How to Save a Life

by Sara Zarr

  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 together was what you’d expect from any good liberal household, and as far as I know they always voted Democrat. But also his world travels made him a hard-core patriot. He truly believed the United States is the best place to live, and American is the best way to be. And part of being American is respecting all people’s right to be whatever they want to be and at the same time respecting your own right to bitch about it, as long as you’re educated and can reason your way through your bitching.

  “They did it when you were in high school, too,” I reminded him. “Hello, KISS?”

  “Not around the house!”

  “How do you know? At least Dylan doesn’t wear platform heels.”

  It was funny. My dad was funny. Every day I reported the Quotable Dad to Dylan and, when I had them, my friends. And it feels good to laugh now at Dylan’s request for makeup, until I think about how there will never be any new Quotable Dad quotes. All over again, a loss. He would have been the best cranky old man. Now he doesn’t get to be that, and I don’t get to tease him, and the part of me that loved to do that and was so good at it is as gone as he is.

  I toss my pen on the floor mat and take my foot off the dash so I can lay my head in Dylan’s lap. “Dyl.” I ignore the emergency brake digging into my ribs and nuzzle my face into his thigh. He runs his fingers through my hair, plays with my eyebrow ring.

  “I know.” He kisses my ear. “But I think we should go to class.”

  A startling thing happens at lunch. Laurel comes up to me while I’m in the cafeteria line and almost smiles. “Hey,” she says.

  “Hi.”

  As the line inches up, she inches with me. “Cinders warned me not to do this, but I’m doing it because I miss you. She does, too, but won’t admit it.”

  A lump gathers in my throat. I force it down. “Warned you against doing what?”

  “Talking to you, Jill.”

  I do my absolute best not to stare at her in order to take in that face I love, with its wide cheekbones and brown eyes that are always looking for the most fun kinds of trouble. Instead, I sneak glances. She’s got part of her long hair in two little side braids sort of swooping along the crown. “That looks good,” I say, pointing to them.

  “Thanks.” We inch. “Are you eating with Dylan? I don’t see him.”

  “He wanted to work on something in the chem lab.”

  “Come sit with us.” And she walks away, having made her statement, which is an invitation and a command all in one, as only Laurel can issue.

  When I come out of line with my taco soup, Cinders and Laurel and a few others are waiting at their table. It’s a long walk. All I want to do is find a dark closet where I can eat without the judgmental-yet-pitying stares of all the people I’ve pissed off or put off. But I’m pretty sure this is my final, final chance with them.

  Cinders doesn’t exactly acknowledge me when I sit down, though she does scoot her bag slightly to the left to make more room for my tray while continuing her conversation with Gianni, the Italian exchange student, who I guess is sort of the new me. At least in terms of filling seats and looking cute, which I always did well.

  “So.” Laurel is making efforts. “I got into Boulder. I mean, everyone gets into Boulder, so it’s not like this big accomplishment, but I guess I was a little worried about my grades.”

  “That’s good. Good job. It’s what you wanted.”

  She nods. “Are you still…”

  Cinders stops talking to Gianni and tunes in to listen for updates about my college plans.

  “Yep. Still planning to take a couple of years off.” Don’t sound defensive, Jill. Don’t sound defensive. “Mom still not happy about it.”

  “Your dad didn’t go to college, right?” Cinders just says it—“your dad”—so in my face, as if my problem talking about him wasn’t the key reason my friends and I haven’t been talking about anything.

  I take a breath, let it out. “No. He took some business classes after he started his company, but, no.”

  “And he was a big success,” Laurel says.

  “Right?” Oh so subtly moving away from the topic of my father, I say, “I’m going to go eventually, I think. I’m just not going to go now.” I need to be away from here for a while. I need to get out from under homework and classrooms and have room to breathe and think and figure out what I want to do, and who I am now that I don’t have him and pretty soon won’t have my mother, either.

  Cinders shrugs, Laurel nods, and the conversation moves on to Gianni’s host family and its strange bathing habits. I eat my taco soup and try to grow accustomed to the idea of possibly having friends again.

  Ravi is setting up a sting operation at work.

  That’s what he calls it. Apparently, there are some bold and prolific shoplifters hitting up all the Margins stores in our region, and they’re a menace to society, to hear Ravi tell it. So he’s come to our store to look for “vulnerabilities.” As we do a walk-through together, he’s completely professional, even a little bit cold. He’d planned to be doing this with Annalee, but she wound up getting stuck with a manager trainee that the RM had dumped on her with no warning.

  So it’s Ravi Desai and his assailant, strolling down the how-to aisle.

