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

"Hello?"

I slam my hand into hardback Ovid, startled. In the doorway, Dress and Boots Girl winces.

"Oh God, sorry! Sorry!"

I rub my red knuckles and she steps in.

"Are you okay? Can I . . ."

"No, it's fine, it's . . . okay." I squeeze my pink fingers, push Ovid aside.

Not Emily. Younger than me. Small. The knots of her dark hair are braided, wound and pinned above each ear. Her dress is cotton, pale blue stripes, and she has a white soil-stained apron tied around her waist. The black boots are leather, tall as her knobby knees. She should be herding Alpine goats. Instead, she's just standing here smiling, shifting her weight. Maybe she has to pee.

"Can I help you with something?"

She turns her head sideways, reads the Metamorphoses spine. "Are you reading that?"

I shrug.

"For fun?"

"School."

She nods. "What do you think?"

"Um." Why does she care? "Kind of depressing."

"Sure."

"And wordy." She smiles. "Yeah."

"And he doesn't seem to think much of the ladies."

She leans against the desk. "How so?"

Uh. Okay, Mrs. McKinstry. I guess we're doing this.

"Well," I say, "he's no fan of subtlety. His women are wallowing in grief and then—oh, look out, literal metamorphosis!—all of a sudden they're mute. Or petrified, or turned into gold. Or a cow."

She laughs. "You're so right."

Her laugh is not Emily's, not bright and big. This girl's is . . . lighter? Smaller.

"Okay," she says, "but don't you love the comfort of it?"

Clearly she has read it for fun. "The what?"

"Well, I mean the whole thing that it's always been this way, it always will be, nothing is static, life is cyclical, no one ever really leaves. . . . It's very . . . I don't know. I love it."

"Guess I'm not to the comfort part yet. People are still just . . ."

"Dying," she says. "Yeah."

She goes back to smiling.

"So," I say again, "is there something I can—"

"Oh! Sorry, yes . . ." She hands me her list. "We've lost track of this guy." Single depth in Serenity. "He's new to us, maybe we got the row wrong?"

I nod, pull out the binders.

"Rockin' the old school?" she says.

I frown, puzzled.

She nods at Pipey's ancient binders. "No computer?"

I tap the landline phone with my pen. "Just upgraded from rotary. Pretty sure the binders are here to stay."

"Oh my gosh," she says, "my parents are practically Amish. Cell phones give you neck cancer, no TV because it murders your brain, and computers . . . People are so mad we don't have a website to order from, but my dad is terrified, he's all, 'Computers have three purposes: porn, fifteen million ways for people to steal your identity, and government spying.' "

Sounds a lot like Wade's asinine logic, except in our case there's also the part about having no money. Which I don't mention.

Hangtown is a black hole for cell service, so I don't actually mind the landlines. We had a computer in Mendocino, but Wade opened some Trojan horse thing, janked it up with a virus too expensive to fix so he turned it off . . . and just didn't ever turn it back on again. His current gospel runs the way of "If binders were good enough for Pipey, they're good enough for us!"

The girl lingers in the doorway. "Otherwise things going well?"

I turn the stiff pages of maps. Where is this guy?

"Hasn't been long, right?" she says. "Few months?"

I nod.

"We were kind of friends with the Hoegreffs before they sold it. I haven't met—is it your dad?"

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.