"Zara!" Mother calls. "Time to get up!"
I literally jump out of bed and run down the stairs, sliding into my chair at the table. Mother turns around and smiles at me, sitting my plate on the table in front of me. I quickly eat my pancakes and then hurry up the stairs to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Mint floods my mouth and I scrub my teeth until they are perfectly clean.
I head to my room and go through my drawers to find some clothes for school. I pull out my pair of black tights and a baggy graffiti shirt. I pull on my white high top sneakers and brush my hair back. I grab my small black backpack and go back down to the kitchen to get my lunch box from Mother. She hands it to me and kisses me goodbye before I run out the door to get on the bus.
I see Zayn standing awkwardly on the footpath and I run over to him. He is wearing a pair of dark jeans and a white shirt, the same thing he was wearing on the weekend, but this time he has a graffiti backpack with him. I stop next to him and tap his shoulder, making him look at me.
Zayn smiles. "Zara!"
"Hey, Zee," I say, grinning. "You going to Bradford Primary School?"
"Yup."
"Yay! We go to the same school!"
He grins and hugs me. I hug him back and we pull apart just as the bus pulls up in front of my house. We climb onto the bus and our noses crinkle at the smell of sweat and bodies. I sit on the very front seat and Zayn sits next to me, a slightly panicked expression on his face. I give him an assuring look and he calms down slightly.
We turn up at school and I find out that Zayn and I have the same teacher. When I find that out, I instantly tell Zayn and he grins at me. I'm the only friend he has at this school for now and I am going to make sure that he likes this school as much as I do, maybe even more because he is the kind of boy that is both a bad boy type and a smart type.
We do everything together whenever we can and absolutely anyone can see that we are close friends already, and that it is not going to change one little bit. That is, not unless something drastic happens, but that is still very doubtful considering everything that we have in common and everything that we don't have in common.
All throughout primary school Zayn and I stay in the same class and do everything together. Yes, we have had our ups and downs, and our fights and 'break-ups', but we always come back to each other because that's all we have. We only have each other in this world and we both hope that this is the way that it stays throughout our whole lives.
Zayn and I even tried dating in the sixth grade because people kept pushing us to get together, but all it did was make things more tense between us. So, instead of staying together, we broke up in secret and let the rest of the sixth grade think that we were still dating. It worked for a while until some popular chick found Zayn and some other chick from another school hanging out for a liaison project or something, and made a big deal about it.
Since then nothing has been the same; everyone looks at me with pity and they all have some sort of hatred and/or anger towards Zayn because he 'hurt me'. I mean, it sort of did hurt me when I found out that I wasn't the only one he told his secrets to, but I got over that, after a few months mind you, and we moved on.
By the end of sixth grade everyone had their schools set out for the following years, and they had their whole futures planned out too. Zayn and I didn't. We were playing by ear and doing our best not to set high expectations of our lives just to be shot down and disappointed when we didn't get what we had planned to get in our lives.
Don't get me wrong, we wanted our lives to be nice and we wanted to have a family, but we didn't want to set it all out in front of us. We wanted our futures to be a surprise to us, and not already know what was going to happen in them. We were the only ones that saw what damage this kind of planning can do to people.