Skirts

This is something I've been working on, I'm looking for ratings,criticism, comments and the like.
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Ever since my grandmother died Death has been one of my closest friends. My family lived in New Mercury-there had never been a Old Mercury or a Mercury-just a New Mercury. Grandmother lived in Satellite, oddly named because Satellite was the center and the top, never on the fringe. People who lived in Satellite were accomplishers, they did important things that moved them out of the New Mercury and the Skirts. Grandma used to be a famous scientist until she got to old and shaky to hold beakers, but she stayed in Satellite like most of them. It was a place of tall mirrored buildings and carriages with cloaked beasts to pull them along.
We walked from our house in New Mercury and we had just arrived in well-to-do Satellite when I saw her. She stood out from the well dressed Satellitians even more then my semi shabby family did. Her clothing was bright and so was her red hair, but when I stopped to stare at her passing us she stopped to. I quickly caught up to my older sister but she kept following me; bouncing along near my side not caring how weird she was acting till she spoke up.
???Hi I???m Death,???Death flipped her hair and looked at me as though asking for my name. I was eleven-a mini tween really- and wasn???t supposed to talk to strangers but since my parents were right there and she was only my age I figured it was alright to answer her.
???I???m Jarex,??? I said slowly and trying to not add weight to my words as people said I often did. I thought for a moment, was this girl from the Skirts? The Skirts people did have the oddest names, it still didn???t explain why she was so keen on following me though.
???Sorry about your granny.??? She chirped happily not sounded in the slightest bit sorry. Frowning, not because she wasn???t sorry or knew about my grandmother before I had told her but because I was sure she had either given me a fake name or was here to kill me. I trudged sullenly ahead; Death was still following and she was skipping and watching her red checkered skirt flop around in the breeze.
???I thought Death was supposed to be a tall grim guy dressed in black, no offense,??? I said with a bit of a tremble in my voice, I could only hope she really was a strange girl from the skirts and not the grim reaper come to strike me down. Out of all the things I expected her to do she did none of them. She just laughed . Death was really quite cheerful I realized as we walked up the steps to the funeral parlor. Death practically skipped up in a state of complete effervescence. People didn???t even seem to notice her, they were all either used to death or too wrapped up in their own matters to care.
I shuddered as we found grandmother to say goodbye, the people in here were ghastly. The alive ones looked worse then they dead; they were all grey and too sad looking like a broken street light, Death was all over, peeking in every corner and coffin ignoring all the strange looks she got for it. She didn???t mind the dead people, they were smiling, painted over with plastic so they didn???t smell, and wearing their best clothes like a group of brightly painted dolls.
My sister looked at me and pushed me out back out of the room to go wait on the steps. She must have thought grandmother scared me when she was dead and lying like that Really I was just watching Death. Somehow Death realized I was gone in only a few short moments and came out to sit with me on the steps next to me.
???It???s not as bad as it looks. It???s different but it???s just as much fun as this,??? She said.
???Being dead???? I replied. She nodded happily while I thought it over; Death really wasn???t anyone to be afraid of. So why should I bother to be afraid? I was musing, Death was playing with a spindly legged creature that looked a bit like a dirty grey clothespin with legs. When I stared at it too long it hopped away and my family took its place. They didn???t seem to notice the strangeness of Death and took her as common place. A playmate I had found to pass the time. Death jumped up and introduced herself quick as a blink but I scarcely payed attention. Times like this would happen and I would slip into a ocean of swirling, swishing, gray haze through which all words have to make their way past the grey and then I snap out of it, waking up to find the world the way it was beforehand. I took a breath and found myself being dragged along by Death near the middle of New Mercury.
???:Where are we going???? I asked in utter bewilderment. While staring at the now familiar landscape.
???Skirts,??? she replying simply.
???Oh.??? I was scared but didn???t say anything. My parents had always warned me away from mixing with people from the Skirts lest I pick up shiftless habits You weren???t supposed to care about whether you lived in the Skirts or not but most people didn???t want to live in them anyway. It made you look disreputable or malicious or just plain lazy.
Death began to navigate her way through the crooked, dark , alleys of the Skirts and I kept straight behind her; as closely as water to water. The houses in the Skirts were many stories high with strange windows and extravagant curly-q decorations. We stopped in front of a megalith of a house; a scintillating world of color smack dab in the middle of the narrow alley. Death stared up at it with a gleeful look of admiration. I looked too but the strangeness of it all made me wish I could flee instead of stare.
It was so very different from the clean cut geometric shapes and light colors of New Mercury that it made me feel as though I had stepped into a venerable yet menacing past.
Shivering, though it was not very cold, I spoke up trying to withhold any signs of fear in my voice.
???What are we doing???? I said.
???Going to see Jack,??? She proudly announced. Death grabbed my arm and scurried into a crack of a side alley that I hadn???t noticed before.
???So this is what a mouse must feel like, ???I murmured to myself. Death jerked me sharply left and we stopped in front of a tiny shed built off one side of the brick house. I felt rather let down really, after how excited Death had been I had expected something more. She glanced at me and upon seeing the disappointment on my face skipped over to the shack while smartly avoiding a stack of bricks, and knocked on the door. Tap, tap, tap , tap- tap, tap.