On the Day I Died Read Online Free PDF Page B

across her shoe.
    Carol-Marie Price screamed and Charlie Groth ran to get help. An ambulance came and took Miss Bolam away. She never came back to school. We heard later that she’d had a stroke and was tottering at death’s door.
    But that wasn’t my problem. She’d asked for it, right?
    No, my problem turned out to be Charlene Shansky. Seems Charlene had seen me pull that spider-filled Mason jar out of my knapsack, and as soon as the ambulance carrying Miss Bolam took off, she hightailed it for the principal’s office. An hour later, I was sitting across from Mr. Davenport.
    I tried to put on my innocent look. I told him it was just a prank, a practical joke that had gotten a little out of hand. But Mr. Davenport didn’t have a sense of humor.
    “I have no choice but to expel you,” he said.
    My fists balled. I tell you, I came close to breaking the guy’s nose. But then I thought, Who cares? I’m sprung! It wasn’t like I loved learning or anything like that. The only reason I ever went to school was to get away from the old man.
    “You just done me a favor,” I told the principal. Head high, I sauntered out.
    I kept walking, too, all the way to Grant Park, where a couple of guys I knew from the neighborhood were living. I didn’t go home. What was the point? Pop would have just slapped me around for getting kicked out of school. No, I decided, I was a free man, and now I needed to make my own living.
    And school?
    Well, that just wasn’t part of the plan.
    “Take that, Funkhouser!” I shouted at the cop. Using all my strength, I flung my head back, slamming it into his blocky chin. His regulation square-brimmed cap fell to the sidewalk and his lip gushed blood. He raised his hand to his mouth, loosening his grip on me for a second. I twisted away and vaulted into the busy street.
    “Johnnie, come back!” shouted Funkhouser. But he didn’t chase after me. He just stood on the curb andwatched as I dodged around delivery trucks, sedans and cranky old Model Ts.
    I looked back over my shoulder and raised my hand in salute to him. “So long, sucker!” I cried.
    There came a horn blast and a squeal of tires as a hearse braked to a stop just inches away from me.
    “Jeez, kid,” said the driver, sticking his head out the window. “You came close to being my next customer.”
    I looked at the hearse—a Packard, it was, long and black and sleek. Through its windows I could see the ornate silver handles of the casket shimmering against dark wood like some hidden treasure. Jeez, that stiff had more dead than I’d ever had alive.
    And that’s when it came to me, just like that. Why bother pinching stuff off living people when there were so many
dead
people lying around? Dead people still had stuff—rings and watches and whatnot—but they couldn’t yell for help or call the cops. You don’t get sent to reform school for stealing a corpse’s pocket watch (or at least, I didn’t think you did). And it would be easy—as easy as taking candy from … well … a
dead
baby.
    I started laughing right there in the street, the hearse driver staring at me as if I’d lost my marbles. “Thanks, Funkhouser,” I said aloud. “Thanks a million.”
    Back in those days, Chicago was lousy with funeral homes, what with all them gangsters running around, drumming up business. Honest, a guy couldn’t cross the street without stumbling onto one of them death joints.They was on practically every corner. Most of the undertakers ran their businesses out of their own homes. Down in their basements was where all the body work took place—draining the blood, pumping the bodies full of the stuff that kept them from looking like overheated nectarines, dolling them up with makeup and dressing them up in their Sunday best.
    The main floor was where they displayed the bodies. They had these big, long rooms they called parlors that were all decked out with curtains that looked like those fancy dresses the nobs’ wives wore to