Kendall Knight lived the life that most people could only begin to dream of; by the age of fifteen, he had more money than the population of the town he was born in. He had more money than the Private School he went too. He had everything he could ever want, and yet it was never enough. Something was missing and he knew it, but he just wasn't sure what it was. The closest assumption he had was 'love,'; it was the only thing he didn't have. And it wasn't something you could buy with all the money in the world either. For most of his life, he had never felt loved, just tolerated. And at times, not even that; the names and things people called and did to him had scarred him for life. And so many times he had started to believe it all. Yet he had to remind himself where he was now; that he was worth so much more than what he was constantly told.

That he was more than just the blonde, gay kid who liked to sing.

That he was more than just the target.

Because in the end, it was all he had left to hold onto anymore.

No. Kendall Schmidt Knight was more than that. He had so much more to live for, but if he did, why was he here; here in this club so very late at night when only bad could happen. Were one camera phone snap could take down his whole career. And yet, for the first time, he was their out of spite for his career. He was there for his self-esteem. Because for one fucking time in his whole god-damned life, he actually wanted to feel normal. He wanted to feel real.

Kendall Schmidt was born into a crap town in Minnesota to his poor, single mother one very glum Friday morning. The rainfall should have been some kind of signal that he was meant to suffer in life. Or maybe the thunderstorm. Or the fact that right before he was going to literally be born, the electricity went out for a second and almost killed twelve different people in the ICU. So to say that it all started the day he was born would be absolutely no exaggeration. It would be an understatement.

His mother, Caroline Schmidt, worked hard, but they lived in a some-what rural town – developing would be a kinder way to put it – so it wasn't always easy for her. She had to do things she would later regret to feed her new born son. She would have to lose certain illusions about life to feed the child that she loved so much. Yet it never made her resent Kendall, it made her love him all the more.

Kendall was three-years-old when he first met David Knight and immediately, the pair bonded; for Kendall, this was the best dad he could ever dream of. David was kind and loving and instantly treated the blonde like he was his own son, teaching him to play sports and do things that men do. And instantly, Kendall would do the opposite.

It wasn't that he put on dresses or wanted to ever be a girl, it was that he just wasn't particularly the athletic type that David had wanted. Kendall was compassionate and sweet, not rough and aggressive. When other boys around his age enjoyed going and riding their bikes or beating each other with sticks till the blood became funny, Kendall enjoyed drawing and singing.

Oh how he loved singing; it was his life. He sang in the bath-tub, he sang in the bed, he sang in the sofa. He sang into his dinosaur hair brush that was lovingly worn with use and blonde hairs. He sang to his dog and all of the stuffed animals he'd accrued from years of begging. He sang in the yard to the birds who would then try to out sing him and of course he'd win because he'd stand in the trees face for hours and sing louder and louder till the tune in the leaves stopped. He sang to the TV and he sang to the radio. He sang to absolutely anything that would possibly listen.

And David learned to love it, matter-of-fact, he did more than love it, he supported and encouraged it as best he could. He didn't want to be seen as the evil step-father to Kendall, but rather his real dad who loved and cared for him. So when the blonde child threw a fit in the middle of the store to get the new Evanescence CD, his father gave in. When he started crying because someone turned off all of the music that he kept blasting through the house, his dad would go turn it all back on. Because David knew he couldn't spoil his son with gifts, but he could spoil him with music. And that's all Kendall wanted.

David Knight adopted Kendall Schmidt just weeks after he married Caroline in a small, quiet ceremony outside of the town. It was pretty, in the middle of a large field, were there was a simple white altar that the Rabbi stood at. With only twenty guests, mostly made up of David's family, the small green patch of land became a vibrant show of proud relatives and co-workers who were elated for the man's new family. They were now Mr. David Knight and Mrs. Caroline Knight with their four-year-old son, Kendall Knight.

The next year, Mrs. Knight gave birth to the couple's first biological child, Katie Knight, to Kendall's disdain. It took David three weeks to finally get Kendall to acknowledge the child's existence all the while learning to love it. But in a month, the blonde was completely taken in by his new sister who was the coolest thing he could ever think of. And as tradition, Kendall sang to the new baby girl every night before bed and after dinner and during breakfast, much to the baby's annoyance. But it didn't matter that she cried, because the blonde finally had an audience.

Yet as the day of his birth had obviously fore-warned, his life quickly took a turn for the worse; David Knight was caught up in a bank robbery attempt that same year. During a hostage stand-off at First Colonial of Juriesberg, Mr. Knight was shot straight threw the chest by a cops stray bullet. He was the only person to die during the event; everyone else came out unscathed as did the culprits.

