Susie's Medium

My favorite character in The Lovely Bones was Ruth Connors for no other reason than that she reflected my own personality, but to an extreme. Like Ruth, I don’t morn for the dead like most people do. “I realize 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)

“Like a phone call from the jail cell, I brushed by Ruth Connors - wrong number, accidental call.” (37)

“If her mother or her more approachable teachers did not want to hear the darker reality she had experienced, she would cloak this reality in poetry.” (38)

“She sat in the tool shed with a flashlight, looking at photos of me and smoking more grass than even the potheads at school could suck down.” (40)

“Sometimes I think she’s lucky, you know. I hate this place.” -Ruth Connors (82)

“’This is not Susie, for Chrissakes!’ her mother would say, plunking down an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter.” (114)

“…she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow.” (117)

“Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. ‘I think she listens.’” (124)

My Brother and the Ditch

It was a couple of hours past midday and the sun was making its slow, steady way to the west. My tan burlap bag thumped softly against my back as I followed my brother out the north entrance of the library. The only sound came from cars passing on M-52 to the south and the sound of our feet against the cement as we made our way to the gray Crown Victoria waiting in the small parking lot. The lines on the worn cement were so faded that even the beginnings of the lines were hard to discern. However, people didn’t need to flock to the library all at once in their cars. Most people were close enough to walk to it and, in fact, there were two bikes parked near the southern entrance. The town was so small that no bums patrolled the streets and the only criminals were bored teens looking for more than ordinary means to waste the time away. If anyone was to steal a bike there was a very high probability that you knew the person who stole it.

Anyway, I was smiling as I opened the passenger side door and plopped onto the couch-like front seat. The bag I was carrying over my shoulder went onto the floor of the car by my feet as I slammed the car door shut and reached back for the seatbelt. As soon as it was secure I adjusted my posture a bit and tightened it, glancing over at my brother as he turned the key in the ignition. My brother had the same dirty blonde hair and blue-gray eyes as me, but his skin was tanned and much darker than mine. This was due to his more active habits and exposure to the sun. The mustache and goatee that he had acquired despite our mother’s urgings to shave it all off were quite thick.

Phenomenon by Thousand Foot Krutch blared out of the subwoofers at my feet as car came to life and my brother was quick to tone it down. We grinned at each other as if we had just gotten away with something we weren’t supposed to and then he pulled the car into reverse and backed out into the street. Thousand Foot Krutch is a Christian rock band that both of us happen to like. This is rather fortunate for me since my brother won’t allow me to touch any of the cars controls other than my windows. However, he does tend to open the windows himself and not give me much of a say in the matter anyway, so I guess that wasn’t even in my control either. It’s his car, although mom and dad paid for it, so I guess he has his rights. However, there’s one incident I can remember quite clearly where his stubborn refusal to let me do anything with the controls came to bite him in the behind.

It was a very humid fall day and before we left I had turned the defoggers on, but my brother, in on of his pain-in-the-ass moments, decided to shut the defoggers off just because I turned them on. This had left me feeling annoyed and strangely depressed that my own brother would risk both our lives just to prove a point. The silence in the car was almost deafening and I refused to even look at him the whole way to school. When we finally arrived in the parking lot I didn’t even say my usual goodbye. I don’t think he even noticed this since he was busy calling mom to tell her that we had arrived safely. I was fuming inside as I made my way up the sidewalk to the front doors of the school, but I’m not one to show it. A couple of hours of dull schoolwork and I had forgotten about the incident, buried in the regular routine and it’s sometimes interesting moments.

When school had officially ended my brother and I were still at school, staying after for film club. Now that I look back on it, we never did finish any of the films we started, but that is for another story perhaps. When that was done my brother was obligated to drive Doug, one of his best friends, home. When we piled into his car I was in the front passenger seat and Doug was in the back. The backseat is much like the front seat, a gray couch with seatbelts. I realized that we would still need the defrosters because of the weather, but my brother, being such a smart and responsible driver, had decided that we wouldn’t need the rear defrosters. Having “learned my lesson”, I was a good sister and didn’t touch the controls no matter how badly I wanted to. The fact that Doug was in the car helped to break some of the tension in the car, but I still felt ignored.

We made it safely to Doug’s house and dropped him off, joking about a raccoon we passed on our way in. Before he left I predicted that my brother would back into the ditch and sometime during the conversation he turned the rear and front defrosters on because some fogginess was showing on the windshield. This didn’t help much, since he was still blind backing up and, as I predicted, he backed into the ditch. I knew as soon as the right rear tire didn’t catch on anything that he’d done so. I proceeded to remind him that I had predicted he’d do it, although this was in a joking manner that gave the whole event a more “Can you believe what just happened?!” kind of feel. Both of us were laughing when we came out of the car to see what happened.

Half the car was on the driveway and the other half was in the ditch. Because of this the rear axle was stuck against a beam running parallel to the ditch and the rear right tire was hanging in the air. My brother tried to make the car pull out of the predicament it was in with the accelerator, but the rear tires were stuck and the Crown Victoria only has rear-wheel drive. After quite a few tries we decided to go into the house and ask for help. Doug and his mom, dad, and uncle thought it was funny and so did my brother and I, since we weren’t too embarrassed about it.

Doug’s dad had a rather powerful suburban so he decided he’d pull us out with the truck and a tow-rope. It took a while for my brother to find a place to hook up the tow-rope on the front of the car. When that was finally accomplished, they hooked the other end to the truck and proceeded to slowly pull the Crown Victoria out of the ditch. We found that when he backed up the truck and then pulled forward it moved farther than if the truck was constantly pulling on it. Trains do this when they start off to get all the cars moving properly. I had just learned about this in physics a little while before the incident and wondered at it a bit.

After a while Doug’s dad did manage to get the Crown Victoria out of the ditch. The car hadn’t suffered any major damage and my brother and I made it safely home with quite a story to tell our parents.

Opposites

In the art gallery on the first floor of Delta College’s S-wing stand two huge glass boxes on wheels. These boxes caught my eye the first time I saw them, but at the time I was in too much of a hurry to get a class and my curiosity was quelled. In one box there is a sculpture of two children playing with little white cubes. The cubes are stacked and placed randomly in the exhibit, and it looks like each one was made separately. It makes me wonder how heavy they are, since they stay in their positions despite the heavy traffic that goes through the art gallery. I also wonder if anyone has managed to jar any of the pieces from their original positions and if the positions they are in now are the ones they had been placed in.

Focusing back on the children, one is white (although darker than the blocks) and the other is black (as in the skin tone, not the actual color). The mottled coloration seems a bit fuzzy and reminds me of felt (my teacher assures me that it is felt in fact). Both children give the impression of being male, mostly because they are bald. They don’t have any kind of clothes on either. The black child is on his stomach, passively playing with the blocks, and I could picture him kicking his feet lazily. The white child seems opposite in more than color, since the position he's in suggests action. His body forms a triangle with the floor: butt in the air with noes and head on the ground, as if he was about to perform a somersault. How the white child could avoid the white blocks around him while doing such an action suggests a carelessness that would bring any respectable adult over to correct him before he harms himself.