Three Quarters Dead

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Amanda/Miranda
Are You in the House Alone?
Bel-Air Bambi and the Mall Rats
Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death
Close Enough to Touch
Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt
The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp
Dreamland Lake
Fair Weather
Father Figure
The Ghost Belonged to Me
Ghosts I Have Been
The Great Interactive Dream Machine
Here Lies the Librarian
The Last Safe Place on Earth
A Long Way from Chicago
Lost in Cyberspace
On the Wings of Heroes
Princess Ashley
Remembering the Good Times
Representing Super Doll
The River Between Us
A Season of Gifts
Secrets of the Shopping Mall
Strays Like Us
The Teacher’s Funeral
Those Summer Girls I Never Met
Through a Brief Darkness
Unfinished Portrait of Jessica
Voices After Midnight
A Year Down Yonder

 

 

 

Amanda/Miranda
London Holiday
New York Time
This Family of Women

 

 

 

Past Perfect, Present Tense

 

 

 

Monster Night at Grandma’s House

 

 

 

Anonymously Yours
Invitations to the World

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Copyright © 2010 by Richard Peck

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S.A.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peck, Richard, date.

Three-quarters dead / Richard Peck.

p. cm.

Summary: Sophomore loner Kerry is overjoyed when three popular senior girls pick her to be in their clique, until a shocking accident sets off a string of supernatural occurrences that become more and more threatening.

eISBN : 978-1-101-53519-6

[1. Dead—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Horror stories.]

I. Title.

PZ7.P338Tg 2010

[Fic]—dc22

2009049362

ACTUALLY, THIS ISN’T about now. It’s about
before
—about last fall, my first semester of sophomore year at Pondfield High School. It’s about a lot of lunchtimes. In fact, it’s about living for lunch. And it’s about one night—Halloween. And a girl named Alyssa Stark, who didn’t particularly matter, though she was a senior. This is about last fall when I didn’t know who I was or what was coming. It’s the time before somebody pulled the world out from under me.

YOU WAIT FOREVER to get to high school. Then you’re scared to death. I was. Pondfield regularly makes
Newsweek
magazine’s list of America’s Top Ten Public High Schools. Even so, my best friend, Abby Davis, went off to boarding school instead. Her parents sent her.

Ninth grade had been in a separate building. It was to keep us from being a bad influence on the middle school people. And to keep the high school people from being a bad influence on us. Whatever.

The point is that I’d washed up at this top school for the top people. Kerry Williamson, a face in the sophomore crowd. Not even. I was so invisible that I was surprised to see myself in the girls’room mirror. And of course I’d turned up in shoes for some other school and a totally wrong T-shirt. I was in everything but Hello Kitty barrettes.

It’s funny about time. I can just barely remember those first weeks. September was a blur of phones and backpacks and people who already knew each other. It was everybody in flip-flops that said it was still summer and that school didn’t particularly matter, even in AP.

September was all those deafening hallways leading nowhere, and orientation meetings about clubs you didn’t want to join.

There was an optional breakout session on Peer Pressure, but I didn’t go to that. And they had an assembly on risky behaviors. Little one-act playlets, so I suppose Alyssa Stark might have been in one of them. She was one of the drama people, that semester. Maybe I saw her then.

But she wasn’t the kind of senior I noticed. She wasn’t strolling in from the parking lot in time for second period. Seniors snapping open their phones to conference, getting a jump on the day, and the teachers. The top seniors in the top school, moving in their separate space. Seniors, still tanned from the beach and backlit by autumn colors. Too cool for school, but running it.

I was two years from senior year, two light-years. I mainly moved in a fog of feeling my way, day by day. Then one day I wasn’t alone anymore. Just like that.

I can’t put my finger on the exact moment. It was more casual than that, cooler. Now I wish I could remember. Now I rack my brain. But I’d definitely have been having lunch alone. I’d text Abby Davis at her boarding school sometimes just to have somebody to lunch with. But Abby was getting harder to reach. I pictured her in a plaid wool uniform and knee socks, having lunch on a backless bench in a dining hall like a cathedral—Hermione at Hogwarts School. Abby was beginning to fade. People are always gone before you expect it.