Kendall didn't think he'd ever seen his mother cry so much in his entire life, but honestly, he didn't know what was happening. 'When was David getting home from the bank? When was Daddy coming to help make Pizza? When is he going to sing with me? Take care of Katie?'

It took him a month to process the fact that David was never going to come back into their lives and as soon as it hit him, he began to cry just as hard as his mother was. And then his mother cried because her son was crying. And her son cried out of the terror of his mother crying even harder than she was before. For a year this tear cycle went on till the day that Katie began to walk.

Their lives slowly started to return to normal, but it would never go back to the pre-David days; Mrs. Knight made a big deal out of keeping the last name for herself and her son even though David's mother requested they drop it. He simply meant too much and she refused to give up to the little shred of her husband she had left anymore. Instead, she gave up on everything else. She quit going to Synagogue and told Kendall he no longer needed to wear his kippah. She just lost faith in anything else out there when she lost David, the only genuinely good person she knew; she had lost faith in life.

And Kendall was too young and wounded to care in the first place; he just didn't understand why things like this even had to happen.

So instead of dealing with things the normal way and trudging through the emotions until it eventually cleared up, Mrs. Caroline Knight threw herself into her work. Heavily. She went in at six in the morning at got home at nine at night, making overtime more of a habit than eating. And seeing as how she had given up on life while still raising two children, Kendall's little six-year-old brain started to get worried. 'Who was going to take care of Katie? Who was going to take care of us? When would his old mom be back?'

Kendall made the decision himself though; he would do this with or without his mothers help and he went to work of growing up. He took care of Katie as best he could while finishing school work. He learned to cook from their neighbor who also was their nanny. He was slowly becoming a young, young, young adult and he wasn't sure how much he liked it; slowly, he felt as if he wasn't himself anymore. The only piece of old Kendall left was the singing. Because for him, the music never stopped.

After five years of his mom working at the pace she was at - with such utter intensity - had finally started to change the three's lives. Drastically. She moved the family into a large apartment in Madison, the first actual big city in the area, and life started to some-what get better. Immediately after moving in, she hired a live-in care-taker for the children and with that, she virtually never saw them again. What Mrs. Knight didn't realize was that care was not a replacement for love and it never could be. You can care about your house, but that doesn't mean you love it. You can care about how you look, but you can certainly hate the outcome. Care is a state of being. Love is a state of heart.

When Kendall finally reached the seventh grade, his mother decided to give him a gift; she transferred him to a private school on the opposite side of town. It was a Catholic School, but it had some of the highest grade rankings in the area, and Mrs. Knight didn't mind being a bad Jew for this. She was a bad Jew in the first place. She was barely Jewish at all anymore. This was no different from all the other times.

What she didn't understand was the emotional impact that this would all have on the blonde boy; if it wasn't hard enough going to a totally different school, he was also starting puberty. That extremely awkward time in your life were you start to realize things and change. When you learn who 'you' really are. When you start to feel thing that are much more than mere companionship for other people. So taking him out of his comfort zone and injecting himself into a strange, new, foreign environment was more than dangerous; it was cruel.

Kendall definitely felt threatened upon first entering the school, yet after finally seeing it all and getting to know the setting, he definitely felt more comfortable. So he let himself actually find interests and seek out the things he genuinely enjoyed rather than try to hide himself in sports or anything like that; he joined drama and choir. He joined all of the arts there, but he took a special interest in those two especially. He had always loved to sing and with choir, he actually got to show-case it and he did drama because his passion for acting had gotten him out of many sticky situations. Those were two immediate mistakes that he would spend the next six years genuinely regretting.

The bullying started just after his first month there; he was a tall, stringy blonde kid with long hair that fell right over his eyes. He virtually had no muscle-tone and had this extreme amount bitchiness that could make a drag-queen cry. All-in-all, Kendall was not the hetero-nominative definition of what a boy was particularly supposed to be. And that was because the blonde wasn't really all that hetero in the first place.

It would be a lie to say that Kendall didn't think about girls; he liked girls. He liked them a lot. He could picture himself getting married to a nice woman and settling down with three kids and a dog. Then again, he had the same vision of himself with a man. Because it would be an absolute lie to say that Kendall didn't feel the same way for boys as he did for girls; he didn't see gender. To him, he only saw love and he liked that; it was a great feeling to have in the first place. The most distinctive presence of love he'd ever seen was the one that his mother had shared with David and all he wanted was that same feeling.

The kids at the school caught onto that immediately and coupled with the fact that he was so artsy and had such attitude, the gay jokes came instantly. He never forgot the time that his newspaper piece that he had wrote after careful research had been graphitized with the word 'fag' over it and then sent to press. That was absolutely crushing for him. And then there was the time that he sang the anthem for the school's last football game of the season and was promptly booed off the stage while people in the crowd held up a banner that read 'No-Mo Homo.' He didn't get it at first, but when it finally hit him, all he could do was cry. How could anyone be this mean?

