Angel-Lover

By RJ Conte

Chad is a reclusive teenager whose thoughts are full of loneliness and suicide. The only thing that he obsesses over more than planning his own death is the nicest, sweetest, most beautiful girl in school. As he stalks her and watches her, he learns the truth about what she believes in and, in the process, finds Someone Else he did not expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RJ Conte
• Release date: Aug 8, 2015

RJ Conte

RJ Conte has kissed only one boy in her entire life. And she married him, inspiring her to write about sweet or powerful love stories ever since.She writes a blog on parenting, publishing, painting, and perorating at http://blonderj.wordpress.com/She also has recently begun a book review and rating website for parents to make informed decisions on what to allow their children to read: rjconte.com/booksRJ Conte writes realistic, issue-driven fiction that explores human nature and the depths of the soul, while pointing readers to their Creator.

Book preview

Part One

One

Chad woke up.

The fact that he was alive made him want to sob. He had slept like the dead. If he didn’t kill himself first, Chad wanted to die in his sleep.

Before he got rejected by Angelique Belle Rose.

He would rather cut both wrists and his neck. He knew just the way to do it.

Chad owned five different razors. They were all black. He got them at a grocery store. The checkout guy looked at him really funny when he bought them. Chad was sure it was his clothes, although the convenience store employee might have been wondering why he was buying razors when he didn’t need to shave. The lack of facial hair came from being too light haired, although no one would know it. Chad had dyed his hair black.

He secretly worried that the checkout guy knew too much about him. The pimply teenager at the Sav-Mart down the street knew he owned five razors and that he bought hair dye every two weeks. Chad couldn’t stand letting a single light hair show. He even dyed his eyebrows. His natural hair was a light brown and Chad thought it was nasty. He thought it made him look like a happy normal boy. But Chad considered himself a depressed maniac.

And different.

He was proud to be different. Chad figured that his differences were the only thing he lived for in life. It kept him sane in an insane world. Chad was sure he needed no one. He could entirely survive as his own soul. He had his poetry, his art, his computer, and his music. He hated everyone. He thought of himself as totally removed from the world. In every way.

Except for Angelique Rose. Angelique Belle Rose.

Chad once looked up every single one of her names in a dictionary.

Angelique was French and it meant angel. And that was what she was. She had waves of golden blond hair that curled down her back. Every single one of them spiraled to the right, except for the one that she pulled over her left shoulder and twiddled while taking math tests. That one curved to the left.

Belle was Italian and it meant beautiful. And she was gorgeous. She was the most beautiful being Chad had ever seen in the world. Chad vowed that everyone else deserved to have their throats slit and be buried under twenty-five feet of limestone. She had violet eyes that made Chad lose his head, although he never made eye contact with her except for the one time.

She never noticed Chad after that first day. She had paid him attention once and that was good enough for him. He convinced himself that it was better that way. If she did look at him and chose to reject him, he didn’t know what he would do. His mind went to the five razors.

Rose was the flower the color of blood. And, besides black, red was Chad’s favorite color. Blood was the color of life and the color of power. Chad felt powerful when he saw that color come out of him. When he made himself hurt by taking his razors and drawing them across his arms, he saw that color and he thought of Angelique’s lips. She was as beautiful and delicate as the flower that was her last name. Chad bet five million bucks her parents changed their last name when Angelique was born. Bloody parents. They didn’t deserve to have a daughter like Angelique. They deserved to die along with everyone else. But no one should die with Chad. He wanted to die alone and of his own hand.

Someday, when he was good and ready, he promised that he’d kill himself. And, while he was dying slowly, he’d write about Red and leave the world the best poem he’d ever written. Chad vowed he’d show them all he was different. With the enlightenment he’d receive, he’d get that Nirvana and write like a god.

Chad wasn’t convinced there was a god. He didn’t think one would have put a human like Chad on a messed up earth with all the idiot people who didn’t know what life was even all about. And yet, Chad was terrified out of his wits about Death. He worshiped it because he feared it. It was the only way to survive – until you were done trying.

Life was really about love. Because Chad was in love with Angelique Belle Rose. And that was all that was keeping him on earth at the moment.

Life was hell in Chad’s mind. He was stuck at Cornerstone High School, population 800, with other sixteen-year-olds whom he deemed far below him and who hated him, ignored him, and picked on him for being different. He was stuck flunking and playing hooky for crabby old teachers who continually told him to push that hair out of your eyes so you can look at me when I’m talking to you! Chad called them demented old freaks under his breath. Didn’t they know he didn’t want to look at their wrinkled mole-ridden old faces? Didn’t they know their classes were the worst thing that ever happened to Chad in his hellish life?

But he stayed because of Angelique.

Angelique Rose had moved to the area the previous summer. She kept nearly perfect attendance at school and made a bunch of friends only six months into her first semester at the school. She was there every day except for when she was sick or on vacation. On those days Chad couldn’t bear with the pain of the separation and would cut himself more. It made him write amazing poems because, when he was so sick inside, he wrote better. When a day went by where he didn’t see Angelique, he got sick inside with sorrow. She made his world. She was the sunshine in the blackness. She was the comfort in the rain. Her violet eyes were the warmth in the coldness. Her five feet four inches were the height in the pit. Her smile was the electricity that kept Chad’s heart beating… He sat and wrote another poem.

