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.
Artie watched her get in line. She was still unaware, just picking up on the excitement in the air – figuring the mousetrap competition had been announced.
He kept his eye on Lindsey and saw the closest flier was posted at the end of the food line over the utensils tray. He was listening to a story about Jack the Ripper that someone at the table was relaying. He stood to return his tray.
When he reached my sister, he cleared his throat. All my hopes were pinned on this wobbly boy. “Catch her,” I said. A prayer going down to Earth.
“Lindsey,” Artie said.
Lindsey looked at him. “Yes?”
Behind the counter the army cook held out a spoon full of scrambled eggs to plop on her tray.
“I’m Artie, from your sister’s grade.”
“I don’t need any coffins,” Lindsey said, moving her tray down the metalwork to where there was orange juice and apple juice in big plastic pitchers.
“What?”
“Samuel told me you were building balsa wood coffins for the mice this year. I don’t want any.”
“They changed the competition,” he said.
That morning Lindsey had decided she would take the bottom off of Clarissa’s dress. It would be perfect for the mouse couch.
“To what?”
“Do you want to go outside?” Artie used his body to shadow her and block her passage to the utensils. “Lindsey,” he blurted. “The competition is about murder.”
