Content Warning: mature content, drug and alcohol use, sexual violence     

          My graduating class doesn’t talk about Andrew Bone. Not that anyone really disliked him. Honestly, you could argue we all liked him a bit too much. Until we didn’t. He was handsome, athletic, and popular—what’s not to like? That was the general consensus amongst the girls, anyway. But we don’t talk about him, not anymore.

          I’ve known Bone since elementary school. My earliest memories of him aren’t actually of him at all, but rather what people would say about him. More specifically, what the girls would say about him. There was a very specific kind of girl who had a crush on Bone. The problematic girls, the kind of girls that in elementary school honestly believed they were going to marry their celebrity crush. The kind of girls that went on to create fan accounts of Bone, to write fanfiction about Bone, to talk about Bone as if he was their long-term boyfriend rather than a popular guy they had an unnerving obsession with. Over the years, I’ve heard a plethora of stories about lengths girls have gone to for Bone. One girl walked three blocks to his house wearing only whipped cream on a frosty December eve. Another girl agreed to do a year’s worth of his Chem homework. In elementary school, one girl jumped off the slide in an ill-thought-out attempt to impress him and wound up shattering her spine (no, she can’t walk).

          I’d like to establish that I was not the kind of girl who had a crush on Bone, rather, I was the kind of girl who likes girls and, consequently, the kind of girl who was unpopular. The kind of girl who had no choice but to be friends with the kind of girls who liked Bone.

          It took me a while to understand what about Bone drew these girls to him. Bone was cute, don’t get me wrong, and he was honestly pretty friendly, by popular guy standards. He’d always said hi to me in the hallways, even though we’d never been friends. Always make a point of looking me in the eye and saying hi, I know you exist. Hi, you’re another person, I perceive you, and I respect you enough to look you in the eyes. I suppose when you’re that unpopular being acknowledged by a guy, let alone a popular guy, is enough to spark a romantic flame inside you.

          But the obsession with Bone amongst the outsiders was unprecedented. Although friendly and cute is enough to spark a romantic flame, it’s hardly enough to merit a lifelong obsession, as was often the case with the Bone-lovers. So honestly, I don’t really know what it was about Bone that drew them to him, other than that maybe he was special, even back then. 

          Jamie always liked Bone, and as far as Bone-lovers go, she was pretty mundane. She suffered from standard daddy issues, and Bone, who had a beard by fifth grade, looked eerily like her father. 

          Jamie and I only became friends because, in our Sophomore year, we both failed our state’s standardized test and were enrolled in the same catch-up course. She was the only person in that room who I felt was remotely suitable to sit next to, since everyone else was either too popular for me or too weird to suffer through.

          I sat with Jamie for three classes without either of us saying a thing. One day, I asked her, “Do you understand what we’re learning?” and Jamie said, “Nope.” and a friendship was born. 

          I’ve tried to find many ways to describe the condition that Jamie suffered from over the years, but I’ll save you the triviality of a long-winded dance around the obvious. Simply put, Jamie was stupid. Sweet, and incredibly fucking stupid. Sometimes, when I’d talk to her, I could tell there was not a single thought behind those big blue eyes, or in that pretty little head of hers. In fact, during our brief friendship, I used to tell people that she must have a guardian angel because her ability to get herself into and then miraculously out of outrageously dangerous situations was unparalleled.

         Life just seemed to happen to Jamie. She believed that almost every facet of her life was completely out of her hands, and what happened to her, well, happened. That’s how she felt about her stepmom stealing her babysitting money to go shopping, about cheating exes, and about any and all the gravest injustices done to her. That they happened. There was nothing she could have done (even if there was) or could do (which there often wasn’t), but she didn’t want to dwell on it, she just wanted to keep on living. She forgave them, each and every one of them. Even the ones who didn’t want her forgiveness, even the ones who thought they did nothing wrong. She forgave them because holding grudges made her feel bad. Jamie was undeniably stupid, but she was also undeniably sweet. Maybe it was one of those qualities, maybe it was both, but was also the happiest person I’ve ever met.

 

          In the beginning of Bone's decline, his friends joked that he was nocturnal. Once it became evident that he was nocturnal, they stopped joking about it.

