Young Adult / Part 1 - He Is Beautiful Inside

          There is a boy I know and he’s beautiful inside even though a lot of people, including him, don’t see it. He’s the boy that no one understands. The fallen angel with a broken soul. If you look hard enough you can see his wings. His name is Michael.
         Michael is the boy who sits in the back of the classroom hunched over his desk writing poetry that no one understands. He eats alone at lunch and writes on napkins with ink pens and then runs when people throw food at him.
         He has hair like raven wings and eyes like leaves on spring-time trees. He doesn’t smile—he’s too afraid. There are boys who hurt him with their actions and girls who kill him with their words. No one understands.
         He walks by me in the halls and I can tell by the look in his eyes that he is trying to will himself to be invisible. I sit by him in a couple of my classes and watch him as he writes. His handwriting is small and precise. He uses his pen the way a doctor would a scalpel. He chooses his words more carefully than a lawyer would. When he smiles in school photos I can tell that it is fake. I wonder if he has ever been truly happy.
         Michael smells like mint. In the mornings he sits alone at a table in the corner of the library. By first period’s start his fingers are already stained with ink. He is in love with Shakespeare, Poe, and Hemingway. He can quote them by heart.
         He loves bright colors but rarely wears them. Instead he wears gray clothing and a plain silver ring on his left hand. In his notebooks he colors bright butterfly wings with sunrises peeking over their wingtips. He is always quiet but you’d be deaf to say you couldn’t hear his heart screaming.
         I only started talking to him because he left a notebook at school one day. I was tempted to open and read his words from cover to cover, but it felt so invasive. I never even opened it. I went to him as he was walking home and handed it over to him. When he met my eyes I could tell he was shocked.
         He held his hand out but didn’t take the notebook from me. I gently placed it in his hand before turning to walk off. Somehow the wordless exchange seemed to hold a lot of meaning for both of us. I opened my locker the next day to find a drawing of a dragonfly with bejeweled wings. In the small and neat handwriting he had written: ‘Unselfish and noble actions are the most radiant pages in the biography of souls.  -David Thomas.’ When I got home I tacked it up above my bed and had one of my best nights of sleep in years.
         About a week later he called my house. He didn’t speak. We listened to each other breathe for a while before he hung up. I listened to the dial tone before saying, “You’re welcome.” and hanging up too.
         At school the next day a football player cornered him in the hall with some of his friends backing him up. For a while I couldn’t see Michael in the huddle. When the boys finally dispersed I saw the broken angel knelt on the ground scooping up what was left of his writing. My heart was pounding with newfound anger, but the boys were long gone.
         People walking by didn’t stop to help. They stepped on pieces of Michael’s shredded soul and kept going. I ran over and helped him pick up what wasn’t ruined. He looked up at me in confusion when I offered him my hand to help him up off the floor. A single tear had rolled down his left cheek and landed on his silver ring, glittering briefly like a diamond, before it rolled off and splattered.

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