Barely Bones

Barely Bones 1

ーHi. I'm new to Wattpad but I've been wanting to write a story forever. Please note that this story is based on real people, but most of the content in this story is, fortunately, created.

"Bones" by In Fear And Faith is the selected song for this short story.

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Update Note: Edited on July 16, 2013. It is 5 a.m.

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Chapter One, Part I: What I Saw in Ess and Cameron

Ess wasn't actually Ess. She was, legally, Francess Abigail Carter. She was older than me by three years, so that while I was heading into the eleventh grade, she finished up her first year without schooling.

Sadly, Ess and Cameron lived about three hours away. They had moved from my quiet town to Mr. Carter's bustling home town after the tragic and mysterious death of Mrs. Janet Rose Carter, which, if I recall correctly, had happened the summer after I'd graduated middle school.

Ess kept me sane through the summer months, but she left after I finished up ninth grade, and I was left with the wolves that disguised themselves as beautiful hypocrites.

I never understood why Ess disliked herself. I wanted to be her for a while. She was pretty enough for the boys to like her and for the girls to be jealous in a friendly manner, but she was shy and quiet enough to ward everyone away. Ess was tall, slim, and distinguishable among her peers, and I wanted to be like that.

Then, when she wrote to me in the summer of the eighth grade, she told me her secret: she was an insomniac. Her lack of sleep eventually gave her zombie eyes and few people wanted to talk to her anymore. This made her upset, so upset that she bought make-up and covered the bags under her fragile eyes, and suddenly everyone at school liked her again.

"They're fake," she told me in her letter. "All they want is a perfect person to idolize (that's why they have celebrities), and I don't care to be that person. I am called beautiful on a daily basis and frankly I'm bored. I threw away the make-up during summer school. Now everything is back to the way it was when my insomnia started. I like it better like this."

Maybe that's the thing I saw in Ess that made me want to be like her; she searched for honesty and shunned hypocrisy.

But I still think Ess is pretty.

Cameron Michael Carter was different. He was exactly one week older than me, exactly one foot taller than me, exactly one rank above me on the Honor Roll list at school (or he was, until he moved. My grades have since plummeted).

Nobody liked Cameron like they liked Ess. They called him the 'emo' kid in fifth grade and ever since, he's just been quiet. He hates the word 'emo.'

Cameron was skinnier than Ess and didn't mind that the gamer geeks who'd never seen the sunlight could probably beat him up. He just liked to read, learn, and skateboard. I usually caught him boarding down the sidewalk, slowly, while reading a book in a foreign language.

To his advantage, Cameron was adored by his teachers and relatives. Despite his image, his father called him the 'perfect child.' Cameron looked plenty rebellious, but he was a straight-A student, avid over-achiever, and an activist against procrastination.

Why Cameron was always sad, I would never know. He only smiled when something utterly hilarious happened in a film. He had friends, I guess, but I could count his friends with my fingers. There was Ess, Valery, Nicholas, and me. Sebastian was kind of like a friend, but he appeared in our lives later on, and so that will be mentioned later on.

It didn't bother me that Cameron never wrote and only attached footnotes to his sister's letters before mailing them. I understood his need to avoid people; after all, how could he warm up to society when everyone had been so... so vicious to him? Why would he throw himself to the lions like that?