How It All Goes Down
- It's summer now, and Lindsey, Samuel, and Ruth are attending "the statewide Gifted and Talented Symposium" (10.1).
- Samuel worships his brother Hal, who runs a bike shop behind the railroad tracks across from the sinkhole, and lives at home in an apartment on top of the garage.
- Ruth is becoming more devoted to her Susie poetry and has become a vegetarian since Susie died.
- Lindsey draws a fish on her nametag – when people see her name, they think of Susie, bloody and butchered. Ruth asks her about it in the cafeteria one day.
- Susie watches Ruth write and dream about her more and more.
- She discovers that Ruth has sexual desires for women.
- Susie learns she doesn't have to stay in the gazebo to watch Earth; she can walk heaven's fields and still see.
- One day, she asks Franny if there's another heaven, where her ancestors are, where nobody can remember their time on Earth.
- Franny says there is, but to go there, you have to stop worrying about Earth. Susie can't imagine getting to that point.
- That night, Ruth comes to Lindsey's bed after dreaming of Susie. She confides in Lindsey.
- On Saturday, the symposium's contest is announced. Whoever can best demonstrate "HOW TO COMMIT THE PERFECT MURDER" (10.71) wins.
- Lindsey's friends try to shield her, but she soon learns the truth. Then everybody learns whose sister she is.
- Samuel and Lindsey have sex for the first time under a rowboat sheltering them from a summer shower.
- Susie thinks, "In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows" (10.138).
- In heaven, they play "How to Commit the Perfect Murder" all the time. Susie's favorite weapon is the icicle, because it melts inside the body of the victim, leaving no trace.