          Addiction seized Bone with the swiftness and grace of a predatory bird. Looking back, it was laughably inevitable. Nobody knows when he started drinking, though we all suspect too soon. Probably middle school, I’d bet seventh grade, although the class conspiracy theorists claimed sixth. It was likely the divorces that drove him to it, but if it was the second or the third, who's to say? They were all pretty ugly, neighbors could hear lamps smashing, men screaming and women crying. His father was a doctor, and unfortunately, the parent that remained in the picture. His mother hadn’t been seen since our third-grade Halloween party. 

          But the legend of Bone, by Freshman year, was a fantastical one. At first, he was just a hard partier. That was all. He threw almost all the town's parties—the good ones, anyway. But then he started drinking on weeknights and coming to school hungover. He stopped saying hi to me in the hallway. Then summer rolled around, and by Sophomore year, he wasn’t coming to school at all.

          The last time I saw Bone in school was my Junior year. At that point, I wasn’t sure if he’d transferred, died, dropped out, or just didn’t have any classes with me. I wasn’t too concerned with it. Bone was certainly an interesting character to follow, but I did have my own life. More specifically, the pursuit of drinking and partying. As I’ve previously mentioned, I was pitifully unpopular, and this combined with my ex-Queen Bee mother meant I was itching to move up in the social hierarchy. I’d been raised on stories of my mom’s golden days, stories about High School and High School antics I would never relate to. I’d felt her disappointment grow subtly yet unwaveringly every day since Freshman year—every day I didn’t wake up beautifully charming, beautifully cool, beautifully beautiful. Having a recovering Queen Bee mom means she got and gets all her worth from being popular, and that correlation between popularity and worth doesn’t disappear after High School. All of this meant, all I mean by it, is to make you understand how badly I thought I needed to party, drink, whatever it was I had to do to prove myself.

          I think it’s worth mentioning the last time I saw Bone in school. He was in my Chem class, which I didn’t know until the middle of my Junior year because he hadn’t attended a single class up to that point. So it was quite a surprise to see him amongst the usual suspects, and he stuck out for more reasons than just his extended absence.

          For one, I’m not sure if it was the way he held himself, but it was as if he was a 5’8 God. Not benevolent nor malevolent, just Godly. He had a power about him that I think the problematic girls liked, the fallen popular boy turned bad boy turned local legend. The energy he exuded unsettled me by that point, and I didn’t like how I could sense his presence from across the room. How his presence seemed to smother, even dictate, everything else.

          He looked like shit. Like he’d just been in a fight or a car crash. At the end of class, our teacher called Bone up as everyone was leaving and told him he was gonna fail. Bone just laughed and left. That was the last time I saw Bone in school. 

 

          Back to the tragic case of my teenage social life. It was Junior year. Jamie and I wanted to go to a party, and we should have just done that. I know that now. We could have just gone to one of the parties, and since we were relatively attractive upperclassman girls, nobody would have cared. But we were worried that everyone would laugh when they saw us, or we’d get pulled aside and told to leave, or whatever else our anxiety-ridden brains told us would happen. So we decided that before we went to a party, we needed to drink in a small group first. Just to get an idea of what we were getting ourselves into so we wouldn’t completely embarrass ourselves at our first party.  To learn our tolerances, so that people would think about us as people who also drank and partied before we tried to drink and party with them. I know that logic’s hard to follow, I struggle to follow it in hindsight. 

          So we went to my neighbor, Seth’s, shed on a stormy night and got drunk for the first time.

          Seth had been offering to drink with me for years, but I’d always refused, as part of my ‘no interacting with Seth’ policy. There are a lot of choice words I could use to describe Seth, but I’ll save us both the time of that tedious dance around the obvious and tell you that he’s an asshole. In the seventh grade, he came over to my house when my parents weren’t home and cornered me for a half hour while I looked for his extra house key. I’d check a drawer, then bam, there Seth would be. All 6’2 of him, towering over me and rubbing his junk up against me as he’d press me against whatever counter or wall was nearest. Then I’d squirm away and try another drawer, trying desperately to appease the giant so he would leave, but he’d follow and repeat. This happened until I found his house key, but instead of leaving, he tried to make small talk with me about our science teacher until I told him to get the fuck out.

