Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the cornfield in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too.

“You’re a really good poet, Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.

I could see back to an afternoon when Ruth watched her teenage cousin undress to take a bath while Ruth sat on the bathroom rug, locked in the bathroom so her cousin could babysit her as she’d been told. Ruth had longed to touch her cousin’s skin and hair, longed to be held. I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls’ crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.

The last week of the symposium was always spent developing a final project, which the various schools would present in competition on the night before the parents returned to pick the students up. The competition wasn’t announced until the Saturday breakfast of that final week, but the kids had already begun planning for it anyway. It was always a better-mousetrap competition, and so the stakes were raised year after year. No one wanted to repeat a mousetrap that had already been built.

Samuel went in search of the kids with braces. He needed the tiny rubber bands orthodontists doled out. They would work to keep the tension tight on the guiding arm of his mousetrap. Lindsey begged clean tinfoil from the retired army cook. Their trap involved reflecting light in order to confuse the mice.

“What happens if they like the way they look?” Lindsey asked Samuel.

“They can’t see that clearly,” Samuel said. He was stripping the paper off the wire twists from the camp garbage bag supply. If a kid looked strangely at ordinary objects around the camp, he or she was most likely thinking of how it would serve the ultimate mousetrap.

“They’re pretty cute,” Lindsey said one afternoon.

Lindsey had spent the better part of the night before gathering field mice with string lures and putting them under the wire mesh of an empty rabbit hutch.

Samuel watched them intently. “I could be a vet, I guess,” he said, “but I don’t think I’d like cutting them open.”

“Do we have to kill them?” Lindsey asked. “It’s a better mousetrap, not a better mouse death camp.”

“Artie’s contributing little coffins made out of balsa wood,” Samuel said, laughing.

“That’s sick.”

“That’s Artie.”

“He supposedly had a crush on Susie,” Lindsey said.

“I know.”

“Does he talk about her?” Lindsey took a long thin stick and poked it through the mesh.

“He’s asked about you, actually,” Samuel said.

“What did you tell him?”

“That you’re okay, that you’ll be okay.”

The mice kept running from the stick into the corner, where they crawled on top of one another in a useless effort to flee. “Let’s build a mousetrap with a little purple velvet couch in it and we can rig up a latch so that when they sit on the couch, a door drops and little balls of cheese fall down. We can call it Wild Rodent Kingdom.”

Samuel didn’t press my sister like the adults did. He would talk in detail about mouse couch upholstery instead.

By that summer I had begun to spend less time watching from the gazebo because I could still see Earth as I walked the fields of heaven. The night would come and the javelin-throwers and shot-putters would leave for other heavens. Heavens where a girl like me didn’t fit in. Were they horrific, these other heavens? Worse than feeling so solitary among one’s living, growing peers? Or were they the stuff I dreamed about? Where you could be caught in a Norman Rockwell world forever. Turkey constantly being brought to a table full of family. A wry and twinkling relative carving up the bird.

If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then – singing – a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in.

I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father’s father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave.

“You can have that,” Franny said to me. “Plenty of people do.”

“How do you make the switch?” I asked.

“It’s not as easy as you might think,” she said. “You have to stop desiring certain answers.”

“I don’t get it.”

“If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling,” she said, “you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.”

This seemed impossible to me.

Ruth crept into Lindsey’s dorm that night.

“I had a dream about her,” she whispered to my sister.

Lindsey blinked sleepily at her. “Susie?” she asked.

“I’m sorry about the incident in the dining hall,” Ruth said.

Lindsey was on the bottom of a three-tiered aluminum bunk bed. Her neighbor directly above her stirred.

“Can I get into bed with you?” Ruth asked.

Lindsey nodded.

Ruth crawled in next to Lindsey in the narrow sliver of the bed.

“What happened in your dream?” Lindsey whispered.

Ruth told her, turning her face so that Lindsey’s eyes could make out the silhouette of Ruth’s nose and lips and forehead. “I was inside the earth,” Ruth said, “and Susie walked over me in the cornfield. I could feel her walking over me. I called out to her but my mouth filled with dirt. She couldn’t hear me no matter how much I tried to yell. Then I woke up.”

“I don’t dream about her,” Lindsey said. “I have nightmares about rats nibbling at the ends of my hair.”

Ruth liked the comfort she felt next to my sister – the heat their bodies created.

“Are you in love with Samuel?”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss Susie?”

Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her, because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. “More than anyone will ever know.”

The principal of Devon Junior High was called away on a family matter, and it was left up to the newly appointed assistant principal of Chester Springs School to create, overnight, that year’s challenge. She wanted to do something different from mousetraps.

CAN YOU GET AWAY WITH CRIME? HOW TO COMMIT THE PERFECT MURDER, announced her hurriedly drawn-up flier.

The kids loved it. The musicians and poets, the History Heads and artists, were teeming and bubbling about how to begin. They shoveled down their bacon and eggs at breakfast and compared the great unsolved murders of the past or thought of ordinary objects that could be used for fatal wounds. They began to think of whom they could plot to kill. It was all in good fun until 7:15, when my sister walked in.