The first sign that things could ever get better was when one of the choir boys took them under his wing. James Diamond was a very wealthy kid, but he was not a particularly kind one. He got his way and it didn't matter how, so when he started to stick up for Kendall, the blonde was quickly excited. All he wanted was friends and for the first time, he'd made a real one. They were both in theatre together and James essentially led the choir, so they were together for most of the day.

That didn't make things particularly easier though; whenever James wasn't around, the bullying got even worse. He could barely go to school on the days that he knew the tanned boy wouldn't out of fear of safety for his own life. Things went on this way until his tenth grade year when his sister, who was attending the school with him, finally broke from the stress of all of it.

"Fuck Kendall," she came home yelling one day, slamming the door in a wild display of anger.

"What? What Happened Katie," Kendall responded, batting the feathery hair out of his eyes.

"You Kendall. You fucking happened," Katie hollered back at him.

"That's ….That's so mean," the blonde said while pulling a seat out for himself.

"God, there you go again, acting like a girl," she replied, throwing her hands up in exasperation, "For one time, could you act like your own fucking gender Kendall."

"Look Katie, this isn't your business and it doesn't aff-,"

"Yes, yes it does," she said, turning away from his as the anger faded, "I get made fun of for you Kendall and I just can't do this anymore." She stormed out of the room and the tall teen was left in silence besides the loud click of a locking door that came from her room's direction.

Her words stung; her words stung more than anything else he could think of, but there was something else to them. They weren't exactly … unrealistic. That was his only description. Because he didn't know what else to think. She was right, he did get bullied a lot on the fact that he was so feminine, but he never even began to think about how it could affect Katie. Did she get bullied because of it too? Were people picking on her as well? Was she the 'Fag's Sister'?

Kendall lied in his room and cried the whole night, only taking breaks to wipe away the heavy tears, because this was all too much to take. He had very little left to live for anymore and he just wasn't prepared to deal with everything anymore. He felt as if every layer of skin and protection had been ripped off at that moment and it wasn't his sister's words alone. It was years of tormenting and name-calling and tears and hurt and sobs and choked words and every fucking time he was singled out and humiliated. And right then, he started to genuinely consider death. Suicide was an option. It was a big option. If he locked the door and grabbed a knife, he could do this. It would take one simple slash and that would be all. He could lay back and close his eyes and let the blood flow. Simple.

That's when his phone rang.

Slowly, he trudged over to his dresser and picked the small, silver object up before pressing the button and putting it up to his ear; this was just a road bump.

"Kendall," the voice on the other line started, "Um, I just wanted to know if you kind of wanted to, you know, go do something?"

"Like what James," the blonde replied, his eyes lighting up when he heard the tanned boy's question.

"It's a Friday night and, well, Look; I'm all alone because, I don't know how to say this without hurting your feelings, but I don't have any friends that want to go out right now and I was just wondering if you were willing too. We could like go to the mall or something?" James finished, the question starting to bleed into his voice slightly.

"Okay, I'd love too, were do you want to meet?" Kendall ran over to his closet as fast as he could to start putting something together all the while forgetting the pocket knife entirely.

"How about I pick you up; does that sound okay?"

"Yeah, that sounds great,"

"Bye."

"Bye. See you in a minute."

"Yeah, you too."

As soon as he heard the click of cell phone, he threw his across the room and fell back into his bed, his previous suicidal thoughts disappearing like dust. He didn't want to entirely admit it, but he did kind of have a crush on James. So he wasn't sure if this was James asking him out or if it was a friend thing, but still, he was excited.

James didn't show up that night; he didn't even call to cancel it. At twelve the nest day, he sent a simple text that read 'things changed' and that was that; he had absolutely no other explanation for what he'd done to the blonde. And the suicidal thoughts returned again.

Yet again, another person he'd driven away and he knew why. It was because of how femme he was. But when he actually started to think about it, he realized something; he could change that, he could stop the femininity.

And Kendall did something that he would regret worse than being himself; he stopped. He stopped being who he wanted to be and started to be what everyone else wanted. In that regret, he saw the last shred of who the blonde was.

He went about changing his life after that miserable weekend and the first thing he did was cut his hair; he had his sister trim the bangs to make them more masculine and less blunt so they would swoop and not sit. He couldn't give it all up.

Then he started changing his wardrobe, going from his usual of bright colors and tight jackets to blacks and reds. He replaced a million different coats with a million different oversized flannels that fit loose. His different shirts with graphics went to plain v-necks that didn't look any different than the rest. He bought himself a nice pair of vans and put the high-top converse under his bed. He didn't stop with his skinny jeans though. He couldn't give it all up.

