Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

“It’s condescending twaddle the way she teaches it. A sort of Black Like Me version of the Moor.”

Ray was smart. This combined with being an Indian from England had made him a Martian in Norristown.

“That guy in the movie looked pretty stupid with black makeup on,” I said.

“You mean Sir Laurence Olivier.”

Ray and I were quiet. Quiet enough to hear the bell for the end of homeroom ring and then, five minutes later, the bell that meant we should be on the first floor in Mrs. Dewitt’s class. As each second passed after that bell, I could feel my skin heat up and Ray’s look lengthen out over my body, taking in my royal blue parka and my kelly green miniskirt with my matching Danskin tights. My real shoes sat beside me inside my bag. On my feet I had a pair of fake sheepskin boots with dirty synthetic shearing spilling out like animal innards around the tops and seams. If I had known this was to be the sex scene of my life, I might have prepared a bit, reapplied my Strawberry-Banana Kissing Potion as I came in the door.

I could feel Ray’s body leaning toward me, the scaffolding underneath us squeaking from his movement. He is from England , I was thinking. His lips moved closer, the scaffold listed. I was dizzy – about to go under the wave of my first kiss, when we both heard something. We froze.

Ray and I lay down side by side and stared at the lights and wires overhead. A moment later, the stage door opened and in walked Mr. Peterford and the art teacher, Miss Ryan, who we recognized by their voices. There was a third person with them.

“We are not taking disciplinary action at this time, but we will if you persist,” Mr. Peterford was saying. “Miss Ryan, did you bring the materials?”

“Yes.” Miss Ryan had come to Kennet from a Catholic school and taken over the art department from two ex-hippies who had been fired when the kiln exploded. Our art classes had gone from wild experiments with molten metals and throwing clay to day after day of drawing profiles of wooden figures she placed in stiff positions at the beginning of each class.

“I’m only doing the assignments.” It was Ruth Connors. I recognized the voice and so did Ray. We all had Mrs. Dewitt’s English class first period.

“This,” Mr. Peterford said, “was not the assignment.”

Ray reached for my hand and squeezed. We knew what they were talking about. A xeroxed copy of one of Ruth’s drawings had been passed around in the library until it had reached a boy at the card catalog who was overtaken by the librarian.

“If I’m not mistaken,” said Miss Ryan, “there are no breasts on our anatomy model.”

The drawing had been of a woman reclining with her legs crossed. And it was no wooden figure with eyehooks connecting the limbs. It was a real woman, and the charcoal smudges of her eyes – whether by accident or intent – had given her a leering look that made every kid who saw it either highly uncomfortable or quite happy, thank you.

“There isn’t a nose or mouth on that wooden model either,” Ruth said, “but you encouraged us to draw in faces.”

Again Ray squeezed my hand.

“That’s enough, young lady,” Mr. Peterford said. “It is the attitude of repose in this particular drawing that clearly made it something the Nelson boy would xerox.”

“Is that my fault?”

“Without the drawing there would be no problem.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“I invite you to realize the position this puts the school in and to assist us by drawing what Miss Ryan instructs the class to draw without making unnecessary additions.”

“Leonardo da Vinci drew cadavers,” Ruth said softly.

“Understood?”

“Yes,” said Ruth.

The stage doors opened and shut, and a moment later Ray and I could hear Ruth Connors crying. Ray mouthed the word go , and I moved to the end of the scaffold, dangling my foot over the side to find a hold.

That week Ray would kiss me by my locker. It didn’t happen up on the scaffold when he’d wanted it to. Our only kiss was like an accident – a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

I climbed down off the scaffold with my back to her. She didn’t move or hide, just looked at me when I turned around. She was sitting on a wooden crate near the back of the stage. A pair of old curtains hung to her left. She watched me walk toward her but didn’t wipe her eyes.

“Susie Salmon,” she said, just to confirm it. The possibility of my cutting first period and hiding backstage in the auditorium was, until that day, as remote as the smartest girl in our class being bawled out by the discipline officer.

I stood in front of her, hat in hand.

“That’s a stupid hat,” she said.

I lifted the jingle-bell cap and looked at it. “I know. My mom made it.”

“So you heard?”

“Can I see?”

Ruth unfolded the much-handled xerox and I stared.

Using a blue ballpoint pen, Brian Nelson had made an obscene hole where her legs were crossed. I recoiled and she watched me. I could see something flicker in her eyes, a private wondering, and then she leaned over and brought out a black leather sketchbook from her knapsack.

Inside, it was beautiful. Drawings of women mostly, but of animals and men too. I’d never seen anything like it before. Each page was covered in her drawings. I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.

“You’re really good, Ruth,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, and I kept looking through the pages of her book and drinking it in. I was both frightened and excited by what existed underneath the black line of the navel in those drawings – what my mother called the “baby-making machinery.”

I told Lindsey I’d never have one, and when I was ten I’d spent the better part of six months telling any adult who would listen that I intended on getting my tubes tied. I didn’t know what this meant, exactly, but I knew it was drastic, required surgery, and it made my father laugh out loud.

Ruth went from weird to special for me then. The drawings were so good that in that moment I forgot the rules of school, all the bells and whistles, which as kids we were supposed to respond to.

After the cornfield was roped off, searched, then abandoned, Ruth went walking there. She would wrap a large wool shawl of her grandmother’s around her under the ratty old peacoat of her father’s. Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn’t report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.

And she began to take rides from her father in the mornings to avoid the bus. He left very early and brought his red metal, sloped-top lunchbox, which he had allowed her to pretend was a barn for her Barbies when she was little, and in which he now tucked bourbon. Before he let her out in the empty parking lot, he would stop his truck but keep the heater running.

“Going to be okay today?” he always asked.

Ruth nodded.

“One for the road?”

And without nodding this time she handed him the lunchbox. He opened it, unscrewed the bourbon, took a deep swallow, and then passed it to her. She threw her head back dramatically and either placed her tongue against the glass so very little would make it to her mouth, or took a small, wincing gulp if he was watching her.

She slid out of the high cab. It was cold, bitterly cold, before the sun rose. Then she remembered a fact from one of our classes: people moving are warmer than people at rest. So she began to walk directly to the cornfield, keeping a good pace. She talked to herself, and sometimes she thought about me. Often she would rest a moment against the chain-link fence that separated the soccer field from the track, while she watched the world come alive around her.