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I'm currently reading Going Bovine by Libba Bray.  Cameron, a 16 year old suffering from mad Cow disease embarks on a journey to cure himself but it's all in his head.  The holes in his brain from his disease require extreme painkilling drugs.  Those drugs  that make him hallucinate almost 24/7.   His only moments of sanity are when his IV of drugs is being changed.  In his adventures, he teems up with a dwarf.  They all have one thing in common, they've all been bullied and harassed by many people.

Before Cameron's diagnosis, he was at the bottom of the school social pyramid.  He cut class, smoked pot, and doesn't have any friends except a few druggies like him.   This is before everyone knows about his disease and don't see their misunderstanding.   Kids avoid him and talk about him behind his back.  In attempt to reduce his looser-ness Cam constantly embarrasses his sister Jenna in front of her clique.  She always has a strong comeback that makes Cam's remark look stupid.  Cam:" Hey, Jenna.  Were those your birth control pills I found in the bathroom this morning?"  Jenna:"No , I think those were the ones Mom meant to take before you ere born.  Don't you have a meeting of the Social Outcast Society to attend?  If you hurry, you can get a good seat."  That's just cruel.  When his disease became widely known in his town and Cameron was hospitalized, that's when people finally understand him.  He befriends Gonzo, a person in real life he met once but  is hallucinating an adventure with.   Gonzo is also a victim of bullying.  He is often picked on because he's a dwarf and he's a video game fanatic.  People call him Shorty and make fun of him for his size.  How is that even the smallest reason to pick on him.  The only reason they are bullied is because they don't follow the crowd.  

Cameron and Gonzo are two very different characters with one thing that they both share. The fact that people pick on them because they are different.  What makes them unique is what turns them into bully magnets.  Cameron because he is a bad, discussing and unreliable kid and Gonzo because he is short.  There is no excuse to bully them even if Cameron is a pain.  It's immoral and wrong.  

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Everyone always is telling each other that life isn't fair.  "Why didn't I get invited?" you say.  Your friend who was invited responds, "I don't know, I guess life isn't fair".   You get over it and move on with your life.  Cameron Smith has hit rock bottom in his 16 year old high school life.  He wants to be liked, he want's to have good friends but something is stopping him from making a change.  A trip to a psychiatrist leads to the diagnosis of mad cow disease.  Cameron struggles with hallucinations and reality.  People don't understand what he's going through.  His whole life is a downhill series of events that all stemmed out of his disease.  

Maintaining a steady balance between friends and school is hard.  For Cameron, he just drops both Ideas and there problem solved!  Forgetting school and not having any real friends is one partial solution.  School is a blur for cameron.  Making snide remarks about his sister in front of her friends resulting in a rule not to acknowledge each other ever again.   Skipping class to smoke weed in the bathroom is part of his routine at school.  It helps him get through the day without thinking about his sister or anything else.   One morning Cameron woke up late for work again.  He couldn't care less.  He arrived and his boss was disappointed.  A clique from his school walked in and purposefully changed their order multiple times to annoy him.  As he was carrying their tray of smoothies to them, his arm twitched and the girls are splashed.  Cameron lost his job.  Everyone thought he did it on purpose.  One day in class he started seeing flames burning in the edges of the classroom.  The same arm twitch caused him to fling his arm out, get called on to answer a question, his "friend" says that he took some bad drugs, get escorted to the principal, twitch and accidentally punch his escort in the gut and get suspended for drug possession and for punching a kid.   He got shunned by his whole family.  If people just listened to him not as a bad kid but as someone who was misunderstood, they would apologize and he would be off the hook.  

With his bad rep there isn't much hope for Cameron.  Known for skipping classes, embarrassing his perfect sister, disappointing his father and mother, loosing his job, and smoking weed, Cameron has no future ahead of him.  Frankly, he doesn't care.  The reasons for his actions are unexplainable the diagnosis of the fatal mad cow disease.   But that hasn't happened yet.  People can't see past his lazy drugged up side because that's how he is.  Does that make him a bad person?