Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.

In the kitchen my mother finished her eggnog and excused herself. She went into the dining room and counted silverware, methodically laying out the three kinds of forks, the knives, and the spoons, making them “climb the stairs” as she’d been taught when she worked in Wanamaker’s bridal shop before I was born. She wanted a cigarette and for her children who were living to disappear for a little while.

“Are you going to open your gift?” Samuel Heckler asked my sister.

They stood at the counter, leaning against the dishwasher and the drawers that held napkins and towels. In the room to their right sat my father and brother; on the other side of the kitchen, my mother was thinking Wedgwood Florentine, Cobalt Blue; Royal Worcester, Mountbatten; Lenox, Eternal.

Lindsey smiled and pulled at the white ribbon on top of the box.

“My mom did the ribbon for me,” Samuel Heckler said.

She tore the blue paper away from the black velvet box. Carefully she held it in her palm once the paper was off. In heaven I was excited. When Lindsey and I played Barbies, Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone’s life; we had no concept of compromise, or retrys.

“Open it,” Samuel Heckler said.

“I’m scared.”

“Don’t be.”

He put his hand on her forearm and – Wow! – what I felt when he did that. Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen, vampire or no! This was news, this was a bulletin – I was suddenly privy to everything. She never would have told me any of this stuff.

What the box held was typical or disappointing or miraculous depending on the eye. It was typical because he was a thirteen-year-old boy, or it was disappointing because it was not a wedding ring, or it was miraculous. He’d given her a half a heart. It was gold and from inside his Hukapoo shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord.

Lindsey’s face flushed; mine flushed up in heaven.

I forgot my father in the family room and my mother counting silver. I saw Lindsey move toward Samuel Heckler. She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.

Two weeks before my death, I left the house later than usual, and by the time I reached the school, the blacktop circle where the school buses usually hovered was empty.

A hall monitor from the discipline office would write down your name if you tried to get in the front doors after the first bell rang, and I didn’t want to be paged during class to come and sit on the hard bench outside Mr. Peterford’s room, where, it was widely known, he would bend you over and paddle your behind with a board. He’d asked the shop teacher to drill holes into it for less wind resistance on the downstroke and more pain when it landed against your jeans.

I had never been late enough or done anything bad enough to meet the board, but in my mind as in every other kid’s I could visualize it so well my butt would sting. Clarissa had told me that the baby stoners, as they were called in junior high, used the back door to the stage, which was always left open by Cleo, the janitor, who had dropped out of high school as a full-blown stoner.

So that day I crept into the backstage area, watching my step, careful not to trip over the various cords and wires. I 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 squeaking from his movement. He is from England, I was thinking. His lips moved closer, the scaffold listed. I was dizzy – about to go under the wave of my first kiss, when we both heard something. We froze.

Ray and I lay down side by side and stared at the lights and wires overhead. A moment later, the stage door opened and in walked Mr. Peterford and the art teacher, Miss Ryan, who we recognized by their voices. There was a third person with them.