On this particular day, it was a rainy March morning that Chad woke up. It was Chad’s favorite kind of day – if he could have favorites. One day pretty much seemed like the next. Chad loved being cold – it kept his senses alert – and he kept the thermostat very low in his room with a fan blowing at all times. He put on his loose black tunic and his thinner black pants. He attached three chains to the loops and buckles covering the pants and tied his black boots on tightly. The boots had tiny metal spikes on the bottom. He paid three hundred bucks for them – money he made selling his stupid old kiddie video games back to a store. He can’t believe he ever played that tripe.

Chad combed out his ragged black hair and let the bangs almost completely cover his eyes. He then wiped off his smudged eyeliner and applied more. It covered his freak blue eyes. Someday, when he could afford it, he’d get black contacts. But his mother refused to pay for them now. She hated the way her son dressed. Chad hated being referred to as her son. She said he looked like a bat. That’s just what he wanted to look like. Bats were cool. Bats were different. And some sucked blood. Black and Red. The colors of death.

He strapped on a couple of thick black bracelets. One of them came with the boots. It had metal spikes that ran along the length of it. One of these days, when he was getting picked on, he’d… But no. Chad was way too chicken. He was the smallest guy in his grade at five six and a hundred and five pounds. His mother complained he never ate and could be working out, but Chad scoffed at the thought of going to the gym. That was for cretin jocks with no souls.

He just wished he wasn’t always so afraid. Dogs scared him. Even eating scared him sometimes. He had heard of people getting food poisoning and dying.

Nothing could kill Chad before he did it himself. That was what scared him most: something else killing him before he was ready. He would snuff out his own painful lonely existence. He needed that little bit of control.

He was afraid he’d die because of his own failing body. Chad had been born with a weak heart. He had a murmur that wouldn’t go away, and his body strained with exhaustion after physical exercise. He had been sickly almost his whole childhood.

Chad was never satisfied with the way he looked, but at least he blended into his bedroom walls and the darkness in his room. His blinds were as black as the paint and he could hardly see himself in the bathroom. He had a skylight that he hated, because it let in more light than he’d like, but he couldn’t get rid of it. Except for that, Chad didn’t have a light bulb in his room. He saw by the light of the skylight or his computer screen.

He physically jumped after waking up on this particular day in March, feeling the depression waiting to pounce on him. He threw open his door and ran to the stairs, halting as soon as he came in view of anyone. Then, slouching considerably, he made his way down the steps at the pace of a snail. Chad was ice; displays of fear were unacceptable.

Chad! Hurry up and eat your pancakes! You’ve got to get on the bus in five minutes! It was his mother. Her screechy witch voice was five million decibels too loud on his ears at too early in the morning. Plus, he hated pancakes.

He also hated his name. Chad Burnhill. Burnhill was cool, he guessed, because fire was cool, but Chad sounded like a sissy who dressed in jeans and fiddled around on a stupid skateboard all day. It sounded like the cute kid with light brown hair that he used to be: the imbecile who played kiddie video games and liked pancakes. The kid who hadn’t given his soul to Angelique Rose. Chad had privately named himself Demon Angel-lover. It was perfect because he was a dark demon who loved a beautiful angel. It also sounded a lot like death. And he loved death almost as much as he loved Angelique.

No worries though! He loved Angelique more. Or he would’ve killed himself a long time ago. Maybe last year.

He didn’t eat a bite of pancake that day. He wouldn’t eat until he got home in the early evening. Chad never ate at school. He hardly ate anything, preferring to live mostly on energy drinks to keep him alive and awake. He could see his mother hold back a worried sigh. It made him want to choke. He had to fight back feeling sorry for idiots like his mother.

Chad was an only child. It was like he was perpetually a baby. She wouldn’t stop nagging him and wouldn’t let him grow up. And then there was his father. He had disinherited Chad. He never talked to him at all. Chad heard his father telling his mother once that he didn’t know where he went wrong with his son. Chad did a great job of pushing down his feelings on that one. He had walked out there and picked at his dinner as if he hadn’t heard his father tell his mother he was a freak of nature and a mistake.

Even though Chad thought he was himself.

He kept his face as still as stone by sticking in his iPod earphones. As soon as scream music was pounding through his brain, he felt the control flood back into him and he relaxed. What did it matter what the old man thought? Sure he was a freak of nature, but he was also a genius. Someday he’d find out. Someday when he was burying Chad in the cold ground, he’d read his poems, have them published, and the entire world would read them. Then he’d know how he truly felt. Then he’d see that Chad had a mind far above anyone else on this planet.

Except for Angelique, of course. She had to be the smartest girl in the entire school. She got As on every test. She even got higher grades than Chad in art, but that was only because Chad never turned in anything good because the teachers couldn’t think outside the box.

Once she got a C. It was on November fifth at 9:50 am. It was in their hideous science class. The teacher deserved to be hung on a gallows for giving her a grade like that. Angelique bit her lip under her perfect top row of teeth and took a quivering little breath that shook her shoulders. She actually shed two perfect tears. Chad watched one drip all the way down to her chin