Overcomer - The Journey by Judy Colella (novels to improve english .txt) 📖

what the old-fashioned novels Celeste sometimes read described as “dimpling.” Weird. Beyond weird.

As… Cian, was it?... took his seat, Celeste began to worry about how the other guys in the class would feel about him. She and Katie had estimated that he was a little over six feet tall; his physique was lean, strong, and perfectly proportioned as far as she could tell, his features unworldly in their masculine beauty. She shook herself. Knock it off, Celeste – he’s a person. A guy. What are you doing, getting all poetic and stuff? Jeez!

Where he sat made it impossible to see his face, other than the curve of one cheek. She stared at his thick black hair, remembering he had clear grey eyes that looked… what? Sad? Frightened? But why?

Mrs. Farrell spoke again. “So! Let me ask you the same question I just asked the rest of the class – what was Lewis Carroll’s real name?”

“Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, ma’am.”

“Yes! Excellent! We’re going to be studying the first ‘Alice’ book. May I assume you know it?”

“I’ve read it a few times, and studied some of the commentaries about it.”

Celeste suspected that had any other guy admitted to such a thing, he would have been snickered into oblivion. Yet when Cian said it, he got no reaction, certainly nothing negative. Amazing.

“Mrs. Farrell?” Janine raised her hand again, and Celeste rolled her eyes. Janine had spent almost her entire student career trying to be every teacher’s pet, and after being in school with her since Kindergarten, Celeste was long over it.

“What is it, Janine?” Mrs. Farrell’s sounded irritated, an usual attitude toward the girl, and for a moment, Celeste sympathized with her teacher.

Janine lowered her hand and cleared her throat. “I’ve read the Alice books more than once myself, and I even own the Annotated Alice, which is a wonderful study tool.” She turned her head toward Cian and gave him a broad smile.

To his credit – and Celeste’s surprise – he nodded at Janine, who turned a flaming shade of pink and looked away.

What a gentleman! She’s so obviously kissing up to him – another guy would have laughed at her and said, “So what?”

“I’m sure, dear.” Mrs. Farrell threw back her shoulders. “Well now, let’s continue with the lesson, shall we?”

As if you weren’t the one holding it up in the first place with your gross flirting! Celeste shook her head and opened her notebook.

Other than noticing the other girls’ inability to look completely past the first desk in the fifth row, Celeste found nothing interesting about the rest of the period. When the bell rang, her progress toward the door slowed almost to a halt as a wall of girls looking over their shoulders at the dark-haired youth rising from his desk blocked her exit. Celeste took a deep breath and began shoving into the crowd. “Hey! Out of the way, please – I have another class! Can you please move?”

Before she could get more than a few inches farther, Katie joined her. “Let’s get out of here before the bloodbath. Come on!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The other guys – they’re going to destroy him, and I don’t want to be here to see them –“

“Make friends with him?” Celeste grinned and pointed over Katie’s shoulder.

The boys had surrounded Cian, smiling and laughing, some shaking his hand and introducing themselves.

“I can’t believe this! I think they like him! Huh.” Katie snorted and started toward the door again.

At that moment, whatever one of the others said made Cian give him a broad smile, and Celeste stopped breathing; his incredible features had become even more so.

“He’s a god!”

Startled, Celeste turned to see the head cheerleader gaping, eyes glazed. Celeste chuckled. “Don’t have an aneurysm, Crystal!”

Katie’s hand intruded between two of her classmates and grabbed Celeste by the arm, pulling her toward the door like a battering ram through the girls still loitering in front of it. “Let’s go – we’ll be late for our next class, and besides, I doubt any of us mere females will get a chance to talk to him right now.”

“But – ”

“Celeste! He’s not going to melt away – let’s go. I’m sure we’ll see him later.”

Celeste cast a final amused glance at the cheerleader and shook her head. “Fine. Let’s go.”

When they were halfway to their next class, Katie said, “I think because we already sort of met him in the mall, we’re maybe immunized against his looks or something.”

“Possibly. Did you see Crystal Warren? I swear she was going to start drooling. She even called him a god!”

They broke into laughter, but when they were almost at their next class, Katie sobered. “In a way, Crystal’s right.”

“What do you mean?”

“How many guys of any age have you seen who look even close to that amazing?”

“Okay, but a ‘god?’ Please Katie. He’s as human as the rest of us.”

“I’m sure he is, but maybe there’s more to him. I mean, look at the effect he had on Farrell.”

“True. And even though every girl in the whole school – including teachers, oh gross – will be panting after him, the guys are okay with him. Go figure. Oh! Oh! I almost forgot! Did you catch his name?”

Katie’s brows drew together. “Yeah, so?”

“You don’t get any more Irish than that Katie, and it took me a few seconds to place it, but his accent definitely has some Irish in it.”

