This is a one-shot about Camille being bullied. It's probably one of my more angst-y writings. (I'm sorry if this is a bit inaccurate, this is my first "dark" fanfic) WARNING: Involves darker themes. It's very sad, and now I feel sad :( Oh well, I'll live. Also, may be a tiny bit OOC.
It's for March 3, 2012 BTR Anti-Bullying Day.
Disclaimer: I don't own BTR.
The cool metal of the razor blade touches her skin, but doesn't pierce the pale flesh. It rests on the faintest of the faint white lines that crisscross over her arm, like a spider web.
She should have known that Los Angeles wouldn't be better then Connecticut. What was she thinking? But when you're sixteen, you do a ton of stupid things. LA wasn't going to make it better. In fact, it was probably making it worse right now. It had to be bad if she was taking out the razor again. She was just blinded by the want to be noticed for once, and the need to escape one of the greatest horrors of mankind. Bullying.
She stares at the mirror, at the tired, scared, and beaten girl she sees in her reflection.
Connecticut was horrible. She would never tell the guys and Jo, but she would never, ever, ever want to go back to that dreadful place. She had always loved acting, though. In the two years of high school she had there, she tried out for all the school plays and productions. She was an extreme method actress even then, but that made the theater teacher hate her. The drama instructor didn't exactly hate her; she just hated her extreme methods of rehearsal. The teacher never saw past the crazy antics that the pale girl used to practice lines. The teacher never saw the talent for performing under there. The girl never got good parts because of it. She would get minor parts with almost no lines.
But no one questioned the reasons for her extreme method acting. No one realized that she acted to get away from being the girl she was to everyone. Everyone saw her as a smart girl, almost a nerd. Since she was just "almost" a nerd, all of her classmates already classified her with those types of people. It's like the students at her school would rather be idiots then smart. It was understandable, because being smart came at a price. The teasing was relentless; it never stopped. And the popular girls were horrible. At school, they spread false rumors about her. The teen always hears what they say about her, and each insult stings worse than the last.
She wishes it all away, all the pain, fear, and sadness of life.
So the brunette, pale girl took up acting to forget the pain. Whenever she's on stage, or even just reading a script, she tries hard, really hard to live as the character. If she feels like she's the person that she's playing, then she feels like she could escape from reality. But when she took up acting, the only way she could really get into the character was by using her extreme methods. The short brunette went around school pretending to be a certain fictional person. That earned her the title "freak".
She looks at the wispy white, faint scars, and decides if she should really retrace them.
The bullying got worse from there. Now she wasn't just a nerd. She was a nerdy freak. And the blows became more than just verbal. Sometimes they were physical, but not too harsh. She's been tripped, slapped, and punched, but those were only on the bad days. On those types of days, she would come home with a million layers of foundation caked over her eye if she got a black eye. They mainly stayed in the form of words and gossip. And, they didn't even bother to be quiet about what they were saying. Whether she was in the room or not, they would talk loudly about her. Soon, all she became was a toy to them, something that they can twist and mess up as much as they want, and then toss it aside like a piece of trash, a piece of junk.
All the harsh words, all the insults she heard in her life start playing in her brain in a constant loop.
By then, the joy of acting wasn't enough to prevent her from feeling hurt and depressed. So the girl turned to dark side.
The pale, dark haired teen turned to cutting to relieve her pain. The feeling of the blade slicing through her delicate skin was painful too, but if she concentrated on the sting of the cuts, it felt like the world disappeared from around her. If she focused on the sticky, red drops of blood that fell from her once unmarred, smooth skin and onto the floor, reality faded away.
She's made up her mind.
She'd come to school wearing long sleeves, and yet no one would notice that she never wore short sleeves or tank tops, not matter how hot. It's like they saw what they wanted to see in her – a nerd and a theater freak. They ignored the glimpses of scars and scratches on her arms that they saw when she tugged at her sleeves. They ignored the helpless, pleading look in their eyes. They ignored the mental scars they left on her from all their verbal abuse. They ignored the real her. That's what made it hurt so much.
Carefully, she presses, hard onto her porcelain skin and gives a satisfied look when she sees the scarlet pearls appear on her skin. She starts creating steady lines horizontally across her wrist and arms, retracing the old lines.
She begged and pleaded her dad if she could go to Hollywood. She thought that moving away, getting a fresh start was the best way to forget about Connecticut. And after her mother's death from cancer, the brunette's dad was pretty much a lost cause to the world – he was just like a skin, with nothing else inside. So, he easily relented. He even let her move across the U.S. by herself at 16! That's where she is now, trying to live her dream as an actress and fleeing from her dark past.
But her troubles weren't over.
She keeps slicing. Back and forth, back and forth. It goes on for hours.
She tried, she really did. She tried to fit in, to be "perfect" looking, "perfect" acting, and "perfect being. But she couldn't conform to the Los Angeles standards of life. She wasn't like the Jennifers, who were pretty and perfect, or Jo, who was sweet and innocent. No, she was worse. Much, much worse. The teen was crazy, but her mind and flesh were still scarred from her previous wounds.
Auditions were fun. At first, life wasn't so bad, and her extreme method acting was almost a joke for herself. But as the day, weeks, and even months wore by, director after director said, "You have so much talent, but this just isn't the part for you."
She still never got major parts in movies and shows, just a handful of guest appearances and commercials. She started to doubt those directors' words. Was she really talented? Or were they just saying that to make her feel better? Then she started to doubt herself. Was she really worth it? Was life some sort sick joke? These questions ran through her mind every night before she went to sleep.
Suddenly, she collapses. It's from blood loss.
Then the Jennifer's became more evil. They would be just like the stuck-up, popular, rich girls in Connecticut. They would always whisper to each other behind Camille's back. It was almost déjà vu to before; the whispers were about how weird the girl was or how she "wasn't good enough for Hollywood". Camille felt crushed by this. She came all the way across the country, leaving her childhood home, just to be bullied again? So she tried to tolerate it. She just ignored the insults she heard snippets about.
But the last straw came this morning. She was going to meet the Big Time Rush boys at the pool, but when she came down, she saw Jennifer 1 whisper something into Logan's ear. Even from where she was standing by the elevator and they were sitting at the couch in the lobby, she could hear little bit of what Jennifer said.
She blinks and looks up at the ceiling, a ceiling that looks like its swirling and shifting.
"She's a weirdo…how can you like her…you deserve better than her…she's worthless."
Tears filled the tiny girl's eyes when she heard this. She automatically turned around, took a very depressing elevator ride back to her apartment. Then she spent the rest of the day crying. The phone rang and couple of hundred times and someone started banging on her door very loudly, sounding very concerned. But she paid them no mind, and continued bawling her eyes out on the bathroom floor.
After a couple of hours, her sobs have died down and she suddenly something remembers that she hasn't touched in at least a year. The girl opens her bathroom cabinet door and rifles through it until she finds what she was looking for. Her worn, bloodstained razor blade.
She closes her eyes one final time and breathes her last breath.
R.I.P Camille.
Review, please.