The Lovely Bones (2 page)

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a Coke.”

In a little while he said, “Aren’t you warm, Susie? Why don’t you take off your parka.”

I did.

After this he said, “You’re very pretty, Susie.”

“Thanks,” I said, even though he gave me what my friend Clarissa and I had dubbed the skeevies.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No, Mr. Harvey,” I said. I swallowed the rest of my Coke, which was a lot, and said, “I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a
cool place, but I have to go.”

He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug-in steps that led to the world. “I don’t know why you think you’re
leaving.”

I talked so that I would not have to take in this knowledge: Mr. Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky
now that he was blocking the door.

“Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home.”

“Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“Take your clothes off,” Mr. Harvey said. “I want to check that you’re still a virgin.”

“I am, Mr. Harvey,” I said.

“I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me.”

“My parents?”

“They only want good girls,” he said.

“Mr. Harvey,” I said, “please let me leave.”

“You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now.”

Fitness was not a big thing back then;
aerobics
was barely a word. Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were butch could climb the ropes at school.

I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not
even close, and I was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having lost
his glasses in the struggle.

I was so alive then. I thought it was
the worst thing in the world
to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped inside the earth and have no one know where I
was.

I thought of my mother.

My mother would be checking the dial of the clock on her oven. It was a new oven and she loved that it had a clock on it.
“I can time things to the minute,” she told her own mother, a mother who couldn’t care less about ovens.

She would be worried, but more angry than worried, at my lateness. As my father pulled into the garage, she would rush about,
fixing him a cocktail, a dry sherry, and put on an exasperated face: “You know junior high,” she would say. “Maybe it’s Spring
Fling.” “Abigail,” my father would say, “how can it be Spring Fling when it’s snowing?” Having failed with this, my mother
might rush Buckley into the room and say, “Play with your father,” while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of sherry
for herself.

Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid
and too exhausted from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an
accent and was dark. I wasn’t supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-closed lids, “freak-a-delic,”
but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn’t. He kissed me by my locker the
day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under
his picture he had answered the standard “My heart belongs to” with “Susie Salmon.” I guess he had had plans. I remember that
his lips were chapped.

“Don’t, Mr. Harvey,” I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot.
Don’t.
And I said
please
a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged “please” before dying.

“I want you, Susie,” he said.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t,” I said. Sometimes I combined them. “Please don’t” or “Don’t please.” It was like insisting that
a key works when it doesn’t or yelling “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it” as a softball goes sailing over you into the
stands.

“Please don’t.”

But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me,
smashing it into my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.

As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave
my body; I began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not
having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side.

“Big white panties,” he said.

I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning
in on themselves and out, like in cat’s cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself
over me.

“Susie! Susie!” I heard my mother calling. “Dinner is ready.”

He was inside me. He was grunting.

“We’re having string beans and lamb.”

I was the mortar, he was the pestle.

“Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake.”

Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped
like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies touching, and, as I shook, a powerful
knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart.
I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where worms and animals lived their
daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying.

“Why don’t you get up?” Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and then crouched over me.

His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover’s voice on a late morning. A suggestion, not a command.

I could not move. I could not get up.

When I would not—was it only that, only that I would not follow his suggestion?—he leaned to the side and felt, over his head,
across the ledge where his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife. Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in
a grin.

He took the hat from my mouth.

“Tell me you love me,” he said.

Gently, I did.

The end came anyway.

W
hen I first entered heaven I thought everyone saw what I saw. That in everyone’s heaven there were soccer goalposts in the
distance and lumbering women throwing shot put and javelin. That all the buildings were like suburban northeast high schools
built in the 1960s. Large, squat buildings spread out on dismally landscaped sandy lots, with overhangs and open spaces to
make them feel modern. My favorite part was how the colored blocks were turquoise and orange, just like the blocks in Fairfax
High. Sometimes, on Earth, I had made my father drive me by Fairfax High so I could imagine myself there.

Following the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades of middle school, high school would have been a fresh start. When I got to
Fairfax High I would insist on being called Suzanne. I would wear my hair feathered or up in a bun. I would have a body that
the boys wanted and the girls envied, but I’d be so nice on top of it all that they would feel too guilty to do anything but
worship me. I liked to think of myself—having reached a sort of queenly status—as protecting misfit kids in the cafeteria.
When someone taunted Clive Saunders for walking like a girl, I would deliver swift vengeance with my foot to the taunter’s
less-protected parts. When the boys teased Phoebe Hart for her sizable breasts, I would give a speech on why boob jokes weren’t
funny. I had to forget that I too had made lists in the margins of my notebook when Phoebe walked by: Winnebagos, Hoo-has,
Johnny Yellows. At the end of my reveries, I sat in the back of the car as my father drove. I was beyond reproach. I would
overtake high school in a matter of days, not years, or, inexplicably, earn an Oscar for Best Actress during my junior year.