          Freshman year I gave him another chance for shits and giggles. On his birthday he drunk-called me and did everything in his power to convince me that I owed him a birthday present and that his birthday present had to be head. I swear, they never drunk call you because they want a Starbucks gift card or something, no, it’s always in the pursuit of head.

          So yeah, I had a no interacting with Seth policy. A policy I should have stuck to, and I knew that as I broke it and every second after. Where Seth goes, good things scarcely follow.

          Jamie didn’t share my reservations—maybe because she didn’t share my history with Seth, maybe because her ability to read character was non-existent, or maybe because she just really, really, wanted to drink. Whatever the reason she eagerly agreed and so I found myself the following Saturday night in the shit hole known as Seth’s shed.

          When we were kids, and when Seth wasn’t a total piece of shit yet, we used to play in that shed. It was falling apart even back then, though the holes in the roof weren’t as big and there wasn’t as much crap everywhere. It was technically a carriage house, or had been before it was the pile of lumber they let it decay into, hardly even worthy of the title ‘shed’. But Seth and I used to walk along the beams that litter the ceiling and talk about the popular kids.

          Seth was somehow less popular than me because I was a girl and at least I knew when to shut up. Seth was a bitter nerd, and although some people can pull off being a nerd, nobody can pull off bitterness. His parents, the nut cases they are, preached to their child extensively about the power of ‘networking’ above all else, and that’s what Seth saw the popular kids as. Connections. He felt entitled to popularity and felt cheated by the universe for not having it. In his defense, popularity was the one thing he’d ever been denied, and so of course he felt owed it. How dare his peers not like him, how dare we not commend him for being the exceptionally average little boy he was? 

          This led to a strange flavor of delusion, and the older we got the more he convinced himself he was popular, just in that weird way where nobody actually likes you or invites you to things. This strange psychosis was corrosive, and before I knew it, everything bad Seth ever did was never his fault, because he’d been denied popularity, so what was he supposed to do? 

          But honestly, I could drag on Seth and the disappointment he became for hours, so let’s get back on track, let me tell you about one of the worst nights of my life.

          Jamie was piss drunk, and I didn’t realize that until it was too late. She lay strewn across a pile of bikes, and she peed herself because she’d been too drunk to stand up. Too drunk to figure out how to undo her pants. ‘It happens,’ was all Seth had to say on it, even though he’d been the one pushing beer after beer into our hands and insisting we chug long after we should have stopped. Somehow, I wasn’t actually that drunk. I’d drank a lot, and yet I was able to keep a level of composure that my lightweight self has basically never been able to replicate. 

          Then Seth made a call to Bone.

          Since Bones decline in Sophomore year, Seth was in contact with him (something Seth was very proud of and bragged extensively about). I mean, there are only so many High Schoolers in a small town who are up at three in the morning and willing to drink every day of the week. Even the legendary Bone must have had a hard time finding people to fill that criteria.

          Shortly before this call, we’d actually been talking about Bone, been talking about how he wandered the streets every night, piss drunk, searching for something. For a good time, was Seth’s theory. For a way home, I’d lamented, assuming Bone was anything like myself. No, Seth had said, the streets are better than his home.

          “Shut up,” Seth hissed to nobody, because nobody had been talking, as he answered the phone. 

          “I wasn’t—”

          “I said shut up,” Seth cut me off, then he cupped his hand over the phone and his face got all serious. 

          So, we were all quiet for a minute, except for the occasional giggle that Jamie would let out from her station on the bikes.

          “Bone says he’ll come,” Seth said, pausing for effect, “but one of you has to give him a head.”

          “Bone?!” Jamie said, letting out another giggle, “I love Bone!”

          Seth ignored her and looked at me, “You think she’d wanna?”

          I stared at him and hissed, “Seth, she can’t stand.”

          “So, I’ll tell Bone you’ll do it then?”

