My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.

In my junior high yearbook I had a quote from a Spanish poet my sister
had turned me on to, Juan Ramon Jimenez. It went like this: "If they
give you ruled paper, write the other way." I chose it both because it
expressed my contempt for my structured surroundings a la the classroom
and because, not being some dopey quote from a rock group, I thought it
marked me as literary. I was a member of the Chess Club and Chem Club
and burned everything I tried to make in Mrs. Delminico's home ec class.
My favorite teacher was Mr. Botte, who taught biology and liked to
animate the frogs and crawfish we had to dissect by making them dance in
their waxed pans.

I wasn't killed by Mr. Botte, by the way. Don't think every person
you're going to meet in here is suspect. That's the problem. You never
know. Mr. Botte came to my memorial (fas?), may I add, as did almost the
entire junior high school (I was never so popular) and cried quite a
bit. He had a sick kid. We all knew this, so when he laughed at his own
jokes, which were rusty way before I had him, we laughed too, forcing it
sometimes just to make him happy. His daughter died a year and a half
after I did. She had leukemia, but I never saw her in my heaven.
My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his
border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. My
murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and coffee
grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My father came home
smiling, making jokes about how the man's garden might be beautiful but
it would stink to high heaven once a heat wave hit.

But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through
the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the
days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken cornstalks
made my walk more difficult. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry
of small hands, and I was breathing through my nose until it was running
so much that I had to open my mouth. Six feet from where Mr. Harvey
stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake.

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