Saving Grace

Written by: Leia Rondeau

Brief Summary: Gabriel has been an outcase her whole life.  Will she finally find someone who will stand by her when her life totally crumbles?

Word Count: 1969 (about 6 pages)

She had no friends, and no one but the teachers at school knew what her name was.  She was quiet, and rarely spoke.  With a bow-over walk, she kept her face hidden with long, uneven, dirty-brown hair.  It fell in front of her eyes, which where a dark-blue that held a helpless look in them.  On her body she wore baggy clothes, making it hard to determine that she really was a girl.  They were black and grey, with a dirty look, and her jeans had holes torn into the knees.

            She sat at the back of every classroom, her arms wrapped around her shoulders, and she kept her eyes down.  Her teachers never called on her; instead they would plainly ignore her, and never tried to make her do anything.

            Her life at home was the same as it was at school.  She stayed in her room, hiding from her parents.  They were always fighting, screaming at each other.  Sometimes they would hurt each other, so she hid.  When she was out of her room, it was to eat or go to the bathroom.  She doubted her father even knew she existed; he was always passed out on his couch, empty cans of beer surrounding him.  Her mother was either at work, or was sitting at the kitchen table, crying over the unpaid bills.  She ignored her only daughter, but she didn’t hate her.  Her mother hated herself for not being able to face her daughter and apologize for the horrible life the two of them shared.

            This was her life.  Being alone was all she knew.  This was all anybody else knew of her.

            It was no surprise that when the new boy entered her math class that she didn’t acknowledge the difference at all.  He was tall, but awkwardly skinny, with no muscles on him.    His clothes were normal: a t-shirt and worn jeans, all tied together with white sneakers.  Extremely pale skin was revealed wherever he didn’t have it covered. Yet you could tell that he was different.  His face looked more like a girl’s face than a boy’s, with no hint of whiskers anywhere.  Golden eyes shined with light underneath his long blond hair with blue stripes through it.  Gold hoops hung in his ears, flashing through his hair.

            “You get that seat,” Mrs. Forman said, pointing at the desk to the left of the gloomy girl, “next to Gabriel.”  As he approached his seat, he watched the person in the adjacent seat.  It was difficult to tell, but she was definitely a girl.  He sat down next to her, and couldn’t help but look at her out of the corner of his eye.  She hadn’t moved an inch, but he could hear her breathing.  It was deep and soothing, like she was sleeping.  He leaned down, trying to make it look like he was just reading something in his book, and tried to see if she was sleeping.  He caught her gaze through her long, brown hair, and saw that she was looking right at him.  He shivered, and looked back at the teacher.  Who was she?

            At lunch he still hadn’t made any new friends.  Most of the people gave him snotty looks, and turned their noses up at him.  He sighed, and looked around for an empty table.  He shouldn’t have died his hair with streaks of blue; most of these kids found that as an excuse to ostracize him.  The only table open was the one that Gabriel sat at.  He walked over, trying to balance all of his food with one hand, while he held his school books in the other.  “Can I sit here?” he asked quietly.  She didn’t answer, or move.  He noticed that she didn’t have any food in front of her.  He took her silence as a yes, and set his food down on the table.  He got down to eating, but soon found that he had almost no appetite.  “You want it?” He pushed he tray closer to Gabriel, offering it to her.  She finally moved, but only to look up to him.  He was surprised to see that she had a very pretty face.  He wished that she would brush the hair from her face, so that he could see her clearly.  All he could tell was that she had somewhat of a small nose, with full lips that were a pale pink, and a face that reminded him of an angel.  Her perfect blue eyes held his for a second, and then she looked down at the food.

            “Thank you,” was all she said, and she reached out to pull the tray toward her.  She ate it fast, he was surprised to see, even though she seemed to take the smallest bites possible.

            “Why don’t you get your own food?” He asked her, curious.  She was obviously hungry.

            “No money,” she replied after a couple of seconds.  She had finished the food, and pushed the tray back at him.

            “No way, you ate the food, you put the tray away.”

            She looked at him through her long, brown hair.  Then, underneath the strands, he saw a small smile.  He felt his heart skip a step, for when Gabriel smiled, she seemed to glow underneath her mask.  When she came back, he stretched his hand out.  She looked at it confused.  “I’m Jamie,” he said.

            “Oh,” she took his hand, and shook, the first formal greeting between the two. “I’m Gabriel.”

            “Isn’t that a guy’s name?”

            She shifted into her seat, her hair falling down in front of her face.  After a few moments of silence she finally spoke. “My mom said I was an angel sent to her, when I was born.”  Jamie smiled at that statement.  She was a special person; that was for sure.