  “I’m working on a lone-gunman theory,” Ravi is saying. “Corporate thinks it’s a team, but I’m not too sure.”

  “You think one person jacked thousands of dollars’ worth of merch in a two-week period?” Sounds unlikely.

  “Sure.” He stops in front of a display of travel books—we’ve turned the corner—and puts his hand on his hip, the bottom of his suit jacket hitching up behind his hand the way it does on every single suited detective on TV. You’d think he practiced it in a mirror or something. “Let’s say you wanted to steal a few of these. What would you do?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I’m trying to get you to think like a criminal. To help me see if I’m missing anything obvi
ous. Seriously, what would you do?” A customer walks by and Ravi has to squeeze in close to let her pass. When he does, something peculiar happens—for a fraction of a moment I see myself as a little kid, in my kitchen, standing on a stepladder. Then the image is gone, leaving the faintest whiff of I don’t know what, homesickness or nostalgia, an ache that doesn’t quite hurt.

  Ravi steps back. I stare at him, bewildered.

  “Well?” he asks.

  “Well what?”

  “What would you do?”

  I try to think like a criminal instead of someone who’s losing it. “Okay. Easy.” I’ve caught enough shoplifters in my day to know the basic MO. “I pick it up, flip through it as if reading, but really I’d be looking for the antitheft device so I could take it out. Of course, I’d be wearing a big coat or holding a roomy purse or a bag from another store. I’d stroll along and let the book casually drop into the bag, then be on my merry way.”

  “And if a sales associate walks by?”

  “Act innocent.”

  Ravi seems disappointed that my criminal mind is not better developed. “Not very original.”

  The bruise on his face is nearly gone, but it’s still visible enough that I reach to touch my own cheek in sympathy and guilt. Ravi gives me a searching look, and I scratch the side of my nose.

  I pick up one of the paperbacks to get us back where we were. “In real life, I wouldn’t bother with swiping something like this, though. Fourteen bucks. Unless I actually needed to know how to get around Honduras but didn’t have the money to buy this, there’d be no point in taking it. I’d be after the art books. Some of those are worth over a hundred. I’d turn around and sell them online. Even at half price, that’s cash money—scrilla—in my pocket, yo.” I throw a gang sign to lighten the mood.

  “Right.” Ravi taps one finger against his chin, thinking. From his chest pocket he takes a little notepad and jots something down before flipping it shut.

  “What? What did you just write down?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing. That’s helpful.” I want to stand close to him again, see if I get another random snapshot of my childhood, another twinge of whatever that was that went through me like a current just minutes ago. But there’s no good excuse for invading his personal space, so instead I ask, “What’s with the suits, anyway?”

  He touches his lapel with his slender hand, looks down. “I figure it helps people take me seriously. When I go around the stores, you know, I don’t want them to think I’m some kid fresh out of high school telling them what to do.”

  “Even though you basically are.”

  “You wouldn’t think that, though, looking at me.” He pauses. “Right? I mean, did you think that?”

  “No, but I did think you were a creepy stalker, remember?”

  “Oh yeah.” He starts walking backward, leading me to the self-help section. “What about someone in a wheelchair?”

  “What about them?”

  “Think how fast a shoplifter could get away in a wheelchair or one of those scooterlike gizmos.”

  Gizmo. My dad used that word all the time. “Where’s the gizmo for the DVR?” Meaning the remote. “Have you seen my gizmo?” Meaning his cell phone. “Jill, will you put the gizmo back in my car?” Meaning the GPS. I almost always knew exactly which gizmo he meant, even if he didn’t provide much context.

  “Even if the thief misses an RFID tag in one of the books,” Ravi continues, “by the time the alarm goes off and the employees rush to the exit—”

  “Yeah, we all know how they ‘rush’—”

  “—he’s long gone on his Zipr Roo or Jazzy.”

  “Halfway to Tijuana with a retrospective of the Dutch masters.”

  He stops walking and laughs. I made a joke. I made someone laugh, and not at the expense of anyone else. Not a real person, anyway. When was the last time I did that?

  Ravi’s smile is a bit goofy. If I picture him without the suit, in jeans and a T-shirt, I can almost see the nineteen-year-old he actually is.

  “Well,” I say, “we can’t go around profiling our disabled customers. PR nightmare for Corporate if anyone figures it out.”

  “I know. I’m just saying keep your eyes peeled. Evil wears many disguises.”

  Annalee’s voice comes over the PA. “All associates to the cash wrap. All associates to the cash wrap.”

  Ravi puts his hand out, like after you, and he smiles again, and I smile back and remember I never looked up the tennis page in the yearbook like he asked me to.

