Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

On the listing scaffold behind the stage, with Ruth below us, Ray Singh had gotten close enough to me so that his breath was near mine. I could smell the mixture of cloves and cinnamon that I imagined he topped his cereal with each morning, and a dark smell too, the human smell of the body coming at me where deep inside there were organs suspended by a chemistry separate from mine.

From the time I knew it would happen until the time it did, I had made sure not to be alone with Ray Singh inside or outside school. I was afraid of what I wanted most – his kiss. That it would not be good enough to match the stories everyone told or those I read in Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue . I feared that I would not be good enough – that my first kiss would equal rejection, not love. Still, I collected kiss stories.

“Your first kiss is destiny knocking,” Grandma Lynn said over the phone one day. I was holding the phone while my father went to get my mother. I heard him in the kitchen say “three sheets to the wind.”

“If I had it to do over again I would have worn something stupendous – like Fire and Ice, but Revlon didn’t make that lipstick back then. I would have left my mark on the man.”

“Mother?” my mother said into the bedroom extension.

“We’re talking kiss business, Abigail.”

“How much have you had?”

“See, Susie,” Grandma Lynn said, “if you kiss like a lemon, you make lemonade.”

“What was it like?”

“Ah, the kiss question,” my mother said. “I’ll leave you to it.” I had been making my father and her tell it over and over again to hear their different takes. What I came away with was an image of my parents behind a cloud of cigarette smoke – the lips only vaguely touching inside the cloud.

A moment later Grandma Lynn whispered, “Susie, are you still there?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

She was quiet for a while longer. “I was your age, and my first kiss came from a grown man. A father of a friend.”

“Grandma!” I said, honestly shocked.

“You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”

“No.”

“It was wonderful,” Grandma Lynn said. “He knew how to kiss. The boys who kissed me I couldn’t even tolerate. I’d put my hand flat against their chests and push them away. Mr. McGahern knew how to use his lips.”

“So what happened?”

“Bliss,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but it was wonderful – at least for me. I never asked him how he felt about it, but then I never saw him alone after that.”

“But did you want to do it again?”

“Yes, I was always searching for that first kiss.”

“How about Grandaddy?”

“Not much of a kisser,” she said. I could hear the clink of ice cubes on the other end of the phone. “I’ve never forgotten Mr. McGahern, even though it was just for a moment. Is there a boy who wants to kiss you?”

Neither of my parents had asked me this. I now know that they knew this already, could tell, smiled at each other when they compared notes.

I swallowed hard on my end. “Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ray Singh.”

“Do you like him?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the holdup?”

“I’m afraid I won’t be good at it.”

“Susie?”

“Yes?”

“Just have fun, kid.”

But when I stood by my locker that afternoon and I heard Ray’s voice say my name – this time behind me and not above me – it felt like anything but fun. It didn’t feel not fun either. The easy states of black and white that I had known before did not apply. I felt, if I were to say any word, churned. Not as a verb but as an adjective. Happy + Frightened = Churned.

“Ray,” I said, but before the name had left my mouth, he leaned into me and caught my open mouth in his. It was so unexpected, even though I had waited weeks for it, that I wanted more. I wanted so badly to kiss Ray Singh again.

The following morning Mr. Connors cut out an article from the paper and saved it for Ruth. It was a detailed drawing of the Flanagan sinkhole and how it was going to be filled in. While Ruth dressed, he penned a note to her. “This is a crock of shit,” it said. “Someday some poor sap’s car is going to fall into it all over again.”

“Dad says this is the death knell for him,” Ruth said to Ray, waving the clipping at him as she got into Ray’s ice blue Chevy at the end of her driveway. “Our place is going to be swallowed up in subdivision land. Get this. In this article they have four blocks like the cubes you draw in beginning art class, and it’s supposed to show how they’re going to patch the sinkhole up.”

“Nice to see you too, Ruth,” Ray said, reversing out of the driveway while making eyes at Ruth’s unbuckled seat belt.

“Sorry,” Ruth said. “Hello.”

“What does the article say?” Ray asked.

“Nice day today, beautiful weather.”

“Okay, okay. Tell me about the article.”

Every time he saw Ruth after a few months had passed, he was reminded of her impatience and her curiosity – two traits that had both made and kept them friends.

“The first three are the same drawing only with different arrows pointing to different places and saying ‘topsoil,’ ‘cracked limestone,’ and ‘dissolving rock.’ The last one has a big headline that says, ‘Patching it’ and underneath it says, ‘Concrete fills the throat and grout fills the cracks.’”

“Throat?” Ray said.

“I know,” said Ruth. “Then there’s this other arrow on the other side as if this was such a huge project that they had to pause a second so readers could understand the concept, and this one says, ‘Then the hole is filled with dirt.’”

Ray started laughing.

“Like a medical procedure,” Ruth said. “Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”

“I think holes in the earth draw on some pretty primal fears.”

“I’ll say,” Ruth said. “They have throats, for God’s sake! Hey, let’s check this out.”

A mile or so down the road there were signs of new construction. Ray took a left and drove into the circles of freshly paved roads where the trees had been cleared and small red and yellow flags waved at intervals from the tops of waist-high wire markers.

Just as they had lulled themselves into thinking that they were alone, exploring the roads laid out for a territory as yet uninhabited, they saw Joe Ellis walking up ahead.

Ruth didn’t wave and neither did Ray, nor did Joe make a move to acknowledge them.

“My mom says he still lives at home and can’t get a job.”

“What does he do all day?” Ray asked.

“Look creepy, I guess.”

“He never got over it,” Ray said, and Ruth stared out into the rows and rows of vacant lots until Ray connected with the main road again and they crossed back over the railroad tracks moving toward Route 30, which would take them in the direction of the sinkhole.

Ruth floated her arm out the window to feel the moist air of the morning after rain. Although Ray had been accused of being involved in my disappearance, he had understood why, knew that the police were doing their job. But Joe Ellis had never recovered from being accused of killing the cats and dogs Mr. Harvey had killed. He wandered around, keeping a good distance from his neighbors and wanting so much to take solace in the love of cats and dogs. For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.

Down Route 30 near Eels Rod Pike, at a spot that Ray and Ruth were about to pass, I saw Len coming out of an apartment over Joe’s barbershop. He carried a lightly stuffed student knapsack out to his car. The knapsack had been the gift of the young woman who owned the apartment. She had asked him out for coffee one day after they met down at the station as part of a criminology course at West Chester College. Inside the knapsack he had a combination of things – some of which he would show my father and some that no child’s parent needed to see. The latter included the photos of the graves of the recovered bodies – both elbows there in each case.