Cheaper to Reaper Read online

  Cheaper to Reaper

  Book 1 in the

  Afterlife Academy Series

  By

  Vi Lily

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental, except in the mention of public figures, past and present, such as celebrities, bands, authors, et al.

  © 2019 Vi Lily, Library of Congress Registry Pending.

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away, as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise — without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

  HEA Publishers

  PO Box 591

  Douglas, AZ 85608-0591

  Or: [email protected]

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  T HIS IS THE LAST damn time I volunteer to drive your dumb drunk butts around!” If I ever become a mom, I have the window-shaking yell from the front seat down pat. I’m just missing a flipflop to beat them with as I drive.

  Hell, I’m already driving a soccer mom van.

  I’m DDing tonight, and I swear, this is the last time, like I just told them. They are the worst drunks in the entire history of drunkdom. And that includes the entire reign of the Romans, and we all know what kind of partiers they were.

  I’m pretty sure I have my Melted Gingerbread Man lipstick all over my teeth from snarling at my idiot besties. Not that they can see it, since the new rule is drunks in the back where the least amount of distractions can happen, since two weeks ago we had a near collision after one of the girls — cough me cough — leaned across the driver from the passenger seat to wave at a carload of cute guys.

  The rule isn’t helping though, because the sluts are still distracting the crap out of me with their screeching and jumping around. I feel like a freaking Uber driver after the bars close.

  Honestly, we’re all candidates for poster children in a campaign against teenage drinking.

  “Chloe!” Addison screams in my ear as she lunges between the captain’s seats, reaching for the radio. Yep, another distraction. I need one of those cages the cops have in their cars to keep the plastered platoon contained in the back.

  “Turn it up! This is sooo my jam!”

  My ear is ringing as I slap at her hand. She isn’t even messing with the radio, but she has managed to get the heater turned up on high.

  In July. In south Texas.

  “Sit your sequin-covered butt back down and get your seatbelt on!” I yell in my best mom voice. It must be pretty darned good, because I watch in the rearview mirror as Addison plops her butt right back down, snaps her belt on after three tries, then crosses her arms over her chest and sticks out her bottom lip.

  I shut the heater off, get the AC back on and then turn the radio up just a little. The girls start to protest, but I snap at them.

  “I can’t think — or drive — when the music is so loud! I need to concentrate in this rain, cuz the roads are slicker ‘n snot! ‘Sides, what if a cop comes up behind us or something? I wouldn’t be able to hear the siren!”

  In the back of my mind is a little voice saying I sound exactly like my high-strung mother… the one I always complain is so uptight if you shoved a quarter up her butt, you’d get two dimes and a nickel back.

  Someone, and I’m pretty sure it’s Maddie, mumbles something about “Fun sucking skeeza.”

  “Don’t make me pull this van over!” I threaten. That quiets them for a few seconds, until Tabby sees something that makes her scream and the other two join in, like a bunch of squawking yard hens fighting over a lizard.

  “Taco Bell! Ohmygawd, I wanna chalupa! Chloe, pull over! Pull over!”

  I roll my eyes; Tabby never eats much more than plain lettuce with paper thin slices of tomato so she can stay thin. If it weren’t for her big boobs, I swear the girl could walk through a picket fence. My mama says the girl has to stand twice to make a shadow.

  I’m in the middle lane and the driveway for the open-late-for-drunks restaurant is like fifty feet away. I almost tell them to shut it, that we are not stopping, but then I realize that food might actually sober them up, which is a seriously wonderful idea. I quickly check the outside lane and whip over. Thankfully, the road’s pretty clear this time of night.

  I threaten the girls that I’ll leave their hooker looking butts standing by the nasty dumpster if they so much as open their mouths when I’m ordering. The threat works, thank God, but stupid me didn’t think to warn them to keep those mouths shut when we pull up to the window.

  A teenage guy is working the drive-thru and he looks like he’s had it up to his Axe scented armpits with drunks for the evening. I smile, trying to show that I, in fact, am not one of those drunks. But when he cringes, I remember the Gingerbread Man on my teeth and I quickly slap my lips back together.

  “Twenty-seven thirty-eight,” he tells me, and I hand him my debit card, then furiously rub my teeth when he turns to process it. Money starts flying at me from the backseat and I laugh.

  “I feel like the star stripper now,” I joke.

  “You don’t have the boobs to be a stripper,” Tabby, aka Bitch Face, says. I roll my eyes and fight not to roll her… right on out the van door.

  Tabby’s comment must have peaked through Maddie’s alcohol fog, because I can see her in the rearview mirror trying to shove her boobs up. I wanna tell her it’s a lost cause; thirty-two A’s do not make cleavage. She’s most likely trying to impress the drive-thru guy, but she apparently forgot that my mom’s van has dark tinted windows and he can’t see her.

  Dork.

  Drive-thru guy — his nametag says “Marco” — hands me my card and receipt and then starts handing me drinks. I’m already regretting letting them order anything spillable, but it’s hard to snarf a bean burrito without something to wash it down with. I’m not totally inconsiderate, even though my mom will lose her mind if the girls spill sticky liquid all over her van.

