Summary: Cara (OC) arrives on the Sunshine Islands after 2 years of travel, wanting to truly start over. So she naturally does the farthest thing from what her past suggests. She becomes a farm hand. But when the dark, rude and over all hateful animal dealer starts hanging around her, as well as that charming cousin of Sabrina's, can she really start over? And why does Sabrina's cousin seem so familiar?
Cara's POV

I looked around myself and thought"Well, these islands certainly aren't much now but whatever, I'm sure it'll get better with time."Hello, my name is Cara von Duetch. I am 17 and I am not friendly. I am sometimes very cynical and I am almost always quiet. If I didn't know better I might have been able to blame that on my past. But no, I was born this way. I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way…. OH, sorry I tend to just drift off sometimes. Where was I? Oh yes, quiet. I used to think I was shy but then I started to think about it and realized that shy does not describe me at all. If you have angered me, you had better watch out. I have never been afraid to get my hands dirty, I never had the option to be, and if you unleashed me in a shopping mall and told me I could have whatever I wanted and not to trouble myself about the cost, I would be walking out of that place wearing sapphires and pearls set in silver with a pretty little evening gown on and the bags would be full of other such dresses, but they would also hold skinny jeans and tight t-shirts.

Oh I apologize, I was rambling again, wasn't I? Well if you're wondering what about my past led me here, it is, quite simply, a very long story. You have time, you say? Alright then, get comfortable and throw another log on the fire, we'll probably be here late into the night.

You see, I was raised in a very strict household, yet my sister and I still managed to sneak our little shenanigans past our mother. Our father was never home, as he worked grave-yard shifts as an air craft mechanic. But when he was home, he never did anything to stop our mother. A prime example of what he should have, but never did, stop would be the night I resolved myself to leave.

I came home one evening and told my mother that I had been asked out by a boy from the park group my sister and I hung out with sometimes on Wednesdays. I asked her permission to go to lunch with him that Saturday with Eliza, my sister, as chaperone. My mother promptly began to beat me. As I laid there that night on my bed, still bleeding and trying to stop the flow of tears, I thought about the last time this had happened. That didn't help, as the tears only increased at this. I had been shielding Eliza from my mother, yet again. That time I had not been bleeding. I whimpered quietly as a spasm of pain shot through my body when I attempted to sit up. This had been happening ever since my mother deemed me old enough to become her own personal slave. At first the beatings had been small, not enough to really slow me down the next day but enough to "teach me a lesson". When it kept getting worse and worse, I had told myself that it would be alright, she would mellow with age. But here I was, 8 years later, and she was showing no signs of slowing down. I ignored the pain that racked my body as I sat up and went to my desk. Lifting the false bottom in one of my drawers I take out my money and counted it. 600G. That should be enough to get me out of here or at least to pay a decent physician to care for my wounds. I was pretty sure she had broken my arm this time. I flicked on my dinosaur of a computer and began my work of finding the select few people who knew of my situation and had offered to help me as much as they could. It was time to test their resolve.

As I stood at the docks in the pitch black of midnight that Saturday, surrounded by all the people who had helped me get this far, I looked at everyone and, starting to cry again, I hugged everyone one last time.

" Are you sure you can't just hide at my house for a bit?" my friend Breanna begged me, teary-eyed.

"I'm sorry Brea, but you know she'd eventually look for me there." I whispered as I wrapped my free arm around her shoulders in a quick one armed embrace.

"You take care of yourself and make sure to call us when you're far enough away to slow down." Terry admonished me.

"I will, Mom, I promise." Terry had always been the mother I had longed after all my life and got mad when I called her Miss Terry like I had been taught.

"My cousin in Forget-Me-Not Valley will be waiting for you when you think you wanna try it out. For a change, you know." I smiled at Mathew, one of my almost-brothers, and told him it was good of him to set up a back-up plan for me. The captain who my friends had paid to smuggle me out in the dead of night came towards us and said sheepishly, "Well folks, if your done with your good-byes we should be heading out now, the tide is about to become favorable." I smiled at my friends one last time and followed the captain onto the boat. It had been decided that I could not and should not return to this land until I had come of age. That meant this would most likely be the last time I saw any of them. So I went to the railing as the captain stowed my bags in my small room below decks and waved at the small group of people on the docks until they could no longer be seen from the ship's deck. My friends, my saviors. They were now lost to me forever. I gripped the railing tightly as the tears slid down my face.

I've been spending the two years between then and now traveling. I did indeed go to the cousin in Forget-Me-Not for awhile. Jill taught me about farming and raising animals, but I couldn't stay with her, much as I would have liked to. It wasn't time for me to settle in one place yet. But when I saw the ad in the paper that morning in my room at the inn, I had known that this place in the ad, these Sunshine Islands, were both far enough and small enough to both hide and comfort me. I was actually excited to be a farm hand after my time with Jill. It was unusual for me to be excited or happy about anything since I left that night. You see, when the day dawned on the little boat next morning it found not the bruised and battered little runaway from the night before, but a cold, hard young teenage girl dressed in a black tank top and tight, black jeans, one arm in a sling and her shoulder length brown hair dyed an icy blue at the tips.

So it was that I looked when I got to Jill's farm after a few months travelling. By the time I left there though, the blue was gone from my hair and I had taken to braiding it simply so I could do my work while avoiding cutting it short. My hair now reached about halfway down my back and I still wanted it longer. A small form of rebellion against my parents, I suppose. That and getting the paper delivered to my room every day. You see, my mother always wanted me to bob my hair and she also didn't like to read the paper when she could just watch the news. So I did these little things to remind myself that my mother did not control me anymore.

I walked off along the beach after saying good-bye to the captain who had taken me everywhere with a harbor ever since the first time I set foot on his boat. This puzzled me greatly, as his obligation to me ended the second we got 2,000 miles from that dock. But no, he had followed where ever I led, sometimes sitting in port for months until I was ready to leave. I believe it might have been that I reminded him of his daughter, who had been lost at sea when she was around the age I was when I first started my wanderings. After my thought about the state of the islands I caught sight of someone coming toward me along the beach. I took a deep breath, pasted on my best "I'm a very nice person, really, I just have a hard time showing it" smile, and went to see if it was my new boss, Chelsea. As I got nearer I saw that the person was actually on a horse, a white horse, and was wearing white pants and a white suit jacket over an orange zip-up hoodie and a black v-neck.

Thank you for reading this story. It's my very first work to ever be veiwed by someone not related to me, so if you could just leave a review and tell me what you think, that would be lovely. Should you feel as if you should flame me for some reason, please do it while logged in or leave an email adress so I can ask questions about why you felt you had to do that. My deepest thanks to all of you who did me the kindness of reading this, Cowgirl.

While the traffic on this story has pleased me greatly( 2 visitors from Ireland and one from Italy! I love those two countries, along with Scotland and Greece), I am not quite certain anymore, now that I have actually posted this story, if I can really continue it. I know that I ramble incomprehensivly at times, and while I try to avoid it as much as possible, at times it slips out and I can't figure out how to fix it, like when I was supossed to be describing Cara's past, I got rather off track. This concerns me greatly, and so I am now thinking of putting this story on hiatus and writing a self insert instead. If anyone could reveiw or message me and give me their thoughts, it would be greatly appreciated.