Strangers in the Province of Joy - high school contemporary sweet romance

Untitled Part 1

Strangers in the Province of Joy

By

Cheryle Williams

A HIGH SCHOOL CONTEMPORARY SWEET ROMANCE

Second Edition 2018

Copyright 2015 Cheryle Williams aka Cheryl Elaine Williams

All rights reserved.

Dedication

Heartfelt thanks to the many helpful friends and loving family members who have assisted me on the path to publication. You have been a blessing.

Many thanks to my editor, Sarah Giese, as well as to Sally Shupe for content editing. Jenifer McConnell Ranieri and Nik Ranieri, cover artists, I love your wonderful cover.

The first handclasp of love is just the beginning...

What do you do when your best guy friend is having a meltdown? I don't even know what to call what Max is going through. He's a super person. A special person to me, kind and sensitive and tough at the same time, which is why I connected with him right off at the beginning of our junior year at Cedar Hills High. My dad was emotionally abusive when I was growing up. Now that I'm seventeen and in eleventh grade, I'm smart enough to avoid controlling people – those people who try to control me - like the plague.

Max Ellis gravitated towards me for some reason I'm still trying to understand. I have a happy, quirky, sometimes serious personality. My friends say I'm not bad looking. I'll accept that for want of a better way of describing myself. I'm not real trusting of people and that's probably because of my parents' divorce two years ago. Before that, Mom and Dad were fighting like crazy and even now they're still battling back and forth over various issues. I'm in the middle of all that and it's no fun.

Anyway, I had time to think a lot during the summer before school started. I told myself I was going to focus on my studies and if I found time to date, that would be cool but it better be a guy who wouldn't bring a lot of drama into my life.

I didn't want complications. I had two years of high school left and I wanted to make the most of it. My plan was to take enough business courses to really build up my resume, for college and beyond. I wasn't going to fool around. I didn't want to end up like my mother, divorced and working three junky jobs while fighting with my father and the state for more money just to survive.

As for having a personal life, I was hoping this school year would be better than every other year I'd managed to survive up to now. I wanted to find a guy who could show me that the world might be kind and helpful. As it turned out, surprise, surprise, somebody was ready to do just that: find me and show me that I could discover a bit of happiness here. Instead of me continuing to feel like I'm a stranger in the province of joy, as most people do. At least most people I know.

I found that phrase about being ''a stranger in the province of joy' on the back of a prayer card. The full phrase was, "Let us not be strangers in the province of joy." I liked that. It made me think. It was an angel prayer card, which was why I read it in the first place and put it in my bag to carry around. I'm into the idea of angels watching over us because it often seems nobody else is, except for one or two special people we're lucky enough to meet. I personally need all the help I can get in this life.

For as long as I can remember, my existence has been messy and I haven't felt like I really belonged anywhere. And that's no fun.

I wanted to get out of that pit of despair. Shake off the feeling that I was just drifting and not accomplishing anything. The day things turned around for me was the day I met Max Ellis. It was the first day of my junior year and my first class in Choral Studies.