“So I guess this means you two were meant for each other?”

“Of course not!” That was what she had meant, but admit it? Ha. “It’s kind of cool, is all.”

“Why?”

Celeste stopped walking and took a deep breath. “I have no idea.”

Nodding, Katie said nothing more about it.

Neither did Celeste, but a strong sense of the inevitable told her that because of this Irish boy, life might never be the same.

TWO

 

The local mall continued to astound Cian – the size of the building, the array and variety of shops within its walls, his acceptance as an employee there. Before moving to Connecticut less than a week earlier, he’d seen a few of these indoor shopping centers, but none had been as vast.

Pulling his waste-removal cart into the food court, Cian passed an older couple staring at the menu sign over one of the Asian food shops. The woman’s arm was linked into the man’s, reminding Cian of Mr. and Mrs. Bolton, his first foster parents.

He’d been given only five months with them. Five short months. Their beautiful home in Atlanta – a plantation house, Mrs. Bolton had called it – had been a place of safety, warmth. The daily drive to and from a private school defined the extent of his travels back then, the reason for keeping him out of more public areas not understood until recently. Had he not travelled for two years with his parents before being left in Atlanta, he wouldn’t even know what a mall was.

Cian unlocked the front of the unit and slid out the overflowing trash barrel, lifted out the lining, and dumped it into the larger bag lining his cart. Recalling the Boltons always made him smile, but as he shoved a new liner into the barrel, his smile faded, pleasant thoughts supplanted by another… of his second foster family.

Safety and warmth had been replaced by six years of imprisonment in a cluttered basement, daily physical and verbal abuse, hard labor at tasks too onerous for a child. Time spent on the upper floors of the Pettijohn’s house and outside had been brief and usually painful. Attendance at school having been denied him, no respite from his misery was possible, his existence pure hell until two social workers sought and rescued him when he was sixteen.

A quick shake of his head to dispel the darker thoughts; he closed the disposal unit and moved to the next. That life is over, done. Stop thinking about it. You’re here now and life is finally better.

Free to attend school and hold a job as a maintenance worker in this gigantic mall, he could focus his thoughts on the future, he reminded himself as he opened the next unit. Many things were yet to be resolved about that future, but here, in this place where he no longer had to fear constant harm, no longer needed to consider killing himself, he could face those unresolved issues with hope.

His smile returned, thoughts turning to his first day at school – a real school, not a small space in a psychiatric hospital where he’d been tutored before being transferred to Connecticut. The students in his classes at the high school had been so kind, so normal.

I’m a stranger, yet they made me feel welcome. Amazing. For the first time in six years, his deep-set insecurities could be corrected without the help of doctors. Insecurities like misinterpreting people’s stares as signs of disgust.

The truth that no one would call his looks monstrous or horrifying had not yet claimed a permanent place, but after the friendly way his peers had treated him earlier that day, he knew relief from the lie was getting closer.

All those years ago, a seed of doubt planted in his ten-year-old mind by Letitia Pettijohn’s venomous behavior had made him wonder. Was something wrong with him? According to his psychologist, Letitia had only needed that miniscule suspicion to break him down.

“I have to stop thinking about it so much,” he murmured, putting a fresh liner in the trash container and moving to the next one. Not easy to do, though, with so many things to remind him, like the chrome sides of the refuse containers in which his reflection was almost as sharp as it was in a mirror. Told he was too stupid to attend regular school and denied access to mirrors because his looks were too monstrous even for him, he had no idea that neither of these assertions was true until a year before coming to this place.

As he looked up from relining the container, he saw his supervisor, Mr. Halloran, approaching.

“Good evening, Mr. MacDara!” The man gave him a big smile.

“Good evening, sir.”

“How’s it going tonight?”

Cian shrugged. “Fine so far, sir. Thanks for asking.” He returned the man’s smile and placed the barrel back into its chrome-sided receptacle.

“Glad to hear it. Keep up the good work son, and before you know it, you’ll be getting a raise.”

A what? “Is that… I mean what... um… ”

“It means you’ll get an increase in pay.” Mr. Halloran patted him on the shoulder and walked away.

Bemused, Cian shook his head. To think he could do what he was being asked and get paid instead of beaten – the mall was, indeed, amazing...

 

*******

 

“No, Katie, we are not going to the mall.”

“Why not? I need a new shirt.”

“No you don’t. You want to see him, and I think it’s a bad idea to bother him at work. He could get in trouble.”

Katie’s silence on the other end filled the next few seconds. “Oh, come on – you want to see him too, and as far as I can tell, no one else from school knows he works there.”

“Maybe not, but I get the impression he needs a lot of space.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve never even talked to him!”

Too tired from the