Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was startled. Harvey stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake. 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. It was dark out because the days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken cornstalks made my walk more difficult. But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through the cornfield back from the junior high. 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. My murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and coffee grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. She had leukemia, but I never saw her in my heaven. His daughter died a year and a half after I did.
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. Botte came to my memorial (as, may I add, did almost the entire junior high school - I was never so popular) and cried quite a bit. Don't think every person you're going to meet in here is suspect. 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 was a member of the Chess Club and Chem Club and burned everything I tried to make in Mrs. 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. In my junior high yearbook I had a quote from a Spanish poet my sister had turned me on to, Juan Ramon Jimenez.
It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My name was Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie.
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