I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt
me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I
was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me
panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.

I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to
be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped
inside the earth and have no one know where I was.

I thought of my mother.

My mother would be checking the dial of the clock on her oven. It was
a new oven and she loved that it had a clock on it. "I can time things
to the minute," she told her own mother, a mother who couldn't care less
about ovens.

She would be worried, but more angry than worried, at my lateness. As my
father pulled into the garage, she would rush about, fixing him a
cocktail, a dry sherry, and put on an exasperated face: "You know junior
high," she would say. "Maybe it's Spring Fling." "Abigail," my father
would say, "how can it be Spring Fling when it's snowing?" Having failed
with this, my mother might rush Buckley into the room and say, "Play
with your father” while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of
sherry for herself.

Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery
and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted
from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was
Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed
to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-closed
lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on
my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker
the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the
yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture
he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon."
I guess he had had plans. I remember that his lips were chapped.
"Don't, Mr. Harvey," I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot.
Don't. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone
begged "please" before dying.

"I want you, Susie," he said.

"Please," I said. "Don't," I said. Sometimes I combined them. "Please
don't" or "Don't please." It was like insisting that a key works when it
doesn't or yelling "I've got it, I've got it, I've got it" as a softball
goes sailing over you into the stands.

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 下一页