They only paid attention to her while asking for help with homework. She always knew the answers. See, no problem at all. It wasn’t because she wasn’t pretty enough. She was. She had long dark hair the color of milk chocolate, hair that she usually wore pulled back into a ponytail because it took her two minutes to do and didn’t fall into her face while she looked down at her schoolwork. Her eyes were warm and large, even behind the glasses she always wore. It was, unfortunately, her air of extreme competence that scared boys away. In fact, she didn’t seem to be a teenage girl at all. She was somebody’s 10/431 mother, just waiting to happen. Fairy’s side note: Many perfumes promise to lure men to women. None of them smell of motherhood. None of them proclaim the wearer to be tidy, thrifty, and sens-ible. At least not in high school. Those traits become attractive much later on, when guys finally realize they’re not living somebody else’s life. So there was Jane, walking out of the school building with a backpack, which was heavier than it needed to be, because it couldn’t hurt to read over her Shakespeare assignment one more time.