          "No!” I gasped. Even though I’d known I liked women since elementary school and had been out as bi since second grade, I didn’t know I was lesbian despite the idea of giving head making my skin crawl. I told myself, that my mom had raised a lady, someone with integrity and class, and so there was no world in which me doing such a revolting thing was plausible. It wasn’t a matter of attraction, but principle. 

          But Jamie…respectfully…she was kind of a slut. I love her and I mean that not as an insult but rather as a fundamental truth. Jamie knew it, I knew it, my mom knew it, everyone knew it.

          So, what’s another body when you already have twenty, right? In my nonexistent experience, I had trouble imagining it meant much. At least, that was the argument I was already beginning to tell myself. 

          Evidently, my reaction came as no surprise to Seth, and he said to me and the phone, “So Jamie will do it then. Right.”

          I went to say something, but he shushed me, and I complied until he hung up the phone.

          Then Seth stuck his arms out and announced, “Bone is coming!”

          “Weeeeeee!” Jamie cheered, kicking her legs up in excitement.

          “Does he still want Jamie to give him head?” I asked.

          “Yeah, that’s like the only reason he’s coming,” Seth laughed.

          I grimaced a bit at this because he was right, but I also didn’t know how to ethically pimp out my shit-faced friend. 

          “Do you think she can even do it?” I said, gesturing over to her, “She can’t even stand.”

          “So? We’ll lean her up against a wall or something.”

          “But she’s—”

          “Look, somebodies gotta suck Bone’s dick, and it’s not gonna be me. So, if you want to, go ahead, but somebody's gotta do it.”

          I was quiet. I did not, in fact, want to do it.

          “Besides,” Seth said, nodding to himself, “doesn’t she have like a giant crush on him or something? Isn’t she one of, like, Bone’s girls? She’d probably wanna do this sober, we’re helping her out.”

          When he said it like that, the whole thing almost made sense. 

          I turned to Jamie and said, “Are you sure you can do this?”

          She looked at me with those big, empty, blue eyes, and said, “Do what?”

          “Suck Bones dick,” I replied rather harshly.

          “Like a lollipop?” she giggled, blinking at me.

          “No, what? Not like a lollipop, like having a penis in your mouth, Jamie.”

          “Haha what?” she laughed, “What are we even talking about?”

          “Bone’s coming and Seth wants you to give him head.”

          “Are we gonna kiss?”

          I looked at Seth and he shrugged.

          “Probably,” I stated, hoping I wasn’t cutting Bone too much credit. She just tilted her head back and giggled some more, so much so that I saw the wet spot on her pants expand.

          “Seth, she’s peeing again.”

          “Good, empty your bladder before Bone gets here.”

          “Bones coming?!” Jamie screamed with glee, suddenly shooting herself up into a sitting position before slowly slumping back down into the contorted shape she’d been before.

          “See, she’s excited!” Seth stated gesturing at her.

          I took one last long look at them both before I decided to go and sit in the corner and watch the rain. What would happen would happen, I decided. And as long as I ignored the situation, I wouldn’t be responsible. Besides, I couldn’t turn down an opportunity to hang out with Bone. Jamie and I weren’t that close, how much did I even owe her? Jamie was kind of a hoe anyway. At some point, I went so far as to even argue to myself that Jamie might be so drunk and so stupid as to not remember and that if she couldn’t remember, there would be really no harm.

          What could have happened didn’t happen, because Seth got caught by his mom soon after and Jamie and I had to run back to my house (I ran. She crawled).

          When I think back on this part of the night, all I can recall is the smell of sulfur and the way the world seemed to wobble.

 

          I’m not proud of the way I acted that night. I’m not proud of any of this. Bone, Jamie, and Seth helped me realize I’m not the person I thought I was. It’s always hard to learn you’re not as good of a person as you thought. Always hard to realize you’re the kind of person who will put yourself first, at least some of the time. And some of the time is all it really takes.

          That may sound like I want pity — I don’t. I don’t think I deserve empathy for feeling bad about something I should feel bad about. I just want you to understand the speed at which a good person can become a bad person, for your own sake. 

