Being Dead Read Online Free Page A

she kept changing her mind, I ran out of space in the dish drainer.
    When the water was all out of my bed, the mattress lay pretty much flat. Mom poked at the wrinkles left in the plastic. "Whatever it was could have drained out with the water," she suggested, looking at the hose that Dad had dangling out the window. "Was anybody watching?"
    It had taken almost four hours. Of course nobody had been watching.
    Danny snickered. "I think her brain drained out."
    I wasn't sure it hadn't.
    By then we were done with the dish washing, and Dad hooked the hose back up to the kitchen sink to refill the mattress.
    By midafternoon the important boxes were all unpacked and flattened for recycling. Dad moved the remaining boxes into the basement, from where we could gradually unpack them as we needed the stuff, or at least wait until Mom had one of her I-can't-stand-this-clutter fits. Not that anyplace besides the basement was at all cluttered, but she gets like that. With everything either put away or still in its box, the house was neater than our house in Buffalo had usually looked, and the rooms were bigger, so it would take a longer time of things not being picked up before the place would look messy. We had more room to spread out, too. There was die extra bedroom, where Mom had set up a guest bed that looked a lot more comfortable than the couch, and that's where the computers went, too: the Mac for serious work, the IBM for games. And there was a wraparound porch, so you could sit in your rocker and watch the neighbor across the street hold up traffic by driving his tractor down the road, or you could sit on the right side of the house and watch that neighbor rounding up his cows. I still hated it.
    "Want to go into town and see what there is to see?" Mom asked.
    Go
into town. See what there is to see.
They were already talking like hicks.
    "Thanks all the same," I said. "I'm going to take a shower."
    "You can take one when we get back," Dad said.
    "Oh, boy, good suggestion," Danny said, holding his nose.
    "Yeah?" I told him. "What makes you think anybody wants to smell you after you've been working all morning?"
    "We can leave the windows down," Dad offered.
    I shook my head. I was so sticky I couldn't stand myself.
    Mom said, "We can wait. We could go
after
your shower."
    "No, you catch all the highlights," I said, "and you make out a list of what I need to see."
    After they left I changed my mind about the shower. Things had been weird enough with the pond and the water bed so that when I stepped into the shower and started to pull the curtain closed, I had a sudden vision of that scene in
Psycho
where Janet Leigh meets Mother Bates.
    Options: Well, I could wait for my parents to come back home after I'd made such a fuss about needing a shower right away.
    Or I could hose myself off in the driveway.
    I opted for a bath instead. Not that I expected anyone to sneak up on me. But at least that way if someone
did,
I could hear him coming.
    I put in an extra scoop of Mr. Bubble, so the bubbles were extravagantly close to overflowing, then decided to be entirely decadent and poured myself some wine. (The glasses had ended up in the cupboard to the left of the sink.) Sometimes my parents let me have half a glass of wine with dinner, but they would not have approved this, so I knew I would have to make sure the glass Was washed and back in its place by the time they came back.
    Standing next to the tub, I couldn't help myself: I stuck my foot in and pushed the bubbles around enough that I could be sure there was nothing besides the bubbles in there.
Brenda,
I told myself as I got in,
sometimes you
can be such a baby.
But I still felt better for having checked.
    I balanced the wine on the edge of the tub and was taking the "How Fashion Savvy Are You?" quiz in
Cosmo
and was feeling pretty Savvy and downright sophisticated when I reached for the glass and felt something drip on my arm.
    I was in a tub—of course things were drippy. I