They sat there for the rest of lunch, talking about anything that came to mind.  Jamie had a feeling that Gabriel had rarely used her voice, but now she was just discovering it.  He liked the sound of her voice.  It was soft, like velvet, and seemed to carry a song with it.  She finally pushed the hair from her face, and he was right.  Her face did glow.

            The two of them were pulled back into reality when the bell rang.  “Do you want to meet up after school?” Jamie asked her.  She smiled at him, and just nodded.

            It seemed like a lifetime, but finally school was over.  She was waiting in front of the office, her hair again falling in front of her face.  It seemed that her beauty was something only he could see, a gift only for him.  “Hey,” he greeted her.  She just nodded.  “Wanna go get something to eat?”  Again, only a nod.

            She didn’t start to speak until they were far away from school.  “I hate that place,” was all she said.

            “Why?”

            She just stared down at the ground.  “No one there can understand what I deal with at home.  They just ignore me.  No one has ever tried to find out what is wrong.”

            “What do you deal with at home?”  He thought of an abusive father, a drinker, automatically.  Mother probably left, and little brother stranded.  The usual suspects. 

            “I don’t want to tell you.”  He felt a little shocked at the harsh response, but dealt with it.  He knew something of the manner, and that it was hard to talk about it.

            “What about you?” she asked, giving him a side-glance.

            “Nothing much...my mother killed my father last year.  I’m with a foster family right now.”  He paused.  “They hate me.  I get just enough money to get by.  It sucks.”

            “I’m sorry for what happened.”  She tried to appear honest, and he believed that she really was sorry.

            “Don’t be.  I hated both of them.”

            “Why?”

            “Because they hated me, and they hated each other.” 

            “I see.”

            The rest of the journey was in silence, but neither of them found the need to speak.  It was nice, finally someone the other person had needed to know what a friend really was.

            Gabriel wasn’t at school the next day, or the next.  Distressed, Jamie went to her house the second day she was gone.  No one else at school seemed to care; not even the teachers.  “She always disappears; it’s of no concern to us.”  Other kids at school seemed to have the same opinion.  “Sometimes I wish she would just disappear forever; she gives me the creeps.”

            Her house was one of those houses you never wanted to go into because you were afraid it might fall over.  It held the look of abandonment, with the over-grown lawn and the boarded windows.  The paint was an ugly grey, pealing back and revealing rotting wood.  The roof was caved in on one side, and weeds grew on the porch.  The stairs and the porch had broken pieces of wood all over with splintered pieces that looked out were going to spear someone through. 

            He walked up the stairs gingerly, trying not to make a sound.  He decided that knocking was not the best thing to do, so he let himself in.  The inside of her house was empty, with a dull-grey depressing look.  He could see that the wood was a little better off on the inside; it wasn’t as rotten as the outside.  The floor had rusty nails sticking up.  Other than that, nothing. He found nothing, and nobody, throughout the whole house.  It was like no one had lived her for at least five years, and that was pushing it.

            He left the house in disappointment, and almost screamed when he saw Gabriel standing in the driveway.  She was facing away from him, towards the road.  He approached her quietly, as if she were a wild animal.  By her side, he took her hand in his, and then stood with her.

            “My mom left.”  He looked at her face, and saw tears running down it.  “Father left after that.  I never cared for him, but I wanted mother to stay.”

            “I’m sorry.”

            She turned to face him, trying to find the truth in his eyes.  “I know you are,” She threw her arms around him, and began crying loudly into his shoulder.  He gently wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her closer to him.

            “It’s ok, you’re with me now.”

            “Thank you,” she gasped, and pulled her arms around him tighter.  They stayed there together, holding on to each other for support, until night fell.  Then, the two of them left, walking all the way to where Jamie lived.  His foster parents looked up from their kitchen table, their eyes full of concern.  There was a long silence, and then his foster mother bounded up from the table, wrapping Jamie up in her arms.

            “We’re so sorry,” she whispered in his ear.  She looked up at Gabriel, who was standing in the doorway hesitate to come in.  “Who is this?”

            “This is Gabriel.  She doesn’t have a home anymore.”  Jamie looked up at his foster mother.  He wasn’t sure what had changed in them, but her eyes had a red look to them, like she had been crying.  His foster mother walked over to Gabriel, and pulled her into the house.

            “Welcome,” was all she said.  It was then that Gabriel smiled.  Jamie felt his heart melt, because right then, she genuinely looked like an angel, glowing in the faint light of kitchen bulbs.  He smiled to himself, turning away to hide the tears in his eyes.  Even though both of them had lost everything, they still had a family.  And in a strange, cosmic sort of way, she had saved him.