The Angel on My Shoulder

My name is Gerald, and I come from a little village in the north. My family and I moved there when I was three.
It is one of those villages where everyone knows everyone.
When I was three, it was the first time I met Elin, and it was like seeing an angel. Elin means "glowing", but it can also mean "In God".
The first time I saw her I remember I got that feeling all of us guys get sometime in our life, that feeling that says: "Keep it cool... There is a pretty girl here!" Elin was one year younger than me. 
As time past, I started to notice her more and more, and when I started to ride the school bus I developed a crush on her. My sister (and embarrassing enough my dad) told me that the way she was looking at me, she probably had a crush on me as well. 
So how did she look? 
She had this thick curly brown hair and when you touched it, it felt like dipping your hands into dry water. She had these eyes that had the same color as the deep autumn sky.
I will always remember her as the girl with the big black jacket with its long sleeves where she hid her hands in from the cold. I will always remember her due to the red and white sport shoes she was wearing, even though it was winter and she wore them in the snow. But mostly, I will remember the long sleeve grey hoodie she wore along with a pink t-shirt and baggy blue jeans. Even when she was indoors, she had her hands up her grey sleeves.
When she walked, she walked with her palms facing the world and she wiggled as if she had great white wings on her back.
She was beautiful.
So, how did I look?
I am a tall guy with green eyes. The only things that were working against my physical attractiveness was that I was overweight and had a ponytail, but my hair was long and thick and red.
I remember one time when Elin braided my ponytail... It was the first time a girl had touched me in a loving and senseful way, and I will cherish that moment until the day I die.
We started to go to the same school when I was thirteen, and the school I went to was literally hell. Actually, all of the schools in the community of villages I lived in were hell... 
A lot of people might say that their school is hell, but mine was. Students could get groped by other teachers (some of the girls that got groped were six years old) and even if they reported it, the teachers didn't get accused. Students could grope the teachers and it was the same thing. 
Students that didn't come from the village the school was situated in (Elin and I lived in two other villages some distance away...) If they got bullied, like me, the teachers did nothing to help. 
All of us got tortured there. Both mentally, and physically. 
So what happens with an angel in hell?
First of all, her wings fall off.
Second of all, her beauty gets ruined.
She tried her best to keep the demons out of her, but finally, she didn't care anymore about people groping her and doing things to her body.
Elin was dying in front of my eyes, and I couldn't do anything to keep it from happening. 
Even her voice changed from being the dreamy happy voice. It started to be a voice full of despair and hate directed towards me.
But I still loved her.
The demons tried to get me as well, but they couldn't because I moved after one and a half years there.
But I forgot Elin. 
And when I looked back in the big city with its beautiful lights I was living in, I realised that I had forgotten her. 
It was too late now.
It looked like she was going to make it after all, but after I went to one year of high school, during the summer break when she was about to start high school, three of the people from my old school got Elin drunk at a party.
I want to think that when that pig started kissing her, she didn't really want to.
I like to think that when that pig and two others dragged her into a bedroom, she didn't want to do the things they did to her.
But they did anyway.
They pulled off her grey hoodie, her pink t-shirt, her baggy blue jeans and her underwear.
They forced her to do things, and she cried and begged them to stop.
But they didn't.
When she started screaming they jammed a glass bottle into her mouth. It cracked and cut her throat and mouth open from the inside, but even when they were done someone could have helped her. My friend was there, it was he who told me this story later. He could have gone in and saved her, but he was afraid.
She bled to death in that room alone. The ones who did it walk free to this day, the police didn't want to offend their neighbors by arresting their sons.
Her death broke me. I didn't think I could ever move on, but those of you that read this and have felt the same pain, I know that eventually you do.
I started a new high school, and the memory of Elin was with me everywhere. I lived in a big city far away from my home village and none of the demons there could touch me anymore.
But demons exists in every corner of the world.
Elin never really left me, I saw her everywhere I went. A shape wearing her gray hoodie and pink t-shirt, but I only saw her if I closed my eyes and imagined her. The first girl I met was a demon. She was a blond girl named Santo, and she was crazy. I thought I loved her, but I was really in love with Autumn, another girl I had met and fallen in love with. Santo loved me, but she got another boyfriend when I told Santo that I had never loved her, and then she attacked me viciously. She sent her boyfriend and his minions after me...
I feel ashamed now. If Elin knew what type of girl I thought I had been interested in... She would have been ashamed of me. Santo was a total tool. And I know Elin would have loved Autumn. Crazy girls tend to have crazy boyfriends. None of my friends believed me when I told them Santo was crazy. I was walking home from school one day, and took a shortcut through an alley only to find it blocked by two guys. I turned around and another guy and Santo's boyfriend stood behind me. All of them were shorter than me, but there were four of them. Without saying anything they start to beat and kick me. I tried my best to fight them off, but it was of no use. I knew all hope was lost. It was near winter, darkness has fallen and the alley was only lit by a few windows. Then in the midst of the kicks and my own screams, I heard a whisper. The whisper became mumbling. The mumbling became voices. My attackers stops beating me and started to look at a point behind me just as the voices becomes singing, singing of such a beauty it feels like a great force in the alley.
"Hi there, boys!" said a happy dreamy voice. I become stiff all over, because I recognized the voice. I got up to my knees and turned around. In the alley, a shape was walking towards us. A shape that is rather tall, a shape that walks towards us with her palms facing the world. A shape with thick brown curly hair. A shape with eyes wearing the same color as the autumn sky. A shape wearing the same clothes as she had worn the day she died when she was fourteen, over three years ago. I know it is her... But how can it be? She's dead. 
"Get out of here, kid!" said Santo's boyfriend. "This is no place for people like yo-" Elin put her finger against his lips, as to silence him, and he disappeared, screaming in a flash of blue light. His smoking shoes were the only thing that were left. My other attackers left us. 
"Hi there, Gerald!" says Elin happily. 
"But you're dead," I say in a whisper.
"But Gerald," she says and her voice, still happy, becomes a little more serious, "Do you really think that all people that die really leave? No! They live on in here!" Then she puts her little warm hand on my heart and I start to cry. 
"I'm so sorry!" I sob. "I'm so sorry I couldn't save you!"
Elin puts her arms around me, and I put my arms around her and I cry against her shoulder. "It wasn't your fault," she said in her dreamy voice after a while. "It was that place... The people that live there." She releases me and we just look at each other for a while. She smiles, and I smile back. "It is time for you to move on, Gerald," she says. "I will always be here." She touches the place where my heart is. "Looking over your shoulder." She kisses the corner of my mouth, and the touch of her lips is as smooth as the summer wind. Elin stands up and smiles one final time, then she spreads giant white wings and flies up in the sky, filled with stars that look like shards of ice shattered all over the universe.
You will read a lot of stories that contains evil things like demons, ghosts, and other evil beings. Here I bring you a story about how good sometimes wins over evil. That no matter how bad things get, there is always hope.
Category:Gods