Saviour's Hell (Completed)

Cinder Blocks

I could see her smiling. Laughing with her friends. She had the most beautiful smile out of all the girls at this school. Her perfect white teeth, the way her cheeks stretched upwards to make her gorgeous green eyes squint, the way her melodic laughter shot out from her powerful lungs and echoed across sky, bouncing off the planets and stars, and returning to Earth as a sound that rang beautifully in my ears, the way her entire body seemed to glow when she smiled or laughed, the way the sun glinted off her glossy brown, curly hair, the way she looked joyful and full of life. If you were any other student in this school, you never would've so much as thought that she had tried to kill herself just hours ago.

Yes, you read that correctly. The stunningly beautiful Rylie Adams tried to shoot herself in the head just hours prior to her standing there on the green school courtyard laughing with her friends. You know why she's still here? I saved her just in time. She was in tears, sitting with her legs drawn up to her chest on the floor in a corner of her bedroom holding a gun to her own head when I burst into her room. She was completely broken and hopeless with hardly anything to lose; now look at her, smiling like nothing ever happened.

"Dude, stop staring at her; her friends are looking at you like you're planning to rape them." Derek said, snapping me back into reality.

I blinked hard, trying to ease the increasing burning in my eyes and looked at him. "W-what? I-I wasn't- um..." I stuttered.

He chuckled. "It's cool, Elijah. You can stare at your little girlfriend as much as you want, but there's a point where it becomes creepy."

"Uh...y-yeah. Sorry,"

"Don't apologize to me, man. Apologize to the girls you just creeped out."

"Right...uh..." I hesitated before taking a step towards them; Derek grabbed the back of my hoodie, holding me in place.

"What are you doing?"

"I-I'm going to apologize to the..." I trailed off when I saw the look on his face.

"I didn't mean you actually apologize to them."

"But you said-"

He cut me off. "I know what I said. But what are you going to say? 'Hey; sorry for staring at you like I'm going to rape you. I wasn't actually looking at you girls; I was looking at the girlfriend I'll only have in my dreams.'?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"Really? Are you sure? Because you're definitely the type of guy to do that."

"No I'm not; I'm-"

"Those would probably be your exact words, too; just add the stuttering."

"I can't help the stuttering sometimes."

His brown eyes rolled back into his skull before he closed them, took a deep breath, and reopened them a moment later. "Just get to class." He released my hoodie. "You'll be late again." And with that, he walked off.

I looked back to where I saw the girls and realized they had already left. I sighed, adjusted my backpack on my shoulder and started towards class.

As usual, I was late to nearly every class because people would stop right in front of me, group together in the middle of the hall, and never let anyone get past them until the last minute before the bell rings. And what did I have to look forward to once I did get to class? Another lecture on being late to class, another detention, another long walk home in the dark, another beating, another night of pain, waiting for the bruises to form and go away, another day, a sempiternal cycle, and life goes on around me.