How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr Page B

swept me up to sit in front of him and gallop me away.
    He laughed his big laugh. “No. I don’t live in a tepee, either.”
    “I didn’t think that.”
    We were on our backs, watching the tops of the corn shiver in the wind.
    “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Those eyes.” He rolled over onto his elbow. “Stay here. We can live in the corn.”
    I smiled. “Okay.” And he laughed a smaller laugh.
    In the time since we first lay down, the sky had gone from blue to pink to purple. “I have to go.” I sat up and pulled my dress over my head.
    He kissed my hand. My arm. My shoulder.
    “Don’t forget me,” I said.
    He told me the name of the town where he lived, the reservation. “Just ask for Christopher B. Everyone knows me.” He walked me almost to the parking lot, and then I told him he should go find his friends. I didn’t want Kent or my mother to see us. “Don’t forget me, either,” he said, and our hands separated, then our fingertips very last.
    I went running toward the truck, gravel getting between my feet and my sandals. The necklace bounced against my collarbone. Kent stood outside the truck cab, impatient and getting ready to yell at me. I didn’t care.
    I know it all sounds like a fantasy. But that’s how it was, and those are the things we said. It’s true. It’s mostly true.
    And Jill should understand that, even if she can’t imagine it, there was at least that one day when I mattered.

Jill

     
    Dylan and I sit in his car in the school parking lot as snow piles up on the windshield, gradually reducing the area of visibility until all we can see are the very tops of the heads of all the people going to class. Trudging to class, I should say, like prisoners of war off to the work camp to haul rocks with their frozen fingers, under the beady yet watchful eyes of corrupt guards.
    Generally, I don’t have a problem with school. I mean, you get through it, and it’s what you’ve been doing nearly your whole life, and there are people who make you laugh and all of that. And of course I’m not anti-learning. I like learning. Education is pretty much the number one value around the MacSweeney home, only Dad didn’t think it had to come from school, necessarily. For him it came from living in the world, trying new things, paying attention. And school can be such torture sometimes, seriously, when you just don’t want to be there and everyone is in your face with all their usual bullshit, not picking up on a single of your please go away now cues.
    I admit: I liked school a lot better before, when it didn’t seem that everyone knew all about my personal life and felt sorry for me. I was never late; I always participated.
    “I don’t want to go in.” I put my left foot up on the dash and start doodling on my sneaker—a string of hearts. I can’t stop thinking about my parents’ anniversary yesterday and what Mandy said: “At least they had those thirty-three years.” What kind of a thing is that to say? How would she feel if she just found out she had terminal cancer and someone said, “At least you had a good eighteen years”?
    “Aren’t you, like, one cut away from suspension?”
    Dylan. Such a rational thinker.
    “That was last year. They gave me a clean slate in September, and I’ve only cut twice since then.” I attempt to turn the hearts into skulls. If the day after my parents’ anniversary feels this bad, I can’t imagine what the anniversary of the accident will be like. Another cut day to ration.
    Dylan pulls down his visor mirror. “Do you have any eyeliner on you?”
    “No, sorry. You’ll have to go natural.”
    When my dad first met Dylan, they made small talk, and Dad showed Dylan his DVD collection and acted totally normal all around. As soon as the door closed behind Dylan, my dad turned to me and said, “Why the hell does a boy need to wear eyeliner?”
    My dad was a walking mass of apparent contradictions. So much of my parents’ life