It is 1993 and Clarissa- useless, washed out stoner- is stood somewhere she never wanted to be again. She is thirty four; the coloured blocks of Fairfax high remain unchanged.
It is early morning and the sun has not yet fully risen. It peeks over the horizon sleepily, casting a faint golden glow over the neighbourhood- the football field where she used to preen in front of the boys, the rows and rows of houses where she grew up. It illuminates the tips of the broken cornstalks up ahead.
She's still afraid of it, the cornfield. Despite fifteen years of the drugs and the booze and the sex, she still remembers with painful clarity every spine chilling whisper about that place following the 6th December, twenty years ago. Midnight. Devil worship. Ray Singh.
Even worse were the missing pieces, the blanks that were filled in with ever more grisly rumours and details her classmates chose that had made her want to scream until they went away.
Hey, she'd wanted to say, that's my best friend you're talking about.
But they'd all known that, hadn't they? They had known and they stared. As a girl Clarissa had loved attention, loved being the centre of attention- but after that she found she didn't want the association. Brian had been a life saver.
In the beginning, anyway.
Clarissa shakes her head trying to dispel those particular memories, but its not easy to ignore. Her turbulent relationship with Brian Nelson was the foundation for the path her life would take for the next twenty years. The hardest part was knowing that Clarissa herself paved the way, brick by brick to where she was now. She could blame Brian for getting her into the drugs, or her mother for never loving her enough, or Su- her best friend- for getting killed and ruining everything, but the truth was Clarissa chose. In the end she always chose.
It is cold. She is wearing thin clothing, inadequate for the early morning chill. It doesn't seem to matter now; the cold makes her feel alive, more alive than she has in years. Its been so long since Clarissa has truly felt the sun.
"I'm here," she murmurs, her voice slurred after years of abusing her body. She sounds like a different person. In a lot of ways, she is. A long time ago it seems, she was the giggling light hearted girl that everyone wanted to be in high school, in middle school. But Clarissa knows now the weight of regret.
"I'm here," she repeats for her own benefit. Maybe for that other girl too, if she believed in heaven and those sorts of things. Maybe if she hadn't seen a lifetimes worth of sorrow that comes from a life wasted, she would think maybe she knows I'm here. Just maybe she's listening.
Susie Salmon. Clarissa forces herself to think the words she has avoided in every way humanely possible, for twenty years. Susie.
She shuts her eyes on the rising sun and its golden rays and tries to picture the face that goes with the name. All she can see is that last school photo that plastered the newspapers, the lampposts, the shop doors for months on end. At some point- Clarissa is not sure when it happened- it stopped being Susie and became the face of the missing girl, the murdered girl who no one ever found. She cannot remember the colour of Susie's eyes, the sound of her laugh. The smile however, she can perfectly recall; frozen, lifeless on a flat piece of paper.
She takes a step into the cornfield, her breath hanging on a thread. She is tentative, afraid. The memory of her last venture here is pressing vividly against the walls of her skull. She wants a drink.
Once, Clarissa- silly, lost Clarissa- came to the cornfield alone in the darkness. The corn was long and obstructed her view, crowding over her head like shadows looming over her. It crunches beneath her feet in broken stalks now but that doesn't stop the recollection.
Brian had wanted her. She had known that and it had both enthralled and repelled her in equal measure.
"The cornfield," she had told him, impressing him with what he thought was her daring nature, "I'll meet you in the cornfield."
She had let him think that she had chosen it for the extra thrill of knowing what had happened there. It wasn't. She had wanted the whispers to stop, the looks, the glances- all of it- to stop. But she had never wanted to spit on Susie's memory, on the horror that had befallen her.
Once, Clarissa had gone to the cornfield to meet a boy, the flashlight gripped tightly in her hand. She wanted to leave the old Clarissa- the girl who had been Susie's friend- behind. Sex with Brian had been the fastest way she knew how to achieve this. But she had also had the vague idea that it was something beautiful she could do. Clarissa had had the childish idea that she could purify the blood soaked ground of the cornfield by filling it with an act of love. That by making love under the stars she could undo all the wrong that it had absorbed.
It hadn't quite worked out like that, of course. She still felt the shame of what Brian did to Mr Salmon, who had been fond of her, of what he had done to a family that had to live with devastation every moment for the rest of their lives. She couldn't forget the way that man, so broken in the faint torchlight, had screamed his daughter's name.
"Susie!" A desperate cry. "Susie!"
Clarissa is still afraid of the cornfield and all the things it represents. But she is here. She has been in and out of rehab for five years. Its time to stop running away. She takes a deep breath and looks up at the baby blue sky, the pink streaks, the wispy looking clouds. It goes on forever. Looking at it, its not so hard to believe in the idea of heaven.
"Hey Susie," she whispers, finally finally, saying the name aloud. "Its been awhile, I know." There are so many things she wants to say. They crowd her brain and stick in her throat. Imissedyoui'.
"Its been awhile," she repeats. "But I've come back."