Free Driving With Dead People by Monica Holloway Page B

hand behind her head and chewing the thumbnail of her other one. I wondered what she was thinking.
    I looked up at the ceiling and imagined faces walking by, peering down at me. Who would come to my funeral? Granda would be there, and Mom would make JoAnn and Becky come, and Jamie wouldn’t miss it. Dad would be there for sure. I felt gooseflesh on my arms thinking of Dad looking down at me. If he decided to haul off and slap me, I wouldn’t be able to move my hands to defend myself, not that I ever did defend myself. Still, laid out powerless in front of Dad was a lethal place to be, even as a corpse.
    I lifted my head and looked over at Julie. Her eyes were closed and she was humming something I couldn’t hear very well. I lay back down. There was nothing to be scared of, no one to hurt me, but I was panic-stricken. I shouldn’t have pictured Dad staring down at me.
    When I sat up to orient myself, an eerie feeling came over me. I was sure that something was about to snatch me out of the world, but I couldn’t see or hear it. Everything looked normal and safe, but it wasn’t.
    “Are you okay?” Julie asked.
    “Sometimes I feel creepy in here,” I said.
    “No kidding.”
    I heard Max slam the doors to the embalming room. I didn’t want Max to embalm me, because I worried he might be a little rough. I’d seen him roll a body onto a gurney only to have it roll off the other side.
    But if Dave embalmed me, he’d see me naked, which was mortifying. I wasn’t like Kathy Brooks’s mom, Evelyn, who’d told us she couldn’t wait to die just to have “Dave Kilner’s hands all over my naked body.”
    “Hey, Monica, close my lid,” Julie said, sitting up in her coffin and looking at me.
    “What? Are you kidding? I’m not closing you in there,” I said.
    She was serious. “Close the lid; I can lift it back up myself.”
    “What if it locks and you can’t breathe?” I asked.
    “There’s no way. It only locks with a key.” She lay back down. “Just close it for a quick second.” Julie gestured for me to come over there. Her hand waving me over was all I could see sticking up out of the box.
    I climbed out of my coffin. “Closing it gives me the willies,” I said, padding over in my socks. We never wore shoes inside the coffins. We weren’t even supposed to be in the coffins.
    I looked in at Julie. She was wearing navy shorts with a yellow-and-white-striped tank top and her gold wire-rimmed glasses.
    I put my hand on the lid. Only the top part of the coffin was open. In the showroom the coffin lids were closed at the bottom and opened at the top, just like it would be at a viewing.
    “I don’t want to do this,” I said.
    “If you’re worried, just close it for a second, leave your hand there, and open it back up,” she said.
    I pulled down the lid and kept my hand under it so it wouldn’t make contact with the bottom. “Are you okay?” I asked.
    “Okeydokey,” she said. I waited.
    “Are you ready to come out?” I asked.
    “Not yet.”
    I looked around the showroom. On the white shelf over by the door sat three miniature vaults. One was silver, one was bronze, and the other one was a dull gray. These were small versions of what the coffin sat in once it was lowered into the grave. I loved picking them up and holding them at eye level. I liked miniature things.
    “Open the lid,” Julie said, so I raised it up.
    “What was it like?” I asked.
    “Not bad,” she said.
    “Don’t ever do that to me,” I told her. “I don’t like to be shut in.”
    “Okay,” she said, climbing out. It was harder for Julie to get out because she was still shorter than I was, so I helped by entwining my fingers and letting her step into my hands and then onto the floor.
    We both rearranged and smoothed out the silk interiors of our coffins so they’d look good as new, put on our shoes, and ran upstairs for a snack. There were mounds of cookies stacked in tins in the office, all flavors, waiting for