My heart raced as I walked through the doors of the reservation's high school. It was my first day of ninth grade. I was surprised to find myself nervous; since my first days of kindergarten I had never been intimidated by school, but I figured that the first day of high school could be nervewracking for anyone: it was entering a whole new chapter of your life.
I followed the crowd to the ninth grade classrooms, trying not to get lost and to be on time. Not my specialty. While doing this, we passed a large crowd of sophomores.
That was where I first saw him.
He looked the tiniest bit familiar to me. His skin was the same copper color as the rest of ours, his shoulder-length, gleaming, black hair hanging loosely, his eyes skimming the halls. I guessed that I had seen him before, around the reservation, just when we were younger. That would explain why I couldn't remember him well. Maybe my head just hadn't bothered to register him, though it certainly was now.
It wasn't his familiarity that caught me. It was the way he held himself: so confidently and assuredly. It was how his face was so calm, so serene. It was how incredibly beautiful he was.
He must have caught me staring at him because his head started turning back to look at me. In my head, it was all moving in slow motion. I was going to look away, save myself the embarrassment, but I just couldn't seem to rip my eyes from him. They just wouldn't cooperate. And then our eyes locked.
The violins inside my head starting playing. For that moment, it seemed like everything had changed. He was all that mattered to me right then. I didn't know him at all, but I knew my life was going to be very different from that point. I had never felt such an instant attraction to anyone in my life. For what seemed like forever, we just stood there staring into each other's eyes.
Finally, he looked away, embarrassed.
It was then when I realized I had to have him.