I wasn’t the most confident or most beautiful girl around, but I looked at myself in the mirror enough to know I wasn’t ugly either. I liked what I saw. Ugly Sara was a shadow of what I’d become. I was no longer bones. I was healthy and athletic, of average height, with chestnut coloured eyes and very long eyelashes. My skin was a light tan, and my body was developing speedily at fourteen. My breasts had come in, and I immediately wished they’d stop growing, but Lucinda advised me that they would be my most useful body part.

“You’ll have boys eating from your hand if you strut that stuff.” She emphasized her own by jutting her chest out.

Ugh. I didn’t want to jut mine out at all. I promised her I would, but knew I most definitely would not. Lucinda’s advice was always a hit or miss.

“Make sure you stay away from them bikie kids, by the way,” she’d advised with the kind of seriousness that meant no funny business. “You don’t want to be involved with that kind of trash.”

That was a hit. Unless it was mystery man, the last thing I wanted was to be anywhere near anyone that associated with the Black-Backed Jackals. That MC was untouchable.

I’d been wracked with nerves on my first day, and although I had a few friends with me, they weren’t in any of my classes for the first semester. The first day was lonely and hard up until lunch time when Jaxon spotted me eating alone. If there was one thing about Jaxon I can say I loved the most, it was that he was caring and protective of me. He invited me to his table, introduced me to his friends, and was attentive to me. He wasn’t at all afraid of letting the world know that I was his best friend, and it made the experience a lot easier on me.

I knew many people, but only had a couple friends. Every year those friends would be replaced by others for many reasons: sometimes they weren’t in my class, other times they moved away, and sometimes we just meshed into different crowds. I maintained my personal distance to them, never letting them in, but allowing them to trust in me. I liked when they told me their problems or their stories, it kept the attention off of me.

And yes, there were boys. I had an awkward and shy boy ask me out on a date the first week I was there, like Lucinda had surmised. I agreed only because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Unfortunately, the date was even more awkward and unmemorable, and Garrett Abbott was crossed off my Potential Boyfriend list. I didn’t think that guy could grow a beard or had it in him to shave that lanky hair of his, which were deal breakers at the time.

My second boyfriend was Jordan. He was in Jaxon’s grade and good friends with him. Jaxon was very unimpressed by this and scowled at me for potentially making it awkward between him and his friend. “You know, he asked me if it was okay to ask you out! Why the hell would I have anything to do with it? Now if you guys go down the shitter, he’ll probably stop hanging out with me, Tiny.” Tiny. He’d been calling me that since I was twelve, when he’d doubled in size and I was physically tiny next to him.

Although I thought he was overreacting, I didn’t mean to intrude on his friendship, but I certainly didn’t think it was that big of a deal. In fact, Jordan and I were a solid couple for a year and a half. He was my first kiss, my first dance with a boy, and, well, my first ever boyfriend. He was cute, tall, and sometimes funny. Also sported short dark hair, check! He was good at sports and talking to him was easy. I was sad to see him go, but my interest in him died very shortly after he vacationed with his parents the entire summer. Being apart made me realize just how much I didn’t really miss him, and not missing him made me realize that the feelings I’d harboured for him were not very deep. It wasn’t love, and it wasn’t real either. It was just… two teenagers who liked each other.

Jaxon was very amused by my break up, and wasn’t afraid to show it. Actually, to put it more accurately, his reaction was overly joyous than what I would have expected from my supposed best friend. But even at the time, I suppressed the tiny suspicion of why that was.

I stepped back from boys after Jordan and focused on my school work. I also got a part time job as a convenience store cashier. I never let Lucinda know the store was owned by a Jackal, but it was the only place that took my resume and gave me the job. I never had any problems working there, and the Jackal owner was hardly ever around, so it worked out well. I was technically not associating with that gang. Just an employee.

Working and studying kept me occupied and distracted me from futile pastimes like partying and gossiping. I was only making minimum wage, and my hours were quite short, so I wasn’t pocketing a whole lot. Yet I felt good at every cent I earned knowing it was done the right way, unlike some people…

Jaxon, by some grand miracle, graduated from high school along with the others I’d been friends with. It was hard to adjust to not seeing him there – whenever he had been there, anyway. In my eleventh grade year of high school, I’d been bombarded day dot by girls. I didn’t try to fall under some pretence they wanted to actually get to know me; I was sure they could care less. No, now that Jaxon was not sticking out gloriously among the crowd of students in school, they wanted to know all about his whereabouts, and our friendship – very evident by our inseparability throughout the two years I’d been there – was the gateway for them.

I didn’t understand the attraction like them, but that was because I really knew Jaxon. I’d grown up thinking of him as my friend and even so far as to say he was like my family. I knew he was drop dead gorgeous, but our friendship was the forefront of my mind. I needed that kind of stability; he was my rock I could always count on.

But what the girls saw was superficial. On the outside, he had that bad boy image; you know, the mysterious, dangerous boy who doesn’t care about authority, doesn’t care about school and rules, and people… I wished I could understand that naivety, wished I could find my own bad boy to drool over, but having a father who bashed my mom and me around, didn’t have a job, and didn’t care about a damn thing either except for himself, had turned that notion of bad boy into a harsh reality.

There was nothing sexy about a real life bad boy, and that was the awful truth chicks didn’t want to accept. Girls enjoyed the two dimensional man, and Jaxon was not one of those.  But would he ever pretend to be for their amusement? He was capable of that. If he sat there in brooding silence for a long enough time, then sure, you could take him as someone who lacked depth or care. He was too much like me in a lot of ways, one way standing out more than others: he never let people in.