How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr Page A

his neck. It was his profile I saw because he was with his friends and had his face turned toward one of them, laughing. A big laugh, the kind that makes everyone look to see what’s so funny, and when I looked to see what was so funny he was tucking his shoulder-length hair behind one ear. I stopped walking right in front of them and stared.
    One of his friends saw me staring and asked, “What’s the matter? You never saw Indians before?”
    I didn’t answer, because I was still looking at him, waiting to see what he’d do next, waiting for him to look at me. When he did, his smile got bigger at first, then it went down, and his expression grew serious. He felt it, too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That’s the way I remember it.
    He spoke first. “Hi.”
    “Hi.”
    The friend who’d first caught me staring looked at him and then at me and watched us watching each other and said, “Always it’s the white girls.”
    “Shut up, Freddy.”
    One of his other friends elbowed Freddy. “Come on.” And to the boy I still stared at said, “See you later, Christopher, yeah? Or maybe never again?”
    “You wanna walk around?” Christopher asked me, but we were already moving forward together, leaving his friends behind.
    All day we walked and talked. I never talked so much to anyone. I told him about my father and about how it was for me at school but even with that I liked the school year better than summer because I could be out of the apartment. Everything I said to him was real. My real thoughts, my real feelings. He listened. He listened so well that I almost told him about Kent, but I didn’t want to ruin our day.
    He bought me a sno-cone. He tried to win me something at the booth where you throw darts at balloons, but couldn’t. When we were walking away, a man in a baseball cap who’d been watching him said, “The balloons are underinflated and the darts are dull. You shoulda just thrown as hard as you could. Accuracy don’t matter.”
    If someone had said something like that to Kent, he would have gotten embarrassed, then mad, and told the guy to mind his business and maybe a fight would start. Christopher only laughed and said, “Next time,” then held my hand and we kept walking.
    On the Ferris wheel he put his arm around me, and I rested my head there between his shoulder and his chest, the way I’d always imagined I would in a situation like that. We watched people go by beneath us, and every time our car neared the top the world would get quiet, the music and crowds fading. When we got off the Ferris wheel, he said that there should be a Tunnel of Love. “At the state fair they have one,” he said, “but I never had anyone to ride through it with. Now I do and there isn’t one.”
    We went through the haunted house instead, and in front of a dangling glow-in-the-dark skeleton he kissed me.
    Outside the fair gates we made a path through the cornfield until we found a clearing. He spread his shirt on the ground and lay back, and I lay next to him. It wasn’t like with Kent, just the night before and always, fast and anxious and him reminding me not to make any noise so my mother wouldn’t hear. When Christopher touched me, it was like none of that had ever happened.
    He took off my sundress and kissed me up and down and moved on top of me, so careful and slow, and I felt everything my mother says you’re supposed to feel, what I never felt before. After, Christopher took off his necklace and put it on me.
    “Where do you live?” he asked, running his hand over the swell of my hip, smooth brown skin on white skin.
    “Omaha.” If you live in Council Bluffs, you should always say “Omaha” when people ask where you live, my mother says.
    “That’s a hundred miles. I don’t have a car.”
    “Do you have a horse?” I could picture him on a wild pony with no saddle, his hair streaming behind him as he rode into the city and