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1 - l'ange sur la terre

1 - l'ange sur la terre
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Alexander Edwin King was, at the best of times, an outcast in his environment.

He had only two friends in the whole world, one of those friends being his two-pound teacup Chihuahua, Beethoven. The other friend was Lilith Heisenberg, a girl from his school who was also a rather large outcast. She was one of five Jewish kids in their entire town, and even two of those were her brothers, Jacob and Neil.

He went to a private high school where all the students were either rich or incredibly scholarly. For obvious reasons, Edwin was part of the latter.

He'd been smart for as long as he could remember. He didn't really feel smart, but everyone constantly told him he was. He just felt like himself, not like some kind of super genius. However, he was apparently very smart to other people.

"Ex-cuse me, shayna punim!" Lilith snapped in front of Edwin's face, causing him to lower his book. "I asked you a question."

"What does that even mean?" Edwin asked, marking his spot and closing it.

"Pretty face," Lilith smiled cheekily and booped his nose.

"You are so Jewish," Edwin told her. "And so mean."

"I called you pretty!" Lilith protested, jumping from her seat.

The two were sitting in the school's massive library, which was arguably one of Edwin's favorite places on Earth. Anyone who simply observed him would assume he went there to proofread the dictionaries or dust the encyclopedias or something equally as lame, but, in reality, he went to read about epic space battles and magic standoffs and great love stories. Edwin loved the world of fiction. It all seemed so much better than his real life.

While Edwin came to the library to escape and become enveloped in endless worlds of his and the author's shared imagination, Lilith liked to peek at the anatomy books and joke about which of the illustrated models were Jewish- or, in not so many words, circumcised.

"I'm sorry. What was the question?" Edwin asked her.

"Did you get your new schedule?" Lilith repeated, sitting back down and grabbing another anatomy book from the stack by her flimsy purple bookbag. With Edwin's heavy reading regimen, he couldn't operate with such a pansy's bag. He'd said this to Lilith once, and she'd doubled over laughing.

"Yeah," Edwin replied. "I still don't see why I even got phys ed in the first place. I didn't put it on my electives list. It wasn't even an alternate!"

Lilith laughed. "The lengths you will go to to avoid physical activity never fail to amuse me."

"But I ended up getting this dumb drama class instead," Edwin told her. "In sixth period. I mean, I'm not even here for theatre. I get that some people are, but I'm not."

Lilith rolled her eyes. "You might have fun, Edwin."

"Well, anyway, they basically had to rearrange my entire schedule," Edwin changed the subject, pulling the little piece of paper from his bag to show his friend. "Now I've got French right before lunch instead of first thing in the morning, and now I've got trig first thing. They also moved my Latin class from third period to-"

Lilith snickered. "You became more and more of a nerd as that sentence progressed."

Edwin rolled his eyes. "Sorry, we can't all get into a private school for being both academically average and diverse."

Lilith laughed. "I wish I was here on a diversity spot! I have to work to stay! Not that being Jewish isn't work, because it is."

"I don't really get what you're saying, but I'm going to nod along anyway," Edwin told her. "How can being Jewish be work?"

"Lemme tell you about a little thing called my grandma," Lilith began.

Just as she started the sure-to-be-boring story about her incredibly Jewish grandmother, the bell rang.

Edwin thankfully popped up from his seat, scooped up all his possessions, and made his way to trigonometry.

He entered the room, quickly reminded Mr. Green that he had rearranged his schedule, and sat in the empty seat closest to the door. This room was a long way from his next class.

He followed along easily with Mr. Green's words. He didn't necessarily like math, it was just something he did, whether he liked it or not.

The bell rang, and Edwin made his way to his world history class as quick as he could. It was across the school, and he didn't want to be late. They were having their Rwandan genocide discussion. It was something Edwin had been waiting for all month. He happened to be incredibly intrigued by the conflict and had taken in upon himself to do a little extra research. He was more than ready to wow his teacher and the more scholarly of his peers with all the extra information he had packed into his brain.

"Hutu and Tutsi armies left behind nearly one million corpses after the Tutsi rebels eventually won out over the Hutu troops," Edwin muttered to himself in a way of remembering. Just as he finished telling himself this fact, his chest connected to another student's shoulder, sending him and his books flying and skidding down the hallway. Luckily, he and the other student were the only people present in that particular area of the hallway, so no traffic was held up and no innocent bystanders were hurt.

"Hey! Watch where-" Edwin cut himself off when he looked up at the stranger and he felt his heart begin pounding like an African war drum.

The boy looked like a real, honest-to-goodness angel. Now, Edwin was undoubtedly a solid Atheist, but this boy was too perfect to be the creation of only simple cells and chromosomes. His eyes were a kind of blue to make the morning sky jealous, his hair was styled meticulously and the color of fresh spring grass out in the country - though that was dye -, his lips were plump and pink, he wore precisely drawn winged eyeliner, and he looked absolutely terrified.

Edwin struggled for the words, any words, to say to l'ange that stood before him, but his mouth felt like sandpaper and his brain was, for a terrifying change, completely devoid of words to say. In every single day of his life up until that very moment, Alexander Edwin King had always had something to say, but upon the sighting of this angel on Earth, his mind had been effectively wiped.

"Sorry," the angel told Edwin, sounding absolutely petrified. "Didn't see you."

Edwin nodded in pathetic lieu of actually responding to his apology, then hastily picked up his belongings and hightailed it to his world history class. Needless to say, the Rwandan genocide was now the very last thing on his mind.