How To Save You

PROLOGUE

When I was ten years old I was small, skinny and scrawny. I had no friends except for one very special girl named Adrienne Walker, although she would murder you if you actually called her by her full name. She preferred Adri, and no one but her mother dared to call her anything else (myself included).

                I was hopelessly in love with her, of course. She was the same height as me, wore the most magnificent pigtails which reached her waist, and had the curliest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a girl. But the great thing was, that she was not friendless- in fact she could have chosen any best friend out of our class. Even the boys loved her, and this was at a time where we believed girls had cooties. But when she saw our class popular boy, Louis Sacker, give me a wedgie, she stormed up to him and pushed him in the sandpit.

                Adri was given a timeout, of course, because no one dared correct Louis as he wept in front of Mrs. Sataslouski. I walked up to her after she grumpily returned from the classroom, hands stuffed in her pink overalls.

                “Wanna have my cookie?” I whispered nervously to the beautiful, terrifying ten year old.

                “What flavor?” she asked curiously, leaning down so her nose was on the same level as the cookie, examining it closely.

                “Oatmeal,” I mumbled, pushing my glasses back up my nose as they threatened to fall off my nose.

                She looked up suspiciously, her big eyes a pastel blue. I swallowed nervously, my throat dry. Then she grabbed the cookie and stuffed it in her mouth, her cheeks stretching comically to provide space for the oatmeal cookie. I started to laugh and pointed at her big fat hamster cheeks. Adri frowned at me and then went to check her appearance in the slide’s reflection and started to laugh herself, cookie crumbs spraying out of her mouth.

                I laughed harder, as did she. Finally she managed to swallow the massive mouthful and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

                “Who’re you?” she said.

                “Elijah Singer,” I introduced myself, although a little hurt that we’d been in each other’s class for a month now and she still didn’t know my name.

                “Can you sing then?” she asked curiously.

                “No,” I admitted sheepishly. My older brother Gus often taunted me with how pathetic I was at singing. Apparently he’d overheard me singing in the shower once or twice and I would never live it down.

                She thought for a moment, her finger tapping against her chin. Then she took my hand, and I noticed her nails were painted a sparkly pink. She tugged me along, far faster than I was of course. I tried to keep up, my glasses bouncing frantically up and down on the tip of my nose. We ran and ran, my breath wheezing out of me. Then she stopped short and I ended up toppling into her, making us both fall to the ground.

                “Hey,” she complained, rubbing her arm and sitting up.

                “It wasn’t my fault,” I defended myself.

                I then looked around, surprised that we had stopped by the biggest tree in the playground. It was an old willow, the branches hanging over us and giving us a blanket of shadows. It was a nice tree, I thought, but I didn’t see why it was that great. I really wanted to play with my trucks and make them bash into each other like bam, boom crash. And then I could make my toy soldiers invade each other and then they’d have a bloody battle and I, played by my GI Joe, would save everybody. I was grinning at the idea.