Sam Jenkins

Biography
Eighteen-year-old Sam Jenkins is the youngest child of James and Sandra Jenkins, a grade-ten businessman and grade-nine accountant. Her parents, often too busy to raise her between their work and her father’s campaigning for election to the Council for Finance, left much of her upbringing to her four older brothers – the youngest being ten years older, the oldest seventeen.

As she grew up Sam often felt like a last-minute addition to the family, a last-ditch attempt by their parents to have a daughter. This, coupled with a very masculine upbringing, made for quite a tomboyish child – something both Sam and her naturally-protective brothers seemed determined would remain unchanged when she hit puberty. Having been raised by boys Sam decided very quickly that she didn’t like being treated like a girl, especially the attention she was receiving from boys at school. Sam started cutting her hair short, wearing her brothers’ old oversized hoodies and leaning into her tomboyish tendencies as a way to hide. Her desire to avoid attention soon extended to everything she did – dress sense, behaviour, academic performance.

This swiftly caused arguments at home. Sam’s parents expected nothing less than excellence from their children, and their sons had delivered – all four, by this point in their twenties, were senior employees of the family import/export business, with the oldest being groomed to take over the company’s Sethian office. Their youngest daughter’s average academic performance was seen as a failure, and Sam started receiving parental attention for the first time in her life.

She couldn’t stand it. Her parents’ attempts to “fix” their daughter started with forcing her to grow her hair and dress “like a lady”, then trying to secure private tutors for out-of-school hours. Sam, of course, hated every second, drove away every one, and wanted nothing more than to return to being overlooked by her parents as well as her peers.

The turning point in all this came when her father held a function at the family home, a combination of business gathering and campaign event. As a younger girl Sam had previously been able to escape these by keeping to her room, but this time her father insisted - she was a young woman now, a teenager, she was his daughter, she had responsibilities. She was dressed up and told to mingle with the guests, none of whom were anywhere near her old age. With her brothers all busy with their own families, Sam had nobody to help her fend off the attention from the sleazier of her father’s guests.

It took a while for her brothers to notice they hadn’t seen her milling around for a while, but when they did they all started searching. They found her curled up on a bench at the bottom of the garden in tears, having run away from a guest too used to getting his own way, whose compliments were a little too frequent and a little too personal. Her brothers swiftly ejected the man, who turned out to be a member of the Council her father was running for election; her father unceremoniously lost the election, and Sam got the blame. This suited her; her parents left her to her own devices again and her life went back to normal.

Five years later, her father is again running for office. This time, her mother gave her advice - “that’s just what men do”, “take it as a compliment” - but Sam was having none of it. While everybody else was busy getting ready she packed a bag of clothes, drained her savings account, and got on the first plane she could.

That was yesterday.