Read The Lovely Bones for Free Online Page B

yet.”
    “Always,” he said.
    When Ruth tottered in later that night, her eyes bleary from using the flashlight and from the eight More cigarettes she’d
     smoked, her mother greeted her with a smile and told her there was blueberry pie in the kitchen. It took a few days and some
     non-Susie-Salmon-focused research, but Ruth discovered why she had eaten the entire pie in one sitting.
    The air in my heaven often smelled like skunk—just a hint of it. It was a smell that I had always loved on Earth. When I breathed
     it in, I could feel the scent as well as smell it. It was the animal’s fear and power mixed together to form a pungent, lingering
     musk. In Franny’s heaven it smelled like pure, grade-A tobacco. In Holly’s it smelled like kumquats.
    I would sit whole days and nights in the gazebo and watch. See Clarissa spin away from me, toward the comfort of Brian. See
     Ruth staring at her from behind a corner near the home ec room or outside the cafeteria near the nurse’s station. At the start,
     the freedom I had to see the whole school was intoxicating. I would watch the assistant football coach leave anonymous chocolates
     for the married science teacher, or the head of the cheerleading squad trying to capture the attention of the kid who had
     been expelled so many times, from so many schools, even he had lost count. I watched the art teacher make love to his girlfriend
     in the kiln room and the principal moon over the assistant football coach. I concluded that this assistant football coach
     was a stud in the world of Kennet Junior High, even if his square jaw left me cold.
    On the way back to the duplex each night I would pass under old-time street lamps that I had seen once in a play of
Our Town.
The globes of light hung down in an arc from an iron post. I had remembered them because when I saw the play with my family,
     I thought of them as giant, heavy berries full of light. I made a game in heaven of positioning myself so that my shadow plucked
     the berries as I made my way home.
    After watching Ruth one night I met Franny in the midst of this. The square was deserted, and leaves began to swirl around
     in an eddy up ahead. I stood and looked at her—at the laugh lines that were clustered near her eyes and mouth.
    “Why are you shivering?” Franny asked.
    And though the air was damp and chilly I could not say that that was why.
    “I can’t help thinking of my mother,” I said.
    Franny took my left hand in both of hers and smiled.
    I wanted to kiss her lightly on the cheek or have her hold me, but instead I watched her walk off in front of me, saw her
     blue dress trail away. I knew that she was not my mother; I could not play pretend.
    I turned around and went back to the gazebo. I felt the moist air lace its way up along my legs and arms, lifting, ever so
     slightly, the ends of my hair. I thought of spider webs in the morning, how they held small jewels of dew, how, with a light
     movement of the wrist, I used to destroy them without thinking.
    On the morning of my eleventh birthday I had woken up very early. No one else was up, or so I thought. I crept downstairs
     and looked into the dining room, where I assumed my presents would be. But there was nothing there. Same table as yesterday.
     But as I turned around I saw it lying on my mother’s desk in the living room. The fancy desk with an always-clean surface.
     “The bill-paying desk” was what they called it. Swaddled in tissue paper but not yet wrapped was a camera—what I had asked
     for with a tinge of whining in my voice, so sure they would not get it for me. I went over to it and stared down. It was an
     Instamatic, and lying beside it were three cartridges of film and a box of four square flashbulbs. It was my first machine, my
     starter kit to becoming what I wanted to be. A wildlife photographer.
    I looked around. No one. I saw through the front blinds, which my mother always kept at a half-slant—“inviting but