Chapter Three

As soon as the bell rings, we race to the classroom. The race happens every morning, right after the bell rings. All the boys want to sit at the last row. I don’t know why it’s better to sit at the back and my friends don’t know either, but everyone wants to be in the last row anyway.

Maybe it’s because the kids with glasses are made to sit in the front. I guess it means that the kids who sit at the last row are the opposite of the kids at the front. I don’t understand how being the opposite of the kids in the front would be a good thing since the people in front seemed to be the smartest in the class.

I see Sara sitting in the front row, at the center, next to the aisle. My friends, Alberto and Tomas, find three seats next to each other at the last row. Alberto calls to me, “Loki! I got you one!”

Alberto holds back three boys from getting to the vacant chair, while also keeping them from sitting on his own chair. “I’ll stay here,” I tell him pointing to the vacant chair across the aisle from Sara’s seat.

It’s homeroom class. Since it’s the first day Miss Torre asks us to introduce ourselves in front of the class. I don’t like talking in front of the class, because everyone is looking at me and I don’t want them to think I’m funny. My dad showed me a special technique when I get nervous, he told me to imagine little chickens laying eggs on the people’s heads to make me less nervous. His advice doesn’t work so well because when I start imagining chickens, I end up laughing and people look at me strange.

It’s Sara’s turn to speak. Miss Torre said earlier that she wants to get to know us as people and not as students. I don’t know what she meant by that. Anyway, she asked us to tell her about the stuff we do when we’re not in school. Sara’s talking about how she spends her weekends.

“…and I go to Bible school on Saturdays and the church every Sunday. My entire family is Christian, except for my uncle. My parents tell me that uncle Johnny doesn’t go to church because he’s an atheist. Every night I pray for Uncle Johnny’s soul because I love Uncle Johnny and I don’t want him to go to hell. Hell is a scary place. Uncle Johnny shouldn’t go there. He is not a bad person. Whenever he goes to our house he brings ice cream and sugar cones. We eat ice cream and watch cartoons. Mother told me bad people go there forever. Bad people go there and people who don’t believe in Jesus. Hell is like a prison except much warmer. And there’s no food there. And your relatives can’t visit – not even Jesus…”

Sara speaks well in front of class. She never seems nervous or afraid. I’m very nervous because this is the first time I’ll be introducing myself in class. Last year, I didn’t get to hear all my classmates introduce themselves because I wasn’t able to enroll on time because we were on vacation too long. The year before that, I was sick on the first day.

Sara’s a nice person. She’s not shy and we both like to read. Last year, in values class Mrs. Rosario talked about the creation story and I was confused so I asked Sara about it since she seems to know a lot about these things. Sara explained that there was a God who had superpowers and he made light. I asked her if this God was like the Norse gods. She said she didn’t know any other gods and I shouldn’t talk about other gods because it was a sin.

I was really interested in her God especially when she said that her God made all the animals on the same day. This God must work really, really fast because Mr. Delgado, our science teacher, said that there are over 5,000,000 species of animals. That’s a lot of animals. I can’t even draw all the animals in the world on the same day. In fact, I can’t even think about all the animals in one day. I tried it once – I thought really, really fast: tiger, lion, kangaroo, monkey, parrot, octopus, sheep, horse… but I only got up to thirty and I started forgetting which animals I already mentioned and ended up repeating the same animals over and over again. So I decided I should write it down. I don’t write very fast. After an hour I got to number 80. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, I realized that even if I knew the names of all the animals, I’d be able to mention only 1920 species. So, I gave up.

Maybe that’s why Sara likes God so much. He can make animals faster than I could count them. But then I thought about dinosaurs and chickens living in the same place and I wondered how the chickens managed to not get eaten. Chickens can’t fly away. Chickens can’t camouflage like the chameleon. Chickens can’t play dead like the possum. I imagined a dinosaur chasing a chicken around and I can’t imagine how it could manage to escape. I asked Sara about this too and she said that God protected the chicken because he protected his creations.

“When your God created the chicken, did he make the egg or the chicken first?” I asked Sara. She said that her God created a male chicken first, and then took a rib from the male chicken to create a female chicken – like Adam and Eve. I didn’t know who Adam and Eve were but pretended I did because I didn’t want her to think I was stupid.

At recess, Sara always offered me chips she bought from the canteen. I like chips, but I always said, “No, thank you.” She always smiled and skipped away and moved on to offer chips to my other classmates. Sometimes I wished I said yes so she would stay a little longer and we could talk about how animals were made. I’m sure she would have found my story interesting too. It starts with a big bang. It’s very exciting.

If I had a sister I would want her to be Sara. We’d stay up late and just talk and talk about interesting things. Sara always talks about how she loves Jesus and how Jesus saved her. I don’t know exactly how that happens since Jesus is a baby. Maybe she was pretending too, like I used to with the puppy. When I was younger I pretended that our dog, Max, could talk and I would tell him about my day and I would pretend that he was listening. Sometimes, on the weekends I would pretend that Max and I are on an adventure. I’d pretend that we were captured by a foreign tribe whose evil king was the village security guard. Max and I would sneak out of the house and hide from the guard. I would pretend that I didn’t know the way out and Max was showing me the way and when we got out, would hug Max and thank him for saving me.

My teacher said that we could ask questions whenever we wanted as long as we raised a hand first and stood up so everyone could hear. So I raised my hand, stood up, and said, “Sara, how does Jesus save people?”