by Maxi MacNair
Reaching her bus stop, she got out, carrying her small suitcase with her. Her old apartment was furnished, and Zoey was a little sad knowing that everything she owned at this point in her life fit into that suitcase. It was late and the streets were dark due to the lack of lamp posts. It was so strange being somewhere where the sound of traffic wasn’t always coating every other sound around it, and the walk to your front door took you down dark roads with no sidewalks and just acres of murky forest beyond what she could see. Zoey clutched her belongings harder as if it would protect her from the things that her childhood imagination told her were lurking in the shadows. Zoey couldn’t explain it, but she always felt watched walking down these roads in her hometown at night. She had never seen anything, but it was more like a feeling always in the back of her mind. The feeling that something lurked in the forest at night.
She quickened her pace and was practically running as she turned the corner of her street. As she walked up to the door that hadn’t changed a bit since she left, she noticed all the lights were off. The neighbor across the street was pulling out her garbage cans. Zoey didn’t recognize her at all.
“Hey, do you know if Marsha and Ted are home?”
“Home? Who’s asking?”
“Sorry, I’m Zoey. Marsha’s daughter. I’m kind of surprising them with a visit back from school.”
“Oh yes, Marsha mentioned you once or twice. It’s nice to meet you, but I’m afraid you should have called ahead Zoey. Your mom and dad are in Florida for the next month or so they told me.”
“Florida!?”
“Yeah, apparently your dad got them a little vacation home for a bit and the two of them are down there now. Do you need to use the phone to call them? I could let you use mine.”
“No thanks, I’ve got a cell.”
“Okay well do you have a plan for the night?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a key for the house.”
“Well okay then, I guess maybe you just learned a valuable lesson in planning ahead. Right dearie?”
Zoey was not in the mood for that, and she was glad it was dark enough so that the lady probably didn’t see the look on her face.
“Oh yeah, well thanks for the notice, and Ted’s not my dad okay. Did they leave a number or something with you?”
The lady quickly came back out of her house with a piece of paper she scribbled the number on and she thrust it at Zoey. The neighbor could feel animosity and frustration coming off Zoey even if she couldn’t see her face, and she just turned