  Once the drinks are safely in the van’s cupholders, I watch Marco as he starts getting our order together. The girls have calmed somewhat, probably thanks to my threats of having to walk home in their four-inch heels, so to be nice I turn the radio up a little.

  My besties and I are singers. Not like good singers, or anything, but all four of us know the words to every pop song. We’re always singing, like some no-talent girl band. The song now playing is one of Addison’s favs and of course she starts singing… loudly and off-key.

  The others join in, just as loudly. Just as off-key.

  Marco opens the little window then to hand me our bag of food. It’s at that moment Maddie screeches out a particularly sour note and Marco cringes.

  “Sorry,” I say, nodding to the backseat, “drunk and stupid.” I give him another smile, minus Gingerbread Man this time.

  Marco cocks a sarcastic eyebrow at me. Not that hairy bits can have their own expressions, but if eyeb
rows could be sarcastic, his would be.

  “I seem to remember you being in the backseat of an SUV that came through the drive-thru last week. You were also drunk and stupid. In fact, I distinctly remember your friend trying to get my attention for some hot sauce and every time she called ‘Marco’ you yelled ‘Polo’.”

  I cringe; I sort of remember doing that. But he’s not done with the humiliating reminders, because he holds up a finger like he just thought of something. I realize then that Marco is a total smart ass.

  “Oh, and then I remember you backing your butt between the front seats, with your food sitting on top, screeching ‘Does this chalupa make my butt look fat?’” he says with a high-pitched seriously crappy imitation of me. And with that, he closes the little window.

  Well, Marco is damned rude. Dang, and he was cute, too.

  The girls heard his comment, because, of course they had just stopped singing at that moment to take bites of their food, like a freaking synchronized eating-singing team. I hear an assortment of Mexican fast food being blown out of mouths, followed by “Oh my gawwwds” and “No he did-ents” mixed in with howls of laughter.

  “You did do that, huh?” Maddie asks as she leans between the seats, talking with her mouth full. I cringe when I feel pieces of taco shell hitting my shoulder, accompanied by the smell of Boones Farm Strawberry Hill mixed with warm lettuce and spicy beef. Kind of a nauseating combo.

  She was our DD last week, so yeah, I guess she would know about my antics then.

  “Sit back!” I hiss at her as I start to pull out of the parking lot. “And you vaginas better have your seatbelts on,” I call over my shoulder in a stern voice, “cuz if we get stopped, I’m tellin’ the po po that y’all kidnapped me and are forcin’ me to drive your hooker butts to Mexico.”

  “Oooh,” Tabby gushes, totally blowing off my threat, “do you think they’ll do a strip search? Cuz the new recruit for the Sheriff’s Office is mighty fine, ladies, mighty fine. I’d be yellin’ ‘I got drugs, officer! Y’all better do a cavity search!’”

  Squeals and howls accompany that statement, followed by eye-rolling and chuckles from me. Then the girls start on discussions of body searches and jail food.

  They apparently wolfed the food down because within just a blink, they start singing again. And Lord help me, even louder this time.

  My teeth grind at the horrid sound coming from the back that sounds an awful lot like the sound a cat makes when its tail is slammed in a screen door, and I wonder if I sound as bad when I’m drunk karaoke-ing. Probably.

  Maddie lives outside of town, so I decide to take her home first, because I’d rather not drive out in the boondocks alone. Not that the bimbo brigade would be much help if say, like a chainsaw murderer was chasing us or something, but at least I’d have someone to trip so I could get away.

  I love my girls, I really do, but they can be a royal pain in the booty sometimes. But then again, I’m pretty sure Maddie was thinking the same thing about me last week when she was DD, and Addison thought the same the week before… we’re all pains when we’ve been partying.

  Hell, we’re all pains stone-cold sober.

  But we have fun. Okay, so I’m not having fun right now, mostly because I’m still ticked that Tabby set her sights on the one guy at the party that I wanted — Alonzo Diaz. That dude is f-i-n-e, as in I would want to have his adorable Mexican-American babies if I weren’t seventeen and still in high school.

  I thought it was clear that I had dibs on Alonzo, and I was doing pretty good with my flirting efforts. Al was showing signs of wanting to pull me into a dark corner and count my teeth with his tongue, and to encourage said counting efforts, I was batting my emerald greens at him so much I probably dried out his contacts with the breeze coming off my eyelashes.

  But then Tabby, the pink-haired super slut, sauntered up to us and did her own batting of her lash extensions at Al, then gave the universal female mating call of “Ohmygawd, I’m so drunk!” She grabbed him by the arm as she stumbled, Al’s eyes dropped down to check out her cleavage, which is definitely not a thirty-two A. I swear, after she got her sixteenth birthday surgical enhancements, she hasn’t worn anything that would cover them, not even when she’s at church. She uses them for bait, hooking unsuspecting guys and dragging them to their doom. Okay, that might be a little dramatic.

  Tabby reeled Al in with her cleavage and then she dragged him off to be gutted, stuffed and hung on her trophy wall.