These were my dreams on Earth.

After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on
the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine—didn’t duplicate it precisely, but
had a lot of the same things going on inside.

I met Holly, who became my roommate, on the third day. She was sitting on the swing set. (I didn’t question that a high school
had swing sets: that’s what made it heaven. And no flat-benched swings—only bucket seats made out of hard black rubber that
cradled you and that you could bounce in a bit before swinging.) Holly sat reading a book in a weird alphabet that I associated
with the pork-fried rice my father brought home from Hop Fat Kitchen, a place Buckley loved the name of, loved so much he
yelled “Hop Fat!” at the top of his lungs. Now I know Vietnamese, and I know that Vietnamese is not what Herman Jade, who
owned Hop Fat, was, and that Herman Jade was not Herman Jade’s real name but one he adopted when he came to the U.S. from
China. Holly taught me all this.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Susie.”

Later she would tell me she picked her name from a movie,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
But that day it rolled right off her tongue.

“I’m Holly,” she said. Because she wanted no trace of an accent in her heaven, she had none.

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines. “How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Three days.”

“Me too.”

I sat down on the swing next to her and twisted my body around and around to tie up the chains. Then I let go and spun until
I stopped.

“Do you like it here?” she asked.

“No.”

“Me either.”

So it began.

We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except
for art class for me and jazz band for Holly. The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were
Seventeen
and
Glamour
and
Vogue.

And our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things.

Franny, my intake counselor, became our guide. Franny was old enough to be our mother—mid-forties—and it took Holly and me
a while to figure out that this had been something we wanted: our mothers.

In Franny’s heaven, she served and was rewarded by results and gratitude. On Earth she had been a social worker for the homeless
and destitute. She worked out of a church named Saint Mary’s that served meals to women and children only, and she did everything
there from manning the phones to swatting the roaches—karate-chop style. She was shot in the face by a man looking for his
wife.

Franny walked over to Holly and me on the fifth day. She handed us two Dixie Cups of lime Kool-Aid and we drank. “I’m here
to help,” she said.

I looked into her small blue eyes surrounded by laugh lines and told her the truth. “We’re bored.”

Holly was busy trying to reach her tongue out far enough to see if it had turned green.

“What do you want?” Franny asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why—really know—it will come.”

It seemed so simple and it was. That’s how Holly and I got our duplex.

I hated our split-level on Earth. I hated my parents’ furniture, and how our house looked out onto another house and another
house and another—an echo of sameness riding up over the hill. Our duplex looked out onto a park, and in the distance, just
close enough to know we weren’t alone, but not too close, we could see the lights of other houses.

Eventually I began to desire more. What I found strange was how much I desired to know what I had not known on Earth. I wanted
to be allowed to grow up.

“People grow up by living,” I said to Franny. “I want to live.”

“That’s out,” she said.

“Can we at least watch the living?” asked Holly.

“You already do,” she said.

“I think she means whole lives,” I said, “from beginning to end, to see how they did it. To know the secrets. Then we can
pretend better.”

“You won’t experience it,” Franny clarified.

“Thank you, Brain Central,” I said, but our heavens began to grow.

There was the high school still, all the Fairfax architecture, but now there were roads leading out.

“Walk the paths,” Franny said, “and you’ll find what you need.”

So that’s when Holly and I set out. Our heaven had an ice cream shop where, when you asked for peppermint stick ice cream,
no one ever said, “It’s seasonal”; it had a newspaper where our pictures appeared a lot and made us look important; it had
real men in it and beautiful women too, because Holly and I were devoted to fashion magazines. Sometimes Holly seemed like
she wasn’t paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of
heaven we didn’t share. I missed her then, but it was an odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever.

I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn’t perfect. But I came to believe that if I
watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.

My father was the one who took the phone call on December ninth. It was the beginning of the end. He gave the police my blood
type, had to describe the lightness of my skin. They asked him if I had any identifying features. He began to describe my
face in detail, getting lost in it. Detective Fenerman let him go on, the next news too horrible to interrupt with. But then
he said it: “Mr. Salmon, we have found only a body part.”

My father stood in the kitchen and a sickening shiver overtook him. How could he tell that to Abigail?

“So you can’t be certain that she’s dead?” he asked.

“Nothing is ever certain,” Len Fenerman said.