I will never forget the first time he spoke to me.

I remember everything, right down to the music that was playing on the Discman I had tucked into the back of my jeans. (It was my brother’s new Chris Cornell album, and the song was “Can’t Change Me.”) When the bullies started taunting me I turned it up, but I still heard what they said.

I was eight years old, and the last girl on the playground anyone would ever guess would grow up to become a fashion model. Every day I came to school in clothes that were worn and usually a couple sizes too big for me, hand-me-downs, either from my brother or from Zane. When I wore their baggy clothes, the other kids didn’t spend so much time telling me how skinny I was.

But they said other things.

I was sitting alone in the playground after school when it happened, up on top of a climbing dome; my brother and his friends called it “Thunderdome” because they’d made a game of dangling like monkeys from the bars inside and kicking the crap out of each other. The bullies were standing at the bottom of Thunderdome, so I couldn’t even run away. They were big bullies. Fifth grade bullies, and while my brother, who was in seventh, would’ve intervened, he wasn’t there.

“How come you got shit stains all over your jeans?” the dumb-looking one asked me, leaning on Thunderdome and looking bored. “Doesn’t your mom do laundry?”

“You got a shit leak in those saggy diapers, dork?” the even dumber-looking one asked, and they both snorted.

“Yeah, she’s so full of shit her eyes are brown.”

“What’s wrong, baby dork? You gonna cry?”

No. I wasn’t going to cry. My brother had a lot of friends and while they were never that mean to me, twelve-year-old boys could be relentless. I knew how to hold my own. I’d cry later, at home, when no one could see me.

Besides… the new boy was coming over, and I definitely wasn’t crying in front of him.

He was in seventh grade, but the rumor was that he was thirteen or even fourteen and had flunked a grade or two. Obviously, he was super cool. He wore an actual leather jacket, black with silver zippers, like rock stars wore. He smoked outside the school, hung out alone at the edge of the school grounds, and spent more time in the principal’s office than the principal. I never knew what he did to get in trouble, but whatever it was, he did it a lot.

The other kids in my class thought he was scary. I just thought he was sad.

Ever since Dad died, I knew sad when I saw it.

The bullies saw him coming and they started getting squirrelly. I thought they’d run but he was there too fast, closing the distance with his leisurely, long-legged stride.

“You guys’re so interested in shit, there’s some over here I can show you, yeah?” He stood with his hands in his pockets, his posture relaxed, as the bullies started going pale.

I slipped my headphones off.

“Naw, I don’t wanna—”

“Sure you do, it’s right over here.” He toed the ground at his feet with his sneaker. The grass was still damp from a bit of rain in the afternoon and mud squished out.

The bullies started shaking and sniveling, babbling apologies and excuses. There was a brief, almost wordless negotiation, at the end of which they ended up on their knees in front of him.

He hadn’t moved. His hands were still in his pockets.

“Just have a little taste and tell me if it’s fresh,” he told them, in a tone that brooked no argument, squishing his foot in the muck again.

Then he looked up, his brown hair flopping over one eye, and winked at me.

I stared from my perch atop Thunderdome with unabashed, eight-year-old awe as the bullies bent forward, shuddering.

He was going to make them eat shit!

For me!

I was ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure it was just wet mud, but those bullies were scared enough to believe it. And ate it, they did.

He then told them to apologize to me, which they also did, eyes downcast and shaking, spluttering mud. One of them was crying, snuffling through his snot and tears. Then he told them to beat it and they ran away, blubbering and tripping over their own feet.

I stared down at my savior as his unkempt hair fluttered in the breeze. He wore a Foo Fighters T-shirt under his leather jacket and his jeans were ripped, like mine. “You can go home now, you know,” he said, like maybe I was slow.

I just sat there, picking dried mud from my jeans.

“Aren’t your parents waiting?”

I didn’t answer. I knew better than to answer questions like that.

When other kids found out what happened to Dad they either made fun of me or worse, they felt sorry for me. And Jesse said not to tell anyone Mom was sick again. He said if they knew how sick she was, they might take us away from her.

So I said, “I’m waiting for my brother.”

He glanced around at the empty playground. “Who’s your brother? And why isn’t he here kicking those little shits up the ass?”

“Jesse,” I said. “My brother is Jesse. He’s in detention with Zane.”

He took a step closer, teetering on the edge of the sandbox. “Yeah? How come?”

“They… um… got in an argument with Ms. Nielsen because she said I can’t come to school in dirty clothes. They do that a lot,” I mumbled, wishing maybe I hadn’t said all that, except he looked kind of impressed about the detention thing.

He looked at my jeans; I’d gotten them muddy when I sat in a ditch to listen to music before school. I could pretend it didn’t hurt me if he said something mean about it, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear it.

Why didn’t he just go away?

“Well, you can come down. Those little shits aren’t coming back.”