  To be fair, it’s not like Al is my boyfriend, because Tabby’s behavior would definitely have overstepped the besties boundary and would have required me holding her head in a toilet while giving her a swirly, but dang, I’ve harbored the hots for Al for ages.

  Tabby knows this.

  But I suppose it’s only fair to say that all the girls in the county harbor the hots for Alonzo Diaz, even the ones who prefer the same sex. He’s just that yummy. So, I guess I’ll have to let it go and just admit the better hoochie got the guy this time. Just means I gotta up my game.

  A little voice in my head reminds me of all the other times Tabby’s stolen the guy I liked, but I’m trying to ignore that in the interest of bestie peace. One of these days, though, Tabby’s gonna cross a line and then she’s going to find herself washing down some sewer system and out to sea.

  We reach the end of town and I turn onto the highway that will take us out to Maddie’s family’s ranch. Even though it’s a four-lane road, it’s pretty desolate. This would be the road where you would find Leatherface out hitchhiking, needing a ride to town cuz he ran out of gas for his chainsaw.

  I’m kind of surprised to see a vehicle up ahead of us, and a few cars and trucks heading in the opposite direction. The vehicle on our side must be going pretty slow, though, because we gain on it in a hurry.

  Addison squeals as we get close enough to see that it’s Joe Gilmore’s lifted Ford. I swear, that truck could run over a longhorn and not even brush its back.

  “Slow down!” Addison yells. She and Joe have been dancing around having a thing for each other all semester.

  Even though I roll my eyes again, I oblige, mostly because I want to see if Jaxon is with them. He’s our high school’s track star and he is one primo slab o’ beef. Not as yummy as Alonzo, but if you poured Texas Pete’s hot sauce on Jax, it would be darned close.

  I glance in the rearview mirror and see Maddie trying to make cleavage again. Hopefully, she doesn’t want Jaxon, cuz I don’t think I can deal with a friend stealing a guy from me twice in one night.

  I pull up alongside the truck and, sure enough, Jax is riding shotgun. It looks like Clay and Travis are in the back, too. It’s a whole souped up Ford full of studmuffins.

  Pushing the button to roll the passenger window down, I lean over so they can see me from so far up. “Hey guys!” I yell as I glance back to the road. I am a very good driver, after all.

  “Where y’all headed?”

  Joe grins down at me and leans out of his window. “Bonfire out at Queen’s,” he hollers. “Y’all outta come!”

  Of course, that invite brings squeals of agreement from the bimbo brigade. They seem to forget we’re all wearing mini dresses and platform heels, which is not exactly great clothing choices for tromping around in the wet, slick Texas clay out at Queen’s ranch.

  Before I can point that out, one of the girls squeals — yet again — about a song on the radio. It’s Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” and before I can react, an arm flies between the seats and the radio gets cranked up to max volume. I cringe; my mom’s speakers are gonna be blown for sure.

  I roll my eyes at Joe, because he’s obviously the DD for the guys, so he’s probably going through the same stuff I am at the moment, minus cleavage fluffing and lipstick issues, hopefully. He just laughs and bobs his head to the song, which only encourages Hoochie and the Bimbettes to start belting out the song in a way I’m sure Billie never intended it to sound.

  And that’s a really good band name, by t
he way.

  Like alley cats in heat, they’re trying to outdo each other in “free for all the home boys” screeches.

  Before I can tell them there’s gotta be a law against that sort of noise, one of the morons opens the freaking sliding door of the van as we’re driving down the highway at like sixty.

  “Are you crazy?” I turn to scream, while trying to keep one eye on the road. “Close that door!” I panic because I have three drunks in the back seat who probably aren’t wearing their seat belts again and I can just picture them falling out and getting run over by Joe’s monster truck mud tires.

  Instead of closing the door, I get back talk. I sooo know how my mom feels right now and I make a mental note to apologize to her.

  “The windows don’t go down back here,” Tabby whines. “How else are we gonna sing to the guys?”

  And with that, the screeching hoochies — I’m thinking that would be an even better band name, if they weren’t so bad — started wailing out poor Billie’s song to the guys.

  “Close the damned door!” I scream, trying to be heard over the cacophony going on behind me and trying not to wreck the van while patting myself on the back for even knowing what a cacophony is.

  A shriek draws my attention then and I whip my head around to see that Maddie has Addison by the back of her black velour mini dress, desperately trying to haul her back in the van. I don’t know if the idiot was trying to jump over to Joe’s truck, or if she almost fell out or what, but my heart is up in my throat. I mean, I kinda wanna kill her myself, but I don’t really want her to die, you know?

  I slam on the brakes as Maddie manages to yank Addison back inside, but I accidentally jerk the wheel to the right. We slide right behind Joe’s truck and the front tires go off onto the slick, grassy shoulder. I can feel a slide starting, so I jerk the wheel hard to the left to correct it… but guess what? My mom’s soccer mom van is top heavy.

  And we end up rolling.

  I’m really not sure how many times we roll. It feels like twenty at least, but I think it’s more like three. All I know is the van finally stops and we’re upside down. Well, I’m upside down, because I was the only one wearing a seatbelt and I’m now hanging from the belt.