Me & Death Read Online Free Page B

tasted pretty bad.
    Man, this hotel sucked!
    “How long have you been here?” I asked.
    “Fourteen years.”
    As long as I’d been alive.
    There was a battered couch by the wall. We sat down on it, releasing plumes of dust into the air. Denise talked about how she died, after giving birth to her first child. Pretty dramatic story. Last-minute cab to the hospital. Fainting. Mess and doctors everywhere. Shouting husband. Pain. More pain. A tiny, coughing baby. Weakness. Cold. And then oceans of blood.
    Yeck.
    “I held my son as I died,” she said. “It was so sad. I was filled with such regret at all the things I wouldn’t see.”
    She sniffed a little. I took a sip of ginger ale.
    “What kind of things?” I said.
    “Everything! I’d miss him teething and crying and going off to kindergarten, and picking me a bouquet of dandelions, and learning how to tell time. I’d miss him scraping his knee and falling in love, and going off to soccer practice, and graduating. All sorts of things.”
    She sighed.
    “You sure your baby was a boy?” I asked.
    She glared at me. “What do you mean?”
    “Nothing. Just a joke.”
    “I don’t joke,” she said.
    I took a sip of ginger ale.
    “I’ve never spoken to him,” she said. “Never told him I love him. Do you think he knows, Jim? Does he realize that his mother loves him more than anything else in the world?”
    She had been pretty tough down on the street, calling me a piece of crap. Now fat tears rolled down her face like trucks down a rainy highway.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    I’ve never seen my dad. Never spoken to him. I’ve asked Ma about him a few times, and she says different things. Sometimes she’s poetic, sometimes forgetful. Once, she said he was like a sunset – red and fiery and headed for the horizon. Another time she told me he got real sick after I was born and had to go away. I asked herwhat was the matter with him. With who? she said. Dad, I said. What about him? she said. I want to know what was wrong with him, I said. You want a list? she said. I told her it was okay, and that I was going to bed.
    Does he love me? I’m going to say:
No
.
    Denise was on her feet. “I can’t take it anymore. It’s been hours. I’ve got to see him,” she wailed. “I’ve got to see my boy right now.”
    She dropped her empty Styrofoam cup and hurried down the hall. I followed.
    “What happens to me?” I asked. We were at the top of the wide staircase leading down to the lobby.
    “Don’t move, Jim. A Grave Walker will come for you,” she said.
    “A what?”
    But she didn’t answer.
    She’d called that old guy in the lobby a Grave Walker. The guy I wanted to beat up. Was he coming for me? I hoped not.
    The front door of the hotel was open, and a vivid blue rectangle of sky dominated the gray of the lobby. Out there, and a long way down, was my body. It was a weird moment. What am I saying – the whole day was weird. But that moment at the top of the stairs, looking at the world outside – that was among the weirdest.
    Denise raced down the stairs and across the lobby, drawn back to Earth by her ties to a boy the same age as me.

CHAPTER 8
    B efore Denise reached the door, two people entered through it into the hotel. First was a bearded guy. I didn’t notice much else about him. The girl beside him, though, grabbed my attention with both hands.
    I took a step down and sat on the top step to watch her. She was older than me. But not much older. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Her hair was damp, worn shoulder length and pushed carelessly off her long angular face. She frowned now, worrying away at her wide lower lip. At this distance I couldn’t make out much about her eyes, but I imagined them to be deep and dark. She wore a dressing gown open over her hospital gown. She looked like an elf queen – maybe what’s-her-name from
The Lord of the Rings
only without the goofy ears.
    I’d seen her before. She lived in my neighborhood. But I’d never