fate Totally Worse Than Death by Paul Fleischman

replied.
    â€œI’m telling the truth!” shouted Danielle. “And I’m telling it for your own good!” She gazed at him, imploring him both to see her as his savior and to stop so that she could catch her breath. Her appeals went unheard. He increased his speed, seeming anxious to be rid of her.
    â€œShe’s not real!” she cried. “There’s no blood in her body!” She withheld Helga’s connection with Charity, fearing it might increase his devotion.
    â€œHer body seemed warm-blooded enough when we were kissing last night.”
    Like a tranquilizing dart, the line halted Danielle. Drew strode briskly onward.
    â€œThis is no joke!” she screamed at him. She took a few steps, then clung to a street sign, wheezing hoarsely. “I’m
serious!”
    â€œTry ‘delirious,’” Drew called back. He vanished around a corner.
    Lungs aching, Danielle sat on the curb, inhaling deeply and sobbing. She was used to getting her own way and seethed at Drew for disregarding her grand plan. She now detested him as passionately as she’d loved him ten minutes before. She vowed he would pay for spurning her.
    It was then that she remembered
Honeymoon in Hades
and realized it held the solution to all her problems.

CHAPTER 13
    â€¦â€¦â€¦Brooke grasped the wheelbarrow’s wooden handles, lifted with a dramatic groan, and steered the mountain of compost toward the garden. It was late afternoon on Thursday. She’d made the same trip thirteen times and felt like a Chinese peasant from the pages of
The Good Earth
, which her class was reading in English. She resembled one, too, she reflected, in her baggy workshirt and big-brimmed straw hat. Plus her short stature, she reminded herself. She’d lost another half-inch that day. Only her Walkman and headphones, transmitting the latest release by Pus, placed her in present-day America.
    She dumped her load beside the huge garden and squeegeed the sweat from her face with her finger. Though the day was sweltering, her shirt’s long sleeves were buttoned at the wrist to cover her liver spots. That morning she’d spied an ad in the paper for a cream that claimed to remove them. She’d clipped it out secretly in the bathroom, had used a false name, and had mailed it with studied nonchalance before school. The address was in Puerto Rico. She wondered if she’d live to receive the product.
    â€œFirst Daughter, you have visitors!”
    Brooke started. She realized her mother was shouting. Between the music and her failing hearing, she wouldn’t have noticed Godzilla approaching. She pulled out her headphones and listened to her mother repeat her announcement.
    â€œMay I go, Honored Mother?” she asked.
    She couldn’t make out the soft-voiced answer, but had schooled herself in reading lips and thought that her mother had agreed. She washed her hands and face and found Danielle and Tiffany in the den.
    â€œIncense—cool,” said Tiffany.
    Brooke let the comment pass, closed her nose against the hated scent, and led the way past her brother’s room.
    â€œWhat’s going on in there?” asked Danielle. They listened to the low chanting from within.
    â€œHis tutor,” said Brooke. “Teaching him prayers for the dead. Confucians are big on funeral rites.”
    â€œCould come in handy,” Tiffany noted.
    They reached Brooke’s room, closed the door, and studied each other while making small talk. Suspiciously, Danielle eyed the red bandana on Tiffany’s head. Brooke pondered Danielle’s beret. Tiffany considered Danielle’s sunglasses, an accessory she’d donned herself when she’d found, with a shriek, the wrinkles beside her eyes. She feigned scratching her wrist and glanced at her watch. Another four hours until the Lazarus 12-hour Wrinkle-Fighting Creme took full effect. She preferred to undergo this transformation, so lyrically