 

          The second time Jamie and I hung out with Seth was a week later. Jamie found the whole incident from the weekend prior funny. She liked drinking, she liked Bone, and she was excited to hang out with Seth again. I even suggested that Jamie and I drink on our own, but she refused, saying she liked the ‘vibe’ of Seth’s shed. 

          So, the next weekend I found myself there again. And again. And again. Until one weekend we decided to go for a walk, because it was a warm spring night, and we were already bored of the ‘vibe’ of Seth’s shed.

          As soon as I inhaled the night air, I wanted to go home. Seth just kept telling me to drink more—that the alcohol would help my anxiety subside—but it didn’t. This was the second and only time in my lightweight life that the alcohol didn’t really work on me.

          We found ourselves downtown, on Main Street, and although they kept the streetlights on every night, they were extra yellow and extra bright. I felt like I was at the doctor’s office on an examination table – I was exposed and vulnerable. The night sky was a dark orange, and for a moment I swore I saw the whole thing illuminate in a bright white explosion before flickering out into the burnt orange once more. I even heard the world crackle as it did so. But Seth and Jamie said I was imagining things. I was just trying to find excuses to go home, it was all in my head and I just needed more alcohol. I didn’t understand how they missed it, but then again neither of them was particularly smart or observant, so I let it go.

          I didn’t like the road that night. It was slick with rain, but it hadn’t rained recently. Maybe I would have thought critically about that if I hadn’t drunk away my critical thinking skills. But I didn’t dislike it because it was wet even though it hadn’t rained, I disliked it because I caught a glimpse of my reflection and was horrified. My face was momentarily contorted into some kind of creature, a beastly thing that looked nothing like myself.

          I drank some more.

          I don’t know how the conversation got to Bone but it did. I think I might have asked about him, why he wasn’t in school. Seth told me it was because he was nocturnal, because he was out every night drinking by himself, even when there was a party at his house. He was out every night stumbling around the streets of our mellow suburb, where only he and the raccoons lurked.

          I think Seth meant it to sound cool, but the idea of Bone wandering the streets drunk all night, every night, chilled me to my core. For the first time, I think I really understood the reality of that statement and was able to truly understand the horrifying place a person would have to be in to choose to do what we were doing, every night, alone. 

          The buildings, with their darkened windows and gaping doorways, looked like faces. Like screaming faces separated by narrow alleyways, watching us continue our trek to nowhere.

          I was trying not to think about my mom, what she’d think if she saw me, with Seth and Jamie, on our weekly pilgrimage to find trouble. What she’d think of me if she knew what I’d done, what I’d been doing. Wondered if she’d still love me, if she’d be proud. Wondered, like I did every weekend, if this was the night something went horribly wrong. Wondered if this was the night I didn’t make it home.

          I drank some more.

          I wanted to go home.

          That’s when I saw him.

          “Who’s that,” Jamie asked. We all stopped.

          He was at the opposite end of Main Street, at the bottom of the hill. He was a blurry shadow that refused to be illuminated by the streetlights, a dark and menacing figure that charged the air. I realized too late why the buildings were screaming, they were screaming at us to turn back.

          He was walking, it was a slow stumble, out from an alleyway towards, presumably, another. Everything bent towards Bone as if drawn to him by gravity, as though the Earth was trapped in Bone’s orbit. He was more like a black hole than a person, pulling us towards him exponentially as he approached us, consuming the street below him and the buildings beside us and even the light hitting him. What did Seth say? Bone's in search of something, something I’ll never know, though I theorize it’s not that deep, perhaps he is just a black hole in search of something substantial enough to sustain his own gravity a little longer. Maybe he doesn’t even know what he’s searching for, what he’s moving towards, maybe he lives to keep living, and consumes everything in his way. I know that Seth, Jamie, and I knew not what we were searching for — why would Bone? 

          “That’s Bone,” I stated.

          “No, it’s not…” Seth slurred.

          “Bone?” Jamie asked in a tone closer to a scream.

          The figure stopped. He stood there, a shadow under the moonlight. I could discern no features at that point, yet I understood, I knew, it was Bone. It was the way the world bent towards him, the way it wobbled from the effort. 

          “We should go,” I hissed under my breath.

