The Lovely Bones

Two weeks before Susie’s death, she arrives late to school. To avoid punishment, she sneaks around to the back door of the stage. Ray is in the scaffolding above and calls Susie beautiful as she enters. Susie reveals that Ray moved from England a year before her death but was born in India, and that the two had a mutual crush on each other. Ray invites her up on to the scaffolding. After a brief hesitation, she joins him since “it was [her] one day in life of being a bad kid” (74).

As Susie and Ray lie together in the scaffolding, two teachers enter below them with Ruth. The teachers reprimand Ruth for a charcoal drawing she did of a nude reclining woman, which someone then photocopied and passed around the school. They instruct Ruth to draw only what she is told to draw, and the teachers leave as Ruth begins crying. Susie climbs down and approaches Ruth. Ruth shows Susie her sketchbook, and Susie, noticing Ruth’s artistic talent, “realizes how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers” (77). Susie tells the reader that, while she didn’t get to kiss Ray then, they had their only kiss later that week in front of their lockers.