Part 1 - He Is Beautiful Inside

This is the first installment and it starts with Janet talking about Michael and what he's like. It goes as far as how they end up becoming friends.

          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.

Author's Note

This is the beginning of what may end up being one of the worst things I've written or the best. Read and review, please, I'm gonna need a lot of help with this.

Reviews

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Haha, don't you just love that feeling? Ok, so I read all three chapters and I will comment on each one. So first off I will say that this story isn't bad and you have an interesting character started. But right there is one of the problems. You only have one interesting character though you have two that are introduced. I don't normally write in first person, and I'm not all that great at it, but the way I look at it is the narrator has to be developed along with the other characters. Right now I feel that Janet's personality is not shown, and we are only given Michael's. In developing Janet as a character would help to fix a lot of other things as well. On the whole, I feel there needs to be more description. Describe school, classes, the little rituals that everyone has in high school. Along with that the pacing seems a little fast. I feel like I'm just getting bullet-points about Michael and not really getting to judge him as a character. The beginning doesn't sit well with me either. It just seems a little cliche. My advice would be to let the reader make that judgment about Michael through you're depiction of him. He might very well be a fallen angel, but let the reader find out, instead of telling us. Like the wings part in the first paragraph. It's a cliche image. A way to fix it is by saying something to the effect of "when I daydream through History lecture, I swear he has wings." Now that's not the greatest line I just wrote, but I hope it just gives you an idea of how you can spice up a pretty stock image. Also what that fragment does is let the reader know more about the narrator. So yeah, just take more time with it, flesh everything out. I think you have a good start to make a great story, but I'd treat what you have now as an outline for something more. Sorry if that was critique heavy, I just feel that you could make this into something good.