  Varsity tennis. Ravi’s on the team, with his big hair and glasses and the rounder face. But what he wanted me to see is squeezed into the lower corner of the page in ballpoint pen and neat printing:

  Jill—

  It was nice sitting near you in Schiff’s. You seem really smart and funny. Of course that’s only my guess from a distance. Maybe you’re stupid and dull! Ha-ha! Not possible. Too bad we didn’t get a chance to talk much. Okay, at all. But I hope we’ll run into each other sometime. I bet we will.

  Ravi J. Desai

  (the quiet guy who just loaned you a pen so you could sign Amy Diaz’s yearbook)

  Mandy

  It’s hard to sleep. I don’t know if that’s because of being in a new place and a different bed or because of being so pregnant. Robin says I should sleep on my left side. She told me why, but I forget. I try that and wind up on my back and then worry it’s not going to be good for the baby, so I turn onto my side again, but I’m not used to it. Before, I always slept on my stomach with my hands tucked under me, like I did when I was a little girl.

  Every morning that I’ve woken up here and opened my eyes to see the branches of the tree by my window and feel the soft edge of the blanket, I’ve stopped to say thank you. I don’t know who to. The ceiling, the sky, the world that I’m a part of now, luck. It’s lucky that I saw Robin’s post when I did, and lucky that she wrote back when I wrote to her, even though I had so many rules. How does it work, I wonder—that kind of luck that would bring two people together at the right moment? Three people. Four if you count Jill.

  It’s the same kind of luck that made me see Christopher at the fair and made him see me.

  Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, I’d never had it before then. Always it’s been the other kind of luck—when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I don’t want the baby to have that kind. I want her to be born into this kind.

  I get up and dressed, checking the bottom drawer, under my bras and things that don’t fit me anymore, to make sure Kent’s watch is still there. Every morning and every night, I check. Even though I don’t think I have to worry about Robin and Jill snooping that way, it makes me feel better to be sure. I should start moving the watch around, too, to different places, just in case. It used to be that when Kent was in a good mood, he’d talk to me about his gambling strategy. That if you’re smart, you hedge your bets. If you bet on something crazy, you always make sure there’s also a sure thing, or as close to a sure thing as you can get, in case the crazy bet doesn’t go like you hoped. The watch is my sure thing.

  Downstairs, Robin’s in the kitchen, tuning in a music station on the radio instead of the news she listens to on weekday mornings. Jill is still asleep, or at least still in her room. Sun reflects off the snowfall from last night and lights up the kitchen and living room, showing off how warm and clean the house is. It’s like a house in the kind of catalog that’s full of down comforters and cotton pajamas.

  Robin seems happier now than she has the last two days. When she sees me standing in the kitchen doorway, she smiles and waves me in with the whisk in her hand. “I’m making crepes. Do you like crepes?”

  I’ve never had a crepe. I’m not positive what it is, exactly, even though I’ve seen it on menus before. “Yes.”

  There’s a glass of orange juice already on the table for me next to all my vitamins, and a blue-and-white checkered napkin folded up. The big w
ooden table, every time I see it, looks like a picture from a magazine. Not because of the table but how Robin does it, like with the checkered napkin this morning, or the fruit bowl that always has real fruit in it, or sometimes a sweater hanging over one of the chairs. It just makes you feel good. She knows how to make a home even out of a table. Not everyone can do that.

  “Is every Saturday like this?” I ask.

  She cracks an egg against the rim of the mixing bowl. Even an egg and a bowl in her hands looks like home. “What do you mean?”

  When someone lives a certain kind of life all the time, it’s hard to describe to them what it looks and feels like to someone who lives a certain other kind of life. On Saturdays in Council Bluffs, Kent and my mother were usually in a bad mood from drinking too much Friday night or staying out too late or losing money gambling. A lot of times I would be trying to forget that Kent had visited my room after my mother was asleep. And there could be a lot of cleaning to do before they came out wanting coffee or aspirin. Sometimes it didn’t smell very good; they were always trying to quit smoking and only lasting a few days here and there.

  My mother usually had a long list of things she had to do that she could only do on Saturdays because of her job, which she was angry to have in the first place because Kent had promised her she wouldn’t have to work anymore, that he would take care of things. But he didn’t, so on Saturdays my mother did errands like any working housewife, even though they weren’t married. Grocery store, bank, nails, and hair. Kent sometimes did nice things, like bring me doughnuts or give me fifty dollars to go shopping if he’d had a good night at the casinos. Usually not.

  At Robin’s table I drink my juice and say finally, “I don’t know.”