Cutting through the graveyard on the way home after the school dance was not my usual route home. I was thinking of the fun I had at the dance. My date, Andrew, had offered me a ride to my house, but I rejected the offer just to be polite. It wasn’t a far walk to my house, and anyway, it wasn’t too late. However, I decided to take a shortcut. This shortcut happened to be through the Maple Hill Cemetery. I took this route often in the day after school for a quicker way home. Tonight I needed to get home in a hurry because my parents didn’t like me staying out past ten o’clock.

I walked through the moonlit graveyard hald scared because of the fact that I was alone in a grave yard at nine-thirty at night and also because of the fact that my parents will ground me because I am out past ten. Suddenly I read a cat screech and I stumbled into a spider web. Frantically trying to get the sticky web out of my new jacket, I managed to trip on a precarious tree root and fell head over heels into a freshly dug grave.

Then I saw a looming figure. It spoke. “Jessie?” queried my father.

“Dad?”

“I thought that you would be home by ten.”

Rosemary O’Malley and Kaitlyn Goetting are students at Central Junior High School