The Lovely Bones Read Free Page A

cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine—didn’t duplicate it precisely, but
     had a lot of the same things going on inside.
    I met Holly, who became my roommate, on the third day. She was sitting on the swing set. (I didn’t question that a high school
     had swing sets: that’s what made it heaven. And no flat-benched swings—only bucket seats made out of hard black rubber that
     cradled you and that you could bounce in a bit before swinging.) Holly sat reading a book in a weird alphabet that I associated
     with the pork-fried rice my father brought home from Hop Fat Kitchen, a place Buckley loved the name of, loved so much he
     yelled “Hop Fat!” at the top of his lungs. Now I know Vietnamese, and I know that Vietnamese is not what Herman Jade, who
     owned Hop Fat, was, and that Herman Jade was not Herman Jade’s real name but one he adopted when he came to the U.S. from
     China. Holly taught me all this.
    “Hi,” I said. “My name is Susie.”
    Later she would tell me she picked her name from a movie,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
But that day it rolled right off her tongue.
    “I’m Holly,” she said. Because she wanted no trace of an accent in her heaven, she had none.
    I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
    “Three days.”
    “Me too.”
    I sat down on the swing next to her and twisted my body around and around to tie up the chains. Then I let go and spun until
     I stopped.
    “Do you like it here?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “Me either.”
    So it began.
    We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except
     for art class for me and jazz band for Holly. The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were
Seventeen
and
Glamour
and
Vogue.
    And our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things.
    Franny, my intake counselor, became our guide. Franny was old enough to be our mother—mid-forties—and it took Holly and me
     a while to figure out that this had been something we wanted: our mothers.
    In Franny’s heaven, she served and was rewarded by results and gratitude. On Earth she had been a social worker for the homeless
     and destitute. She worked out of a church named Saint Mary’s that served meals to women and children only, and she did everything
     there from manning the phones to swatting the roaches—karate-chop style. She was shot in the face by a man looking for his
     wife.
    Franny walked over to Holly and me on the fifth day. She handed us two Dixie Cups of lime Kool-Aid and we drank. “I’m here
     to help,” she said.
    I looked into her small blue eyes surrounded by laugh lines and told her the truth. “We’re bored.”
    Holly was busy trying to reach her tongue out far enough to see if it had turned green.
    “What do you want?” Franny asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why—really know—it will come.”
    It seemed so simple and it was. That’s how Holly and I got our duplex.
    I hated our split-level on Earth. I hated my parents’ furniture, and how our house looked out onto another house and another
     house and another—an echo of sameness riding up over the hill. Our duplex looked out onto a park, and in the distance, just
     close enough to know we weren’t alone, but not too close, we could see the lights of other houses.
    Eventually I began to desire more. What I found strange was how much I desired to know what I had not known on Earth. I wanted
     to be allowed to grow up.
    “People grow up by living,” I said to Franny. “I want to live.”
    “That’s out,” she said.
    “Can we at least watch the living?” asked Holly.
    “You already do,” she said.
    “I think she means whole lives,” I said, “from beginning to end, to see how