Jump When Ready Read Online Free PDF Page A

Most of us do at first. In your case, it looks
like you slept for almost a week.”
    “A week?” The most I’d ever managed before was sleeping
until noon. Now that I thought about it, why would I need to sleep if I was
dead? But then why did we sleep when we were alive? The last I heard, no one
really understood why that was either.
    “Like I said, almost a week,” Jamie said. “No biggie. Are
you doing okay so far?”
    “I guess. I’m not really sure.” Then something occurred
to me and I pointed toward the coffin. “Do I…?” I couldn’t quite bring myself
to ask.
    Jamie shook his head. “You look fine. Actually, you can
appear anyway you’d like. Really, it’s up to you.”
    I was about to ask about that when suddenly the music
started, the usual droning organ music you hear in church, but now it seemed
even more depressing (something I’d imagined impossible). Behind the music, I
heard people whispering as they waited for the service to start.
    Then I saw my family.
    They sat in the front pew, staring straight ahead. Tears
ran down my mother’s face while my father kept his arm around her shoulders.
John clenched his jaw the way he did when he didn’t want you to know he was in
pain. Bethany kept taking deep breaths while dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.
They looked terrible, exhausted, each of them pale with dark circles under
bloodshot eyes.
    In that moment, it became real to me. Maybe I was between
lives, whatever that meant, but to them I was nothing but dead. Dead and gone.
Our family was broken and I’d made it happen. I had to tell them I was okay,
that I was right there next to them! I started toward them—ready to call out,
to try anything to get their attention—but in that same instant, I suddenly
realized something else. It felt like the world stopped.
    The whispering—all those hushed words going on around me.
I could hear them. All I had to do was look at someone to hear perfectly.
    Behind my parents, I saw my father’s brother, Uncle
Richard, sitting next to Aunt Anita. They must have flown down from New York
just for my funeral.
     “God, it’s such a shame,” he said. “Do you think it
could be true?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I’d like to think it can’t
be.”
    Another row back, Uncle Mike whispered to Aunt Jenny.
“The kid was messed up. All those black clothes, the earrings and the purple
hair. You could see something like this coming.”
    “This is not the time,” she said. “We’ll talk about it
later.”
    Next to them, my cousin Jeff leaned in toward his sister,
Lisa. “Henry was totally weird,” he whispered. “All depressed looking. Those
are always the kids who do this kind of thing.”
    “I know,” Lisa said. “When did he get on the bus to Emo
town?”
    I don’t know what was more confusing, the words I heard
people saying or the fact that I could actually hear them. Neither seemed to
make any sense. To be sure it wasn’t some sort of weird coincidence, I looked
to the back of the church where two ushers stood by the entrance—two old guys
I’d never seen before.
    “It’s really sad,” one guy said. “Only fourteen years
old.”
    “Probably something going on with him,” the other one
said. “You have to feel bad for his family.”
    Until that moment, I’d been hoping it was only Nikki and
Jamie who’d thought I might have drowned myself on purpose. But obviously some
people here were also convinced I’d committed suicide. How could they possibly
think that about me? So, I’d dressed in black a lot. Streaked my hair purple
for the heck of it. What kind of stereotype crap was this?
    Then something horrible occurred to me. What did my
family think?
    Suddenly, it made sense why I’d been shown those scenes
from my life. My parents had been worried about me before I died. They’d been
wondering what was up with me and now they’d never be sure. As far as they
knew, I could have been seriously depressed. They couldn’t know