The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Page A

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.
    “Hasn’t the first bell rung?” I asked.
    “I have Mr. Morton for homeroom,” he said. This explained everything. Mr. Morton had a perpetual hangover, which was at its
     peak during homeroom. He never called roll.
    “What are you doing up there?”
    “Climb up and see,” he said, removing his head and shoulders from my view.
    I hesitated.
    “Come on, Susie.”
    It was my one day in life of being a bad kid—of at least feigning the moves. I placed my foot on the bottom rung of the scaffold
     and reached my arms up to the first crossbar.
    “Bring your stuff,” Ray advised.
    I went back for my book bag and then climbed unsteadily up.
    “Let me help you,” he said and put his hands under my armpits, which, even though covered by my winter parka, I was self-conscious
     about. I sat for a moment with my feet dangling over the side.
    “Tuck them in,” he said. “That way no one will see us.”
    I did what he told me, and then I stared at him for a moment. I felt suddenly stupid—unsure of why I was there.
    “Will you stay up here all day?” I asked.
    “Just until English class is over.”
    “You’re cutting English!” It was as if he said he’d robbed a bank.
    “I’ve seen every Shakespeare play put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Ray said. “That bitch has nothing to teach me.”
    I felt sorry for Mrs. Dewitt then. If part of being bad was calling Mrs. Dewitt a bitch, I wasn’t into it.
    “I like
Othello,
” I ventured.
    “It’s condescending twaddle the way she teaches it. A sort of
Black Like Me
version of the Moor.”
    Ray was smart. This combined with being an Indian from England had made him a Martian in Norristown.
    “That guy in the movie looked pretty stupid with black makeup on,” I said.
    “You mean Sir Laurence Olivier.”
    Ray and I were quiet. Quiet enough to hear the bell for the end of homeroom ring and then, five minutes later, the bell that
     meant we should be on the first floor in Mrs. Dewitt’s class. As each second passed after that bell, I could feel my skin heat
     up and Ray’s look lengthen out over my body, taking in my royal blue parka and my kelly green miniskirt with my matching Danskin
     tights. My real shoes sat beside me inside my bag. On my feet I had a pair of fake sheepskin boots with dirty synthetic shearing
     spilling out like animal innards around the tops and seams. If I had known this was to be the sex scene of my life, I might
     have prepared a bit, reapplied my Strawberry-Banana Kissing Potion as I came in the door.
    I could feel Ray’s body leaning toward me, the scaffolding underneath us