OUTSIDE READING #6

“Imagine being stabbed.” Someone said.
“No Thanks.”
“I think it’s
cool.”
“Think of it—she’s famous.”
“Some way to get famous. I’d rather win
the Noble Prize.”
“Does anyone know what she wanted to be?”
“I dare you to
ask Lindsey.”
And they listed the dead they knew.
Grandmother,
grandfather, uncle, aunt, some had a parent, rarer was a sister or brother lost
young to an illness –a heart irregularity—leukemia—an unpronounceable disease.
No one knew anyone who had been murdered. But now they knew me.

This conversation arouse in the book when Lindsey, Susie’s sister, was at camp for the first time since Susie’s murder. Lindsey was not there when the topic came up; it was some kids from camp who had been planning the perfect murder for the competition they host for the parents every year on the last day of camp. Usually the competition is based on how to make the perfect mouse trap. But this year the competition had changed and Lindsey could feel the eyes of the other campers upon her when the challenge was announced.
This passage was very interesting to me. I found it so surprising that, in the book, Susie could become “famous” just by how gruesomely she had been murdered. But then I thought about it harder and realized it happens a lot—people become famous for something that happens to them, not for what they do or accomplish. The sad fact is that Susie probably wouldn’t have been remembered, except by her family, if she had just died of some “unpronounceable disease”. But because of the lack of evidence in her case and the surplus of rumors, her death has become this tragic story that everyone in the community, and by everyone I mean EVERYONE, is aware of.