by Alice Sebold
There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge. Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again—no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades.
Samuel was a Master. His heroes were Richard Feynman and his brother, Hal. Hal had dropped out of high school and now ran the bike shop near the sinkhole, where he serviced everyone from Hell’s Angels to the elderly who rode motorized scooters around the parking lots of their retirement homes. Hal smoked, lived at home over the Hecklers’ garage, and conducted a variety of romances in the back of his shop.
When people asked Hal when he was going to grow up, he said, “Never.” Inspired by this, when the teachers asked Samuel what he wanted to be, he would say: “I don’t know. I just turned fourteen.”
Almost fifteen now, Ruth Connors knew. Out in the aluminum toolshed behind her house, surrounded by the doorknobs and hardware her father had found in old houses slated for demolition, Ruth sat in the darkness and concentrated until she came away with a headache. She would run into the house, past the living room, where her father sat reading, and up to her room, where in fits and bursts she would write her poetry. “Being Susie,” “After Death,” “In Pieces,” “Beside Her Now,” and her favorite—the one she was most proud of and carried with her to the symposium folded and refolded so often that the creases were close to cuts—“The Lip of the Grave.”
Ruth had to be driven to the symposium because that morning, when the bus was leaving, she was still at home with an acute attack of gastritis. She was trying weird all-vegetable regimes and the night before had eaten a whole head of cabbage for dinner. Her mother refused to kowtow to the vegetarianism Ruth had taken up after my death.
“This is not Susie, for Chrissakes!” her mother would say, plunking down an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter.
Her father drove her first to the hospital at three A.M. and then to the symposium, stopping home on the way to pick up the bag her mother had packed and left at the end of their driveway.
As the car pulled up into the camp, Ruth scanned the crowd of kids lining up for nametags. She spotted my sister among an all-male group of Masters. Lindsey had avoided putting her last name on her nametag, choosing to draw a fish instead. She wasn’t exactly lying that way, but she hoped to meet a few kids from the surrounding schools who didn’t know the story of my death or at least wouldn’t connect her to it.
All spring she’d worn the half-a-heart pendant while Samuel wore the other half. They were shy about their affection for each other. They did not hold hands in the hallways at school, and they did not pass notes. They sat together at lunch; Samuel walked her home. On her fourteenth birthday he brought her a cupcake with a candle in it. Other than that, they melted into the gender-subdivided world of their peers.
The following morning Ruth was up early. Like Lindsey, Ruth was a floater at gifted camp. She didn’t belong to any one group. She had gone on a nature walk and collected plants and flowers she needed help naming. When she didn’t like the answers one of the Science Nerds provided, she decided to start naming the plants and flowers herself. She drew a picture of the leaf or blossom in her journal, and then what sex she thought it was, and then gave it a name like “Jim” for a simple-leaved plant and “Pasha” for a more downy flower.
By the time Lindsey stumbled in to the dining hall, Ruth was in line for a second helping of eggs and sausage. She had made a big stink about no meat at home and she had to hold to it, but no one at the symposium knew of the oath she’d sworn.
Ruth hadn’t talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she’d seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.
As Lindsey walked blindly to the next open spot in line, Ruth interceded. “What’s the fish for?” Ruth asked, nodding her head toward my sister’s nametag. “Are you religious?”
“Notice the direction of the fish,” Lindsey said, wishing simultaneously that they had vanilla puddings at breakfast. They would go great with her pancakes.
“Ruth Connors, poet,” Ruth said, by way of introduction.
“Lindsey,” Lindsey said.
“Salmon, right?”
“Please don’t,” Lindsey said, and for a second Ruth could feel the feeling a little more vividly—what it was like to claim me. How people looked at Lindsey and imagined a girl covered in blood.
Even among the gifteds, who distinguished themselves by doing things differently, people paired off within the first few days. It was mostly pairs of boys or pairs of girls—few serious relationships had begun by fourteen—but there was one exception that year. Lindsey and Samuel.
“K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” greeted them wherever they went. Unchaperoned, and with the heat of the summer, something grew in them like weeds. It was lust. I’d never felt it so purely or seen it move so hotly into someone I knew. Someone whose gene pool I shared.
They were careful and followed the rules. No counselor could say he had flashed a light under the denser shrubbery by the boys’ dorm and found Salmon and Heckler going at it. They set up little meetings outside in back of the cafeteria or by a certain tree that they’d marked up high with their initials. They kissed. They wanted to do more but couldn’t. Samuel wanted it to be special. He was aware that it should be perfect. Lindsey just wanted to get it over with. Have it behind her so she could achieve adulthood—transcend the place and the time. She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport. You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.
“They’re going to do it,” Ruth wrote in her journal. I had pinned hopes on Ruth’s writing everything down. She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her—literally, she felt, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day.
When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the cornfield in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too.
“You’re a really good poet, Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.
