

Franny, their intake counselor, helps the girls adjust to life in heaven, and explains the rules to them-to get what they want, all they have to do is desire it, and understand the reason why. The dead interact in the spaces where their heavens overlap-Susie soon makes friend with a girl named Holly, who, like Susie, has newly arrived. Susie arrives in heaven and finds that everyone’s heaven is different.

After the act is done, Harvey instructs her to tell him that she loves him. Susie begs Harvey to stop, but he rapes her. He begins kissing her, and Susie thinks of her first real kiss-it happened just the other week, with a classmate named Ray Singh. She and Harvey begin to struggle physically, but Harvey bests her, and throws Susie down on the ground. Harvey remarks on how beautiful Susie is, and urges her to take off her clothes. Harvey opens up a trapdoor in the ground and invites Susie to climb down. Her neighbor George Harvey is waiting in the field, and he invites her to come take a look at something he has built. After school on December 6th, 1973, Susie walks home from school, cutting through the cornfield which separates her junior high from her neighborhood. Susie Salmon is fourteen years old when she is murdered.
