“Are you going to open your gift?” Samuel Heckler asked my sister.
They stood at the counter, leaning against the dishwasher and the drawers that held napkins and towels. In the room to their right sat my father and brother; on the other side of the kitchen, my mother was thinking Wedgwood Florentine, Cobalt Blue; Royal Worcester, Mountbatten; Lenox, Eternal.
Lindsey smiled and pulled at the white ribbon on top of the box.
“My mom did the ribbon for me,” Samuel Heckler said.
She tore the blue paper away from the black velvet box. Carefully she held it in her palm once the paper was off. In heaven I was excited. When Lindsey and I played Barbies, Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone’s life; we had no concept of compromise, or retrys.
“Open it,” Samuel Heckler said.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
He put his hand on her forearm and – Wow! – what I felt when he did that. Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen, vampire or no! This was news, this was a bulletin – I was suddenly privy to everything. She never would have told me any of this stuff.
What the box held was typical or disappointing or miraculous depending on the eye. It was typical because he was a thirteen-year-old boy, or it was disappointing because it was not a wedding ring, or it was miraculous. He’d given her a half a heart. It was gold and from inside his Hukapoo shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord.
Lindsey’s face flushed; mine flushed up in heaven.
I forgot my father in the family room and my mother counting silver. I saw Lindsey move toward Samuel Heckler. She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.
Two weeks before my death, I left the house later than usual, and by the time I reached the school, the blacktop circle where the school buses usually hovered was empty.
A hall monitor from the discipline office would write down your name if you tried to get in the front doors after the first bell rang, and I didn’t want to be paged during class to come and sit on the hard bench outside Mr. Peterford’s room, where, it was widely known, he would bend you over and paddle your behind with a board. He’d asked the shop teacher to drill holes into it for less wind resistance on the downstroke and more pain when it landed against your jeans.
I had never been late enough or done anything bad enough to meet the board, but in my mind as in every other kid’s I could visualize it so well my butt would sting. Clarissa had told me that the baby stoners, as they were called in junior high, used the back door to the stage, which was always left open by Cleo, the janitor, who had dropped out of high school as a full-blown stoner.
So that day I crept into the backstage area, watching my step, careful not to trip over the various cords and wires. I paused near some scaffolding and put down my book bag to brush my hair. I’d taken to leaving the house in the jingle-bell cap and then switching, as soon as I gained cover behind the O’Dwyers’ house, to an old black watch cap of my father’s. All this left my hair full of static electricity, and my first stop was usually the girls’ room, where I would brush it flat.
“You are beautiful, Susie Salmon.”
I heard the voice but could not place it immediately. I looked around me.
“Here,” the voice said.
I looked up and saw the head and torso of Ray Singh leaning out over the top of the scaffold above me.
“Hello,” he said.
I knew Ray Singh had a crush on me. He had moved from England the year before but Clarissa said he was born in India. That someone could have the face of one country and the voice of another and then move to a third was too incredible for me to fathom. It made him immediately cool. Plus, he seemed eight hundred times smarter than the rest of us, and he had a crush on me. What I finally realized were affectations – the smoking jacket that he sometimes wore to school and his foreign cigarettes, which were actually his mother’s – I thought were evidence of his higher breeding. He knew and saw things that the rest of us didn’t see. That morning when he spoke to me from above, my heart plunged to the floor.