He started to deepen his voice on purpose and stop letting himself be over-dramatic; the hand flails went out the window first. He quit choir and threw the folder full of songs away while ripping each script in two carefully. He threw it all in a black bag and forgot about it. All accept his playbills with his credits. He couldn't give it all up.

But the thing that changed it all, that made life so much better, was Kendall joining sports; he joined every sport he could find or sign up for and immediately, he started training. He became a front-end for the football team and was the catcher for the baseball players. He was the hockey leader and was the soccer goalie. He did it all. He did it all to distract himself from the things he actually cared about. The things that he dreamt about and grew up with and genuinely enjoyed. He forgot about Kendall Knight. Because he had given it all up; he'd created something he thought was perfect. And in the end, destroyed something absolutely, positively beautiful. He'd broken Kendall Knight. He was no longer Kendall Knight. He was someone else entirely.

Yet, it made things get better; he made friends and went to parties and slept with girls. Lots and lots of girls. So many girls that he could describe each member of the cheer squad's boobs down to the tee. Jenna was a little lumpier than Lorrie, but he still enjoyed it. He enjoyed it all on the surface; on the inside, he could feel it slowly killing him. Still, he got respect. And the ultimate show of that was when James wasn't embarrassed to introduce him as his friend. When the tanned boy would laugh with him and go to parties with him and work-out with him.

But Kendall was so far from whom he used to be that he didn't care that much; all he wanted was more numbing agents to not have to deal with the real things. So more sports and booze and one-night stands were in order for him. He forgot about love entirely.

By the time he had reached the end of his twelfth grade year, he was completely unrecognizable; he had grown even taller and he was muscular. He was ripped. Beefy. He was a jock, plain and simple. He looked like he threw on the first thing he saw in the morning and constantly seemed some-what out of it. His blonde hair was messy and everywhere, a huge difference from his old style of blunt, long bangs that would cloud his eyes. He was crass and crude and loud. He wasn't the same person he was as a kid.

The first time he took an interest in singing again was when he saw an audition at the mall and decided to try out for fucks-n-giggles. He and James both bought a bottle of patron together, swallowed it as fast as they could and got on stage and sang a duet as best as two very drunk boys could. And the crowd went wild. They started screaming for more and more and they almost ran the stage over with picture and squeals.

Immediately, the audition host and judge, a record producer named Gustavo Roque, signed them as soon as they finished their booze filled, improvised set list and within a week, they were moved out to LA. Kendall and James made up the new pop boy band duo Big Time Rush, a worldwide sensation that swept America like the crack epidemic. Within three months, Kendall bought his mother off to never speak to him again while James got a helicopter with his name in bold black letters on the sides.

After going on their first international tour, The Rule the World Tour, were the Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber opened for them on multiple occasions, they helped redefine teenage fame. They were two eighteen year-old boys that were living the lives of rich, pig-headed frat boys and hid it better than anyone could imagine. They constantly kept an air of mystery surrounding themselves, keeping the paparazzi at arms length. It made them that much more famous. And James enjoyed every single second of it.

Yet, Kendall didn't; he was missing something, something that could not be bought or sold. He missed love.

And that's how he ended up here, on that cold LA night, in a club in the middle of the city with glistening strobe lights striking him blind every few seconds. He got up slowly from his plush seat in the middle of the chaotic setting and strided forward slowly, careful to not tear his deep purple, leather jacket against one of the many alcohol fueled people surrounding him.

Slowly, he turned a sharp corner and ended up somewhere that he didn't expect to be; he stepped into a dark hallway that lead to a some-what well hidden room that was different. It was more, intentional. That was the first time he saw the brunette. The short, toned brunette that would change his life forever.

Author's Note: I hope you enjoyed this; I swear, it's my last chapter to follow this format. The rest are going to be more action oriented, dialogue heavy ones, but this was just necessary. I needed to introduce each boy properly to make sure that it was clear who they were exactly and just how fucked up they were. Are. PS, sorry for using a Catholic school again, but I swear, this will have a ton less to do with religion. Okay, some, but not much. But It'll all be good religious stuff, SWEAR. Okay, I don't really swear because I swear and promise alot of stuff, so hopefully. Definitely hopefully. And sorry if I got any Jewish customs or traditions wrong, but I am not currently or have ever been, Jewish. I was Cabbala for a week though, so does that count? XD BTW, It will become important in the story later.

PS. Update Next Friday. Once a Week.

And I'm sure you know what I'm going to say at the end, so I'll just end with this. REVIEW Lovelies. Luv Ya. XoXo.