The Wrong Grave Read Online Free

down and saw that he was walking on Gloria Palnick’s hair.
    â€œSorry!” Miles said. He meant several things by that. He meant sorry for walking on your hair. Sorry for riding off and leaving you in the 7-Eleven after promising that I wouldn’t. Sorry for the grave wrong I’ve done you. But most of all he meant sorry, dead girl, that I ever dug you up in the first place.
    â€œDon’t mention it,” the dead girl said. “Want some jerky?”
    â€œSure,” he said. He felt he had no other choice.
    He was beginning to feel he would have liked this dead girl under other circumstances, despite her annoying, bullying hair. She had poise. A sense of humor. She seemed to have what his mother called stick-to-itiveness; what the AP English Exam prefers to call tenacity. Miles recognized the quality. He had it in no small degree himself. The dead girl was also extremely pretty, if you ignored the hair. You might think less of Miles that he thought so well of the dead girl, that this was a betrayal of Bethany . Miles felt it was a betrayal. But he thought that Bethany might have liked the dead girl too. She would certainly have liked her tattoo.
    â€œHow is the poem coming?” the dead girl said.
    â€œThere’s not a lot that rhymes with Gloria,” Miles said. “Or Palnick.”
    â€œToothpick,” said the dead girl. There was a fragment of jerky caught in her teeth. “Euphoria.”
    â€œMaybe you should write the stupid poem,” Miles said. There was an awkward pause, broken only by the almost-noiseless glide of hair retreating across a pine floor. Miles sat down, sweeping the floor with his hand, just in case.
    â€œYou were going to tell me something about your life,” he said.
    â€œBoring,” Gloria Palnick said. “Short. Over.”
    â€œThat’s not much to work with. Unless you want a haiku.”
    â€œTell me about this girl you were trying to dig up,” Gloria said. “The one you wrote the poetry for.”
    â€œHer name was Bethany,” Miles said. “She died in a car crash.”
    â€œWas she pretty?” Gloria said.
    â€œYeah,” Miles said.
    â€œYou liked her a lot,” Gloria said.
    â€œYeah,” Miles said.
    â€œAre you sure you’re a poet?” Gloria asked.
    Miles was silent. He gnawed his jerky ferociously. It tasted like dirt. Maybe he’d write a poem about it. That would show Gloria Palnick.
    He swallowed and said, “Why were you in Bethany’s grave?”
    â€œHow should I know?” she said. She was sitting across from him, leaning against a concrete Buddha the size of a three-year-old, but much fatter and holier. Her hair hung down over her face, just like a Japanese horror movie. “What do you think, that Bethany and I swapped coffins, just for fun?”
    â€œIs Bethany like you?” Miles said. “Does she have weird hair and follow people around and scare them just for fun?”
    â€œNo,” the dead girl said through her hair. “Not for fun. But what’s wrong with having a little fun? It gets dull. And why should we stop having fun, just because we’re dead? It’s not all demon cocktails and Scrabble down in the old bardo, you know?”
    â€œYou know what’s weird?” Miles said. “You sound like her.
    Bethany. You say the same kind of stuff.”
    â€œIt was dumb to try to get your poems back,” said the dead girl. “You can’t just give something to somebody and then take it back again.”
    â€œI just miss her,” Miles said. He began to cry.
    After a while, the dead girl got up and came over to him. She took a big handful of her hair and wiped his face with it. It was soft and absorbent and it made Miles’s skin crawl. He stopped crying, which might have been what the dead girl was hoping. “Go home,” she said.
    Miles shook his head. “No,” he finally managed to say. He