“Don’t worry. It’s perfectly natural.” She smiles at Melyssa’s reaction. “You should have seen me when I was a school girl with a crush.”

”It’s not a crush, Mrs. Thompson. I just met him.” Melyssa states matter-of-factly, but even she doesn’t believe it. She could feel her face flushing as she said it.

Smiling, Mrs. Thompson said, “Call it what you wish, dear, but just know that it is normal. You should talk to him.”

With that Melyssa smiled, her dreaming of the unfathomable possibility of her actually talking to Brandon again. She walked out.

Walking down the hall to her locker, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring her mind away from Brandon. Above all, she couldn’t believe she was even thinking about this. I don’t even know him she chastises herself. Just as she thought that she bumped into him. It’s Brandon. It has to be. She knew it was him because who else could it be.

“We really have to stop meeting like this.” He said with the wonderful smile she remembered from earlier. “Can I walk you out?”

All Melyssa could do was smile and nod. He took her arm and walked her out to the quad where the buses picked up the kids that lived too far out of town to walk. We continued walking out past the buses to the street where he released her arm and said, “I actually need to go this way. My mom wants me to go to Ole Fingwick’s Market for some cantaloupe. She’s making some fruit salad. She makes the best fruit salad. Maybe one day you can come over and have some.”

“Okay.” Was all Melyssa could muster.

He smiled and took her hand in his and brought it up to his lips and kissed the top of it.

She blushed. Again.

With that he lets go of her hand and walks away looking back as he walks down the sidewalk.

Melyssa turned around directing her blush toward her home. Just then she heard a harsh fearsome noise coming from behind her. She turned in time to see a car with a blown tire careening out of control onto the sidewalk where Brandon was just walking. But she couldn’t see him. Where did he go? The fear overwhelmed her sometimes overbearing need for seclusion. She ran to the front of the car and she saw him. He was on the ground and there was blood all around him. She knelt down beside him and he looked up at her. She didn’t know what scared her more, the sight of the blood and him laying on the ground, or the vacant look in his eyes. The same eyes that just a matter of minutes ago shown such wonder…such beauty. All she could think about was the loss.

His eyes swam into focus to meet hers. He said, “So that is what an angel looks like.”

She smiled and took his hand. Tears were lining her face like another skin that glistened in the bright afternoon sun.
That was the last face he saw.