          He was far away yet I understood that meant nothing. Bone was part of the night now, part of the town, and he knew we were here.

          I’ve never wanted to go home so bad.

          “Don’t be paranoid,” Seth mumbled, “it’s not Bone.” 

          He seemed larger than I knew him to be, yet there was not a doubt in my mind it was him. He commanded the street the same way he commanded my Chem class. The way the air was charged, and in a way, I could never articulate I understood we were at his mercy.

          “It’s Bone and we need to go home,” I insisted.

          “Bone!” Jamie yelled, “Bone!” 

          She was waving at him, waving him over.

          “Shut up!” Seth snapped, but it was too late.

          Bone looked at us, and I saw his eyes staring at me as if he were an inch away from his face. I saw his contorted features, his twisted smile, I felt his breath on my face, and I felt the street below me begin to grab onto my shoes. His face was pale and sunken, his eyes an endless void, and his shriek made the sky tremble. His shriek, there were words in it, but at this point, my brain was outdone. I have no idea what he said, but I understood the intention; we needed to go.

          I broke my feet free of the street with what required a surprising amount of effort and took off running, but I only made it a few feet before I realized Jamie hadn’t moved.

          “Jamie,” I growled, “Jamie!”

          Jamie didn’t move. Her eyes were as big as a deer’s and her face was frozen in an expression of wonder or horror or maybe both. Seth was gone, maybe he’d been gone for a while. It was just Jamie and the quickly approaching figure. Just Jamie and a demon. He’d been in my face only a moment before, and yet now he was down the street, walking slowly towards us. If he wanted, he could be in front of us already, but he wanted to take his time. He was toying with us. 

          “Jamie!” I cried, sprinting back over towards her and grabbing her arm. She didn’t budge. Perhaps the street had latched too strongly onto her, had invaded her shins and hips and she couldn’t move. I just recall her arm being like stone, her skin like ice.

          If only Seth hadn’t run. If only he could have picked her up and shaken her or pushed her over and dragged her or anything he was so large it wouldn’t have taken much, but all I could do was grab at her and beg her.

          “Jamie, we need to go,” I pleaded, but she wouldn’t budge. 

          You have to understand she wouldn’t budge.

          So, I left her. I left her and I never saw her again.

 

          Jamie, if you ever get to read this, I need you to know how sorry I am. I am so, incredibly, sorry. 

 

          People—the police, the school, her parents—asked me what happened. I told them Bone took her. But when I talked about Bone, nobody remembered him. There were no records of him. Not in the schools, the hospitals, nowhere. A week after the incident his family moved to oblivion and couldn’t be reached. So, when they told me to cut the crap—told me to stop making up a classmate nobody had heard of—I told them she ran away. In the end, Jamie became a missing person case, an open case, with the only lead being a pair of her shoes found on Main Street.

          I’d convinced myself I had had a psychotic break until a week ago. I was cleaning out my attic and found my third-grade yearbook. Open it up to page 56 and you’ll see him. See Andrew Bone, right there, staring back up at you.

 

 

          I've been writing since I learned to write. I'm currently a Junior majoring in English / creative writing and screenwriting. I'm from NJ.

          I've been working on this short story since Junior year in High School. I've been editing this story for almost four years, and I don't think a single line of it is the same as the first copy. This story is based loosely on real events and regrets, which is why I always go back to it. Every character is based on real people (though I took many creative liberties with Bone.) It's important to me that I do this story justice for these reasons, even though this story is written evidence of some of my worst moments. The guilt the narrator feels at the end is the guilt I feel for failing my friend in real life, even though things with the real Jamie were far more complex and less dramatic, I was still a horrible friend, and some bad things happened to real Jamie because of that. What happened with real Jamie was my first real failure, real regret. That guilt is my motive for writing this story, and why I always return to it.

          MASSIVE SPOILER, DON'T READ UNTIL AFTER READING STORY OR IT WILL RUIN IT: One of my favorite interpretations of this story is as a metaphor for rape, Jamie going missing is a metaphor for being stripped of power and having something taken from you. That said, I have other interpretations of it, because again, this has been four years of revision.

 

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