The Book of Living and Dying Read Online Free Page B

shook her head and smiled politely, continued to walk down the alley before dipping through the bushes to the street. She didn’t know where she should go. The Queen’s, maybe. If it was open. She’d never gone there so early before. Walking briskly, she avoided the eyes of adults, afraid they would wonder why she wasn’t in school. Busybodies.
    When she reached the Queen’s, Sarah looked through the window into the diner. The row of faded green stools stood empty before the melamine counter, the soda fountains dulled from years of fryer grease and use since the fifties. Wooden booths hugged the wall, individual jukeboxes poised at every table. The black-and-white floor tiles were scuffed in a trail down the middle of the shop past the booths toward the washrooms. The whole place was like a postcard from the past, including the owner who slouched over the counter reading the paper, his swollen belly permanently diapered in a stained white apron. Nick the Prick. Hehated students, even though they gave him most of his business. Sarah wondered briefly what he would look like naked, his soft white skin jiggling like milk-coloured Jello.
Yuck,
she thought as she pushed against the door.
    The bell jangled loudly in the morning quiet. Nick didn’t bother to look up from his paper. Taking her usual seat in a booth near the back, Sarah pulled her writing journal and a pen from her knapsack. Nick finally acknowledged her, waddling over, face carved with disdain. He sloshed a glass of water onto the table.
    “What do you want?”
    “Coffee,” Sarah said. “And, uh … fries.”
    Nick shook his head. “Too early for fries.”
    “Okay … toast,” Sarah said, “… with jam.”
    Nick sauntered to the kitchen and disappeared through the swinging doors. Sarah clicked her pen and began to write. She started writing about Donna, about how mad she was. She would write her anger away, put it down on paper so she could forget about it. Defuse it. That’s what she did with everything. Her feelings about her father and her mother, her yawning emptiness over John. Her terror at seeing him … it … again. She couldn’t actually bring herself to write the word “ghost.” To put it down in ink would make it seem too real. But she
would
write it, she told herself, the same way she had scratched out her entire existence over the years in short spiky letters. The highs and lows of it. The little peaks and valleys of an imperfect life.
    After writing several lines about Donna, Sarah found herself thinking about Michael. In fact, she couldn’t
stop
thinking about him. The leisurely walk home, the talk of music and books. The conversation had been easy, with genuine interest on both sides. He had asked lots of questions about her. He seemed to really care. It made her feel surprisingly dizzy and light just to think about him, like the way she felt when she jumped from the cliff at the quarry. The momentary weightlessness as her body lifted up, then descended. The whistle of wind in her ears. The sparkling sheet of blue, rushing up to meet her. She floated there when she thought of him, just above the point of impact. A kind of crystalline suspension. Until she was struck by the horrifying realization that she hadn’t asked a single question about him. How could she have been so stupid? The water rose up as her body hit the surface with a slap, her heart sinking like a stone.
    The pain swelled in her head again, sending Sarah digging through her bag for the bottle of aspirin. She found it just as Nick appeared shambling over with the coffee and toast. No jam. Sarah sighed, poked at the flaccid white bread soaked in margarine and pushed the plate to one side. She didn’t feel like toast anyway. The coffee smelled particularly bitter today, too. She diluted it with cream, carefully peeling the aluminum tabs off the creamers and neatly stacking the empty containers next to the abandoned toast. Normally she didn’t take sugar, but this