I could see back to an afternoon when Ruth watched her teenage cousin undress to take a bath while Ruth sat on the bathroom rug, locked in the bathroom so her cousin could babysit her as she’d been told. Ruth had longed to touch her cousin’s skin and hair, longed to be held. I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls’ crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.
The last week of the symposium was always spent developing a final project, which the various schools would present in competition on the night before the parents returned to pick the students up. The competition wasn’t announced until the Saturday breakfast of that final week, but the kids had already begun planning for it anyway. It was always a better-mousetrap competition, and so the stakes were raised year after year. No one wanted to repeat a mousetrap that had alread
y been built.
Samuel went in search of the kids with braces. He needed the tiny rubber bands orthodontists doled out. They would work to keep the tension tight on the guiding arm of his mousetrap. Lindsey begged clean tinfoil from the retired army cook. Their trap involved reflecting light in order to confuse the mice.
“What happens if they like the way they look?” Lindsey asked Samuel.
“They can’t see that clearly,” Samuel said. He was stripping the paper off the wire twists from the camp garbage bag supply. If a kid looked strangely at ordinary objects around the camp, he or she was most likely thinking of how it would serve the ultimate mousetrap.
“They’re pretty cute,” Lindsey said one afternoon.
Lindsey had spent the better part of the night before gathering field mice with string lures and putting them under the wire mesh of an empty rabbit hutch.
Samuel watched them intently. “I could be a vet, I guess,” he said, “but I don’t think I’d like cutting them open.”
“Do we have to kill them?” Lindsey asked. “It’s a better mousetrap, not a better mouse death camp.”
“Artie’s contributing little coffins made out of balsa wood,” Samuel said, laughing.
“That’s sick.”
“That’s Artie.”
“He supposedly had a crush on Susie,” Lindsey said.
“I know.”
“Does he talk about her?” Lindsey took a long thin stick and poked it through the mesh.
“He’s asked about you, actually,” Samuel said.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re okay, that you’ll be okay.”
The mice kept running from the stick into the corner, where they crawled on top of one another in a useless effort to flee. “Let’s build a mousetrap with a little purple velvet couch in it and we can rig up a latch so that when they sit on the couch, a door drops and little balls of cheese fall down. We can call it Wild Rodent Kingdom.”
Samuel didn’t press my sister like the adults did. He would talk in detail about mouse couch upholstery instead.
By that summer I had begun to spend less time watching from the gazebo because I could still see Earth as I walked the fields of heaven. The night would come and the javelin-throwers and shot-putters would leave for other heavens. Heavens where a girl like me didn’t fit in. Were they horrific, these other heavens? Worse than feeling so solitary among one’s living, growing peers? Or were they the stuff I dreamed about? Where you could be caught in a Norman Rockwell world forever. Turkey constantly being brought to a table full of family. A wry and twinkling relative carving up the bird.
If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then—singing—a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in.
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.”
She stared at him.
Lindsey held on to her tray. She kept her eyes locked on Artie.
“I wanted to tell you before you read the flier,” he said.
Samuel rushed into the tent.
“What’s going on?” Lindsey looked helplessly at Samuel.
“This year’s competition is how to commit the perfect murder,” Samuel said.
Samuel and I saw the tremor. The inside shakeoff of her heart. She was getting so
good the cracks and fissures were smaller and smaller. Soon, like a sleight-of-hand trick perfected, no one would see her do it. She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
“I’m fine,” she said.
But Samuel knew she wasn’t.
He and Artie watched her back as she departed.
“I was trying to warn her,” Artie said weakly.
Artie returned to his table. He drew hypodermics, one after another. His pen pressed harder and harder as he colored in the embalming fluid inside, as he perfected the trajectory of the three drops squirting out.
Lonely, I thought, on Earth as it is in heaven.
“You kill people by stabbing and cutting and shooting,” Ruth said. “It’s sick.”
“Agreed,” Artie said.
Samuel had taken my sister away to talk. Artie had seen Ruth at one of the outside picnic tables with her big blank book.
“But there are good reasons to kill,” Ruth said.
“Who do you think did it?” Artie asked. He sat on the bench and braced his feet up under the table on the crossbar.
Ruth sat almost motionless, right leg crossed over left, but her foot jiggled ceaselessly.
“How did you hear?” she asked.
“My father told us,” Artie said. “He called my sister and me into the family room and made us sit down.”
“Shit, what did he say?”
“First he said that horrible things happened in the world and my sister said, ‘Vietnam,’ and he was quiet because they always fight about that whenever it comes up. So he said, ‘No, honey, horrible things happen close to home, to people we know.’ She thought it was one of her friends.”
Ruth felt a raindrop.
“Then my dad broke down and said a little girl had been killed. I was the one who asked who. I mean, when he said ‘little girl,’ I pictured little, you know. Not us.”
It was a definite drop, and they began to land on the redwood tabletop.