Barely Bones

Barely Bones 3

Author's Note: I'm sorry. No one even reads this but if you are, I'm terribly sorry. I always write at 3 a.m while listening to sad songs. I'm half asleep when these words appear on the page.

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Chapter 3, Part I: Learning New Things

As a kid, I never understood the need for swearing. Why did some people limit their bank of adjectives to two curse words? Were they so important as to be used thrice in every sentence?

Not until I met Valery Corcoran did I find the most appropriate use for the word 'bitch.'

She was one of Cameron's friends back when he lived here. She was short and on the... curvier side of the spectrum. Valery may have been slightly chubby, but she acknowledged the fact that she had a beautiful face and wavy hair that was a stunning shade of dark chocolate. It was because of her own prettiness that we didn't get along. She flipped her hair a lot, took an abundance of self-glorifying photos, and led a horde of loyal Instagram followers.

When Cameron was still around and I hadn't known Gwynn yet, Valery, her boyfriend Nicholas, Cameron, and I would be our own group at school. She was obnoxiously loud and liked to point out my faults.

"Ew, what the heck did you do to your hair?"

"Stop slouching like that. It's driving me insane."

"Could you flipping speak up when you talk to me? Ugh, I can never understand what you're saying!"

She was, essentially, a bitch.

She treated Cameron like a child, but what I found extremely detestable was the fact that she'd been cheating on Nicholas when he went away for sports tournaments.

People who cheated on their partners deserved to be imprisoned.

After Cameron left, so did Valery and Nicholas. They merged well with the rest of the school population while I was left alone.

I gladly dealt with Valery's departure. We never said 'hi' in the hallways, or followed each other on social sites, or even remembered each other's birthdays. I was perfectly fine with that, because I couldn't bear to hear any more, "Holy crap, stop being an emo middle school kid and smile for the group picture."

Nicholas was a bit different. He supported Valery entirely but never hurt me directly. He was tall and definitely looked like the defensive type... he just never defended the right people. With his raspy smoker's voice, he would laugh at Valery's jokes or, on the odd occasion, he would tell some bastard off when he or she insulted his girlfriend's appearance.

Maybe that's why they were together so long. They defended each other mindlessly without thinking about why they even cared.

If that's what relationships were about, I never wanted to be in one.

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Chapter Three, Part II: Badly Baked Birthday Cake

"Happy birthday, to Sebastian, happy birthday to you!"

Three weeks into the summer, we celebrated Sebastian Blevins's eighteenth birthday.

That's right, his eighteenth. I wasn't even sixteen yet, and we were both going into our junior year.

Apparently, Sebastian had seen his share of bad luck. The August before he was supposed to enter ninth grade, he'd been in a car accident that left him in vegetable state for ten months. He didn't say much about the incident, but we knew that he'd taken his freshman year the September after he woke up. After barely passing the ninth grade, he completely failed the tenth and was forced to re-do it. Since he'd opted out of taking summer school, he spent the year after that in tenth grade Applied courses.

A week ago, when Sebastian had first mentioned this to Gwynn and me, he'd blurted out, "I'm turning eighteen," while we had been watching Battle LA.

He'd briefly explained his past stories but was obviously shy about it.

"Happy birthday, Sebastian," chirped Ms. Byrne-Blevins to her son as she handed him a slice of home-made triple chocolate fudge cake.

Gwynn smiled sheepishly at the boy she liked. The fact that he was slightly older only made her even more attracted to him than before.

I thought Gwynn's birthday gift was cute. It was a fifty dollar gift card to the gas station, which would be perfect to go with his shiny new license and even shinier lightly used car.

He could finally drive us to Ess and Cameron.

I smiled as I accepted a paper plate of cake from Ms. Byrne-Blevins.

"Mom, do you mind leaving us alone?" asked Sebastian with a mouthful of fudge.

She smiled and nodded.

As soon as she left, Sebastian ordered us to follow him out the back door with our cakes. Confused, I walked into his open backyard, bare-footed. The three of us tip-toed across the unfenced grasses to the neighbor's deck, where a rusting trash bucket that was missing its lid stood guard over the various plastic sandals that Sebastian's neighbor kept on the worn-out "Greetings from Jamaica" woven straw mat.

It finally hit me, and I wasn't referring to the scent of zombie that wafted from the trash bucket.

"Are we... are we throwing the cake out?" I croaked.

Sebastian nodded as he spit out a mouthful of chocolate goo and flipped his slice into the trash. Gwynn followed his example without questions.

As for me: "Why?"

"If you've ever tasted my mom's cake, you'd be thanking me."

I picked up a small chocolaty piece and tossed it on my tongue. Then I nodded furiously and threw the plate into the trash.

"Holy crap," I commented. "Thanks, Sebastian."

For the first time in the three weeks that I'd known Sebastian, he chuckled this low, rumbly, and oddly comforting chuckle. Then, Gwynn let out a girly giggle, and before I knew it, all three of us were laughing maniacally on the foreign soil.

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Chapter 3, Part III: Midpoint & I Hate It

We were in Gwynn's basement with a map, an assortment of dollar store highlighters, and a full spectrum of Sharpies spread on her Tibetan carpet.

The melodic and funky sound of Isles & Glaciers played in the background, coating the echoing sounds of Mr. Harper's yelling at a football match upstairs.

Somehow Gwynn and I had convinced Sebastian to drive back to Ess and Cameron's house. All we had to do was plan our getaway.

"What day is it today?" asked Sebastian, bringing a capped blue highlighter to his lips.

"The nineteenth," I replied.

Gwynn groaned. "It's already mid-July! The weather is just gross and summer's half done!"

I smiled meekly, because Gwynn was right about the unsettling topic. I mean the excruciatingly hot weather, rendering me unable to wear the sweaters I so loved, and in a month and a bit, I would have to face the dingy halls and glistening faces of a thousand hormonal teenagers.

"That's why we gotta do the road trip now," Sebastian pointed out. "The cheapest good hotel is like seventy bucks a night. A decent hotel stands at forty. What do you guys think? I'm fine with forty."

"I can't afford a seventy-dollar-a-night hotel by myself if we plan on staying for a week," I huffed. "At this point, I'll gladly take anything with indoor plumbing."

"And free wi-fi," Gwynn added.

"Then it's settled," he said as he scribbled onto his notebook. "Okay, next, the gas money."

I zoned out after this, and eventually fell asleep, right there, on Gwynn's imported Tibetan carpet.