Excerpt from Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The headstone path, the caskets in the garden—over the past five months Wade has continued to muddy the line between the graveyard and the house a little more every day. Because he thinks it is funny. Because death is hilarious. And I love it.

part one
PRE-NEED
one

I WAS BORN DEAD. Or died shortly after—Meredith's story changes depending on her audience and her mood. "The first thing Leigh did after she was born was die!" she loves bragging to people, working her well-worn "tragedy + more tragedy = comedy" routine. And yes, I was born nearly three months early—a two-and-a-half-pound "micro preemie"—but I have since learned from watching medical dramas that premature babies flatline all the time, and these days reviving them is really no big whup. Wade says it's just bravado masking Meredith's injured maternal pride over how I subsequently lived—thrived—without the protection of her womb, but most parents wouldn't drag that chestnut out for laughs. Makes me cringe.

"Oh, Leigh," she and Wade constantly moan. "Don't be so dramatic, my God!"

If my eyes so much as mist up, get a little dewy over anything—epic Wade and Meredith eye rolling. Sighs are heaved. A person lucky enough to be brought back from a birth/death and go on to enjoy freakishly perfect health has nothing to cry about.

They buy graveyards on the sly and perform stand up comedy routines about their kid's near death and I'm dramatic?

I don't remember when I started calling them Wade and Meredith.

So here we are. I am. Non-selling days I walk home as fast as I can from school, step on every crack I see. No, living here is not technically Meredith's fault; Wade bought the graveyard without even telling her, saw a classified ad—Graveyard for Sale—and signed mortgage papers she never even saw. But still—come on.

I keep my eyes down all the way to Sierrawood, through our out-of-control Gothic black wrought-iron entrance gates, yet another genius Wade idea. They're just stupid. Every single time I look at them, I think, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . ." and I'm in a Daphne du Maurier novel, alone behind the gates of a creepy estate coincidentally also presided over by a ridiculous man. Huh.

Just inside the Manderley gates, ducks paddle in a pond, beside which is a wooden sign, small and low to the ground, that reads: this is a non-endowment care facility. Non-endowment, according to Wade, means the families don't pay extra into funds to maintain the graves; therefore everyone should be grateful he even gases up the mower and runs it at all. A little farther past the pond, another very small, carefully hand-printed sign reads: all flowers, artificial and real, will be removed on Tuesdays to facilitate mowing. Which everyone knows is a big joke—people are figuring out pretty quickly that most of the signage around Sierrawood, like Wade himself, is all talk, no action. gates closed at dusk? If we remember. no music allowed? Tell that to Mrs. Irvin, who hauls a boom box over to J 72 in Peaceful Glen so she can blast the sound track of the Broadway show Carousel for her sister week after week. Even with Wade's mower running and my headphones on, every Wednesday I can hear Shirley Jones hollering about having "a real nice clambake."

With all my attention concentrated on the gravel road beneath my feet, I pretend the graves away. Most of the headstones are flat, so if I squint it's just a house, just a nice house near a nice park, just a park. But on digging days the pretense dissolves as I run to the house, my heavy backpack beating me senseless, away from the backhoe and the pile of soil beside it, Jimmy the contracted grave digger leaning casually on his shovel.

Excerpted from Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo. Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Longo. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.