Spooky Little Girl A Novel

by Notaro, Laurie

• ISBN13: 9780345510976
• ISBN10: 0345510976
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-04-13
• Publisher: Villard

Summary

Death is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Coming home from a Hawaiian vacation with her best girlfriends, Lucy Fisher is stunned to find everything she owns tossed out on her front lawn, the locks changed, and her fiancé's phone disconnected--plus she's just lost her job. With her world spinning wildly out of her control, Lucy decides to make a new start and moves upstate to live with her sister and nephew. But then things take an even more dramatic turn: a fatal encounter with public transportation lands Lucy not in the hereafter but in the nearly hereafter. She's back in school, learning the parameters of spooking and how to become a successful spirit in order to complete a ghostly assignment. If Lucy succeeds, she's guaranteed a spot in the next level of the afterlife--but until then, she's stuck as a ghost in the last place she would ever want to be. Trying to avoid being trapped on earth for all eternity, Lucy crosses the line between life and death and back again when she returns home. Navigating the perilous channels of the paranormal, she's determined to find out why her life crumbled and why, despite her ghastly death, no one seems to have noticed she's gone. But urgency on the spectral plane--in the departed person of her feisty grandmother, who is risking both their eternal lives--requires attention, and Lucy realizes that you get only one chance to be spectacular in death.

Author Biography

Laurie Notaro was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She packed her bags for Eugene, Oregon, once she realized that since she was past thirty, her mother could no longer report her as a teenage runaway. She is the author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club, Autobiography of a Fat Bride, I Love Everybody, We Thought You’d Be Prettier, and An Idiot Girl’s Christmas. She is currently at work on a plan B (to take effect when her book contract runs out,) which consists of options with minimum dander of office politics, including selling hot dogs at Costco, selling hot dogs from a street cart, selling hot dogs at high school football games, or being the Stop sign holder for road construction crews. She avoids raccoons both day and night and fully expects to be run out of her new hometown once this book is published. At press time, she is still married, her cat is still alive, and she has an adorably disobedient dog named Maeby, who wears sweaters and loves chicken strips. (Clearly, Notaro has no children.)

Excerpts

Chapter One


You Win

The very moment when the cab pulled up to the curb, Lucy Fisher knew that she was seeing something exceptional.

Directly in front of her fifties-ranch-style red-brick house, a woman dressed in flowing white was wrestling with nothing short of a cloud in Lucy's yard. For a ridiculous moment, Lucy's mind determined that it was a dilapidated angel desperately trying to climb back aboard her ride, almost like a surfer that had toppled off a board.

But a second later, Lucy realized it was simply a homeless lady, complete with stolen grocery cart, trying to shove a shimmering white mass into a huge dirty plastic bag, like processed meat into a sausage casing. Lucy sat there, nearly smiling at the curiosity that she was witnessing as the cloud flapped against the woman's head, briefly slapping her face as if she was about to be bound with the wrappings of a shiny Gabor sister mummy.

It took less than a fraction of the next second for Lucy to suddenly--and clearly--realize that the white mass was no cloud at all.

"HEY!" she shouted, furiously popping the door open and flying out of the backseat as if a superpower had been activated. "HEY! What are you doing! Put that back! That's my dress! That is MY wedding dress!"

"That'll be twenty-two seventy, lady!" the driver called after Lucy as she bounded across the street toward her house and the homeless woman.

But Lucy failed to hear him. When she came within an arm's length of the woman, she grabbed two handfuls of satin and lace and tugged the dress out of the woman's grasp as hard as she could.

"Give me that!" Lucy snarled, tugging, pulling. "What are you doing with my dress? Give me my dress!"

"This is my dress now!" the woman, who was twice Lucy's size, hissed back, and she jerked the dress back with all of her might. "You can't change your mind! You can't leave all of this out for the taking and then just change your mind when someone else decides they want it!"

"Twenty-three fifty," the cabdriver called again, this time louder.

"Give me my damn dress," Lucy shouted as she tugged harder. "I just had my last fitting for it. Give it to me!"

"It's mine!" the woman yelled back. "I found it just laying here. Finders keepers!"

"It is accruing twenty-nine percent interest on my Visa, and that makes it mine!" Lucy gathered all of her strength, gritted her teeth, locked eyes with her opponent, and then pulled as hard as she could, producing a shriek from the woman that was loud, high-pitched, and shrill, like she was coming apart.

How did she do that? Lucy thought. How did she do that without opening her mouth?

And then Lucy understood. The satin and lace, once taut between the women, was now slack, although neither had let go. Lucy looked down at the tear, which had screamed as it was being ripped, now frayed, open, and destroyed. The two women looked at the mess in their hands, neither one saying a word.

"Okay, then," the homeless woman finally said as she dropped her end onto the ground. "You win."

"Twenty-five even, and the meter is still running," the cabdriver called impatiently.

Lucy looked up from the white mess in her hands, through the collection of light brown curls that had fallen into her face, and finally saw what the cabdriver saw. What the homeless woman saw. What every car passing on the street in front of her house had seen.

Her life. Spread out all over the lawn, littered in the gutter, spilling out of the bed of her truck that was parked in the driveway. Her brand-new thirty-six-inch television sitting in her front yard like a postmodern flamingo; her laptop bag, with the corner of her computer peeking out of it, flung onto the ground like a stepping stone. Her grandmother's antique rocking chair tipped up against the mailbox as if someone had recently been dumped out of it. Her clothes, her photo albums,

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Excerpted from Spooky Little Girl: A Novel by Laurie Notaro
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