The deal was, if I didn’t go to camp, I had to do all my chores, put in my hours at the funeral home and never, ever complain about being bored. Oh, and I had to promise to be on time for everything. Mom is a real “stickler for punctuality,” as she likes to remind us all the time.

I said a quick goodbye to Suzanna and raced out of the store.

So fast, in fact, that I nearly took out a couple of people coming in.

“Whoa, sorry!” I blurted. But then I saw who it was. Miri and Sasha. Great. I had been hoping I wouldn’t have to see them until September.

I muttered an apology I really wasn’t feeling and tried to get past them.

Nope. They blocked the doorway and just looked at me.

I pasted a smile on my face. “Oh hey. How’s your summer going? Can you believe we’re going into eighth grade? Unbelievable, right? I am—having a good summer, I mean—even though I’m not going to camp this year. I’m helping out at the—well, at home, I guess. What are you two doing? Having fun?”

Finally I had to stop to take a breath.

Miri and Sasha just kept staring.

“Sorry,” I muttered, even as I felt my face grow hot. I clamped my lips shut.

Miri snorted and rolled her eyes. “She’s awfully chatty for a corpse, isn’t she, Sasha?”

Here we go.

“Right?” Sasha said. “I mean, I thought corpses were quiet. I didn’t realize they talk nonstop.”

Do I even need to say it? Miri and Sasha are the worst.

Sasha wasn’t done, either. She laughed at her own clever comment and then leaned in close. She took a loud sniff of my ponytail. “And ugh, she sure smells like death. Disgusting. You sure you’re not a zombie, Evil?”

After my speech in class about how I was going to be a funeral director when I grew up, the two of them had come up with all kinds of mean nicknames that I am now mostly used to. Sort of.

I’d washed my hair that very morning. With the shampoo I’d made my mom buy after the last time Sasha said I smelled like rotting corpses.

The shampoo is strawberry scented. A part of my brain drifted away and started wondering if dead people smell like strawberries. And if they do, how Sasha would know. I’d never gotten close enough to the actual dead people at the funeral home to sniff them, but the building didn’t smell like strawberries. Or any other type of fruit.

I wanted to tell them both to shut up. Also that, like I’d told them a million times before, my job at the funeral home doesn’t include getting close to dead people, so I couldn’t smell like one. But for once I kept my mouth shut. It wouldn’t matter. They just didn’t care. No matter how hard I tried to show them that I was a normal girl whose family just happened to own a funeral home, they kept picking on me.