The Town of Splintered Bones

PART ONE: Chapter One

 Fairview Falls, Virginia. A destination town, tourists come to see our historic main street, practically unchanged since the late 1700's. They come to taste our ice cream, made fresh with cream from our famous dairy cows and hand-churned every evening by a man who has been making it the same way since the early 60's, and his father and grandfather before him even longer. They come to boat in our serene and picturesque lake, which stays a beautiful shade of blue-green from the warmest days of summer through the coldest days of winter.

They come to walk barefoot on our brick sidewalks, which are swept clean every evening and are warmed to smooth, dry perfection by the sun every morning, so they feel pleasant every afternoon. Most young women here unknowingly dress for a different time, with knee-length skirts that float on the breeze and button-front cardigans thrown over silk camisoles, their hair swinging thick and bluntly trimmed across sun kissed shoulders; or thick denim jeans and crisp, dried-on-the-line white tees for casual affairs. Their red and navy-blue sneakers thud across perfectly mown lawns.

The houses in my town are mostly beautiful, stately Federals. In the afternoon light, the brick seems to glow. They ooze a sense of peace, and old money, and good taste. The people in them are so snooty and so old-fashioned that the few enormous Victorians at the edge of town (and the people who live in them) are still considered to be bourgeois and nouveau-riche, even a hundred and fifty years later.

We all have expansive front lawns and large, airy front porches, where we sit to admire the fireflies on balmy late-summer nights when sunset can arrive as late as nine o' clock, while we sip our Arnold Palmers and dine on our peach cobblers (with fresh vanilla-bean cream, of course). Inside the smooth wooden floors shine with bees wax, because like I said before, we're old-fashioned and we appreciate a well-waxed floor. The walls are all papered, because only trash uses paint in the house. The tables are topped with marble or glass, and the window treatments always match the carpets.

Most of the girls here make their debuts at our town ball each summer, wearing pale dresses that could have been worn by their mothers or their grandmothers, because the style has changed so little. They make their entrances on the arms of handsome, suntanned young men who are going to Georgetown or William and Mary in the fall, with all the family connections they'll need to be great successes. They dance and they laugh and they get the slightest bit drunk on the Julep Punch that is meant only for the adults, but which all the young men and women sneak when they think no one is looking. After the ball they'll run through the woods until they make it to the lake edge to watch the sun rise.

Once there, they'll trample the tall grasses and sink down near the water lilies to breath in the damp and floral scents. The worst to happen will be a light scolding for the grass stains on their expensive pale dresses. It won't be bad, though - every mother is still relieved. Every mother will watch her young daughter with ease because the Full Flower moon is past, and her daughter is still here with her. Her daughter was able to laugh and dance and play this summer, and wasn't found dead in some ditch on a chilly May morning.

I, who am far from perfect, have lived in this flawless place my entire life. And my entire life (before, that, even) my small and otherwise sleepy town has been plagued with a series of deaths. Only one murder each year, which those of you from cities of a normal size will laugh at, because why not appreciate life in a town with just one murder a year? You might laugh, but it is the victims of these murders that haunts the remaining citizens, year after year. Every May for the past twenty years, Fairview Falls has lost it's most beautiful young woman. Like a ripe, lusciously fragrant peach that can no longer be supported by the tree's branches - every spring a girl dies, and the peach falls to the cold, bruising ground. Some say that it's because she was too beautiful, too ripe, too perfect.

So is it jealousy? Is it a lover's game gone wrong? No. Between these wide, sun-soaked streets a dark secret hides, I know it. I know this because of the girl that no one talks about, the girl that breaks the mold. She's important, even in death. Every May for the past nineteen years, Fairview Falls has lost it's most beautiful young woman; but the first victim is an anomaly, shrouded in mystery. Nancy Travers. Her name means "favored grace", which I bet is ironic if you think about it long enough. She breaks the mold because she wasn't beautiful. She wasn't graceful. She didn't debut, she wasn't popular, she didn't spend her warm summer nights sipping sweet tea, laughing on a friend's front porch.

She didn't get pearls for her sixteenth birthday, and she didn't get diamonds for her eighteenth. She didn't get anything at all, except an obituary and blunt force trauma to the face. Her dental records were obliterated, and she had to be identified by the clothes she was last seen in. This was before DNA testing was available. She wasn't beautiful, I've seen the pictures. Her hair was ragged and dull, her skin pock-marked and uneven. Her lips were cracked and always dry. She favored shapeless sweaters, and acid-washed jeans, because they were all she could find at the thrift store. She's not mentioned much in the yearbook, and most people barely remember her. "I think I might've had a class with her, once. Pretty girl, wasn't she?", they say. Everyone looks better after they're dead, in memories.

Maybe I identify with this dead girl, even though I probably shouldn't. But I'm ugly, too. That dead girl's hair, skin, everything... it could all be mine. The only difference between us is that my Mother buys me the best of everything. It's not out of any sense of love or duty, I know - I'm an embarrassment to her. Mother doesn't care how much some new prescription or treatment costs. If it'll clear my skin, smooth my hair, she'll buy it. If she can't cure it, she covers it up (hence my wardrobe, which consists almost entirely of long-sleeved shirts and pants despite the long, hot summers of the South East United States).

Luckily, I am naturally rebellious. I favor scissors to chop off the sleeves of the shirts Mother begs me to wear, so I can get a breeze on my arms like any other girl on a warm spring day. Sometimes I sit in the sun in my cut-off shorts and my cut-off tees. I feel the it warm my skin and my hair, and when I close my eyes, all I can hear is the rushing breeze and all I can smell is the sunshine-cotton fragrance of my clothes. On some days, my blotchy and discolored arms hardly bother me, and I wear them as a badge of courage - daring any one of my classmates to comment. Which of course they do, being teenagers as they are, and teenagers being want to say cruel and hurtful things.

I do the best I can with what I have. My skin isn't smooth and glowing, and my eyes are a deep, dark, green, too dark and too unusual for this town of blue and brown-eyed beauties. I have sallow skin and dark circles, which get darker when I lay awake at night worrying about how I'll look the next day.

That's not to say that I don't have anything going for me - I do. I'm smart. I make straight-A's in all my courses, and I've read almost every book in my school library. I play the cello and I'm one of the fastest girls in the school (fast as in track, not in the dating department - I should only be so lucky). I'm the best writer in the journalism club, too (I favor research and hard facts over high school gossip). Most of the time my accomplishments are enough to make me feel better; until my Mother makes some snide comment, and then it's back to square one.

Would it be called suicide to wish I was beautiful enough to be a Splintered Girl?