I picked at the hole in the knee of my jeans, where my kneecap was poking through.

He leaned over, resting his elbows on Thunderdome. “What’re you doing up there?”

“Playing Thunderdome.”

I knew how stupid it sounded when no one else was there. It wasn’t like I didn’t have any friends to play with when my brother wasn’t around, but they all had parents who picked them up after school. Anyway, I thought it might impress him. Thunderdome was outlawed by the teachers and we only played it after school.

He stepped into the sandbox. “How do you play?”

“It’s quicksand!” I squealed. “You can’t step in it!”

“Oh. Shit.” He jumped up on the dome. “Almost lost a shoe.” He looked up at me and his hair fell over his eye again. Blue; his eyes were a deep, dark blue. He climbed to the top of the dome and sat across from me.

Maybe he wasn’t making fun of me; he just didn’t know the rules of Thunderdome.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re safe up here with me. I’m the princess.”

It was true; my brother and his friends always let me be the princess so I’d stay out of the way while they played, and sometimes they let me decide on the winner in case of a tie. But I figured it sounded more important if I left that out.

He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a shiny flip-top lighter that had been scraped and dented all to hell, and started smoking. His hands were scraped too, his knuckles split and scabbed over. His fingernails were too short, chewed all down into the nail bed, his cuticles all ragged and blood-encrusted. They were a mess. But his face…

He was so… pretty.

“What happened to your hands?”

He didn’t answer. Just smoked his cigarette and looked out across the school grounds, his arms wrapped around his knees, watching as parents picked their kids up in the distance, along the road in front of the school.

“A princess, huh?”

“The princess.”

“So who’s the prince, then?”

“Don’t need one.”

He looked at me. “Then who’s gonna save you if you fall in the quicksand?”

“I will.”

“What if you can’t?”

“Then you can,” I said. “If you want to. But you might get stuck in there, too.”

He stared at me for a minute. Then he smiled, slowly, and it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.

“Then I guess we’ll sink together.” He took a couple of drags of his cigarette, his eyes squinting through the smoke. “You got a name, princess?”

“Jessa Mayes.”

“Jessa Mayes,” he repeated. “Don’t ever let those little shits talk to you that way, yeah? Next time they try, you make a fist, like this.” He showed me, clenching his fist until his split knuckles looked like they might burst. “And you hit ’em, right here, in the nose, as hard as you can. You do it hard enough, they’ll go down. Then you run away. You do that once, they’re not gonna bother you again.”

I shook my head. “I’m not supposed to hit people. My brother says sticks and stones—”

“Yeah?” He flicked the ash off his cigarette and spat on the sand below. “Well, your brother’s a pussy who doesn’t know shit.”

I gaped at him.

No one talked about Jesse like that. The other kids all thought he walked on water because he could play guitar.

“I can’t make a fifth-grader eat crap.” My face was getting hot and I looked down at the sand. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”

When I glanced up again, he was taking something off his jacket. He held it out to me. “Take it,” he said.

I took it from his outstretched hand and examined it. It was a little silver pin shaped like a motorcycle. It said Sinners MC on a banner that wrapped around the tires. There was a woman on the motorcycle but she wasn’t riding it, exactly. She was facing the wrong way and reclined back, her back arched, shoving her boobs out.

I was eight.

I had no idea what Sinners MC meant, so it never occurred to me to wonder why he had a pin that belonged to an outlaw motorcycle club.

“You wear that,” he said, glancing over my shoulder, “no one’s gonna mess with you.” He was looking in the direction of the school, his eyes narrowing as he dragged on his cigarette.

“Smoking on school grounds again Mr. Mason?”

I turned to find a teacher stalking toward us, one of those shit-eating bullies in tow, red-faced, looking anywhere but at us. “What will your parents have to say about this?”

“Can’t wait to find out,” he muttered. His blue eyes met mine as he tossed his cigarette aside. Then he smiled at me again.

I smiled back.

He leapt to the ground, jumping over the quicksand and landing in the grass.

“See you around, princess.”

I watched him shove his hands in the pockets of his jeans and walk away. But it wasn’t true; I didn’t see him around. He never even came back to school after that day.

Not for two whole years.

Those bullies never bothered me again, though. None of them did. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of some pin. It was because of him.

Because he’d made two fifth-graders eat shit for being mean to me, and no one wanted to eat shit.

The next year, when a new girl in my class asked me about my motorcycle pin, she didn’t believe me when I told her where I’d gotten it. As if I’d made up the whole thing about the badass boy in the leather jacket who saved me from a couple of bullies—then mysteriously vanished from school, never to return—just to impress her.

But I knew he was real.

I had his pin, and I had his picture. In the seventh grade class photo in the school yearbook he was standing right next to my brother, staring down the lens of the camera like he was ready to take on the world… and make it eat shit.

His name was Brody Mason.

He was the love of my life.

If only I’d figured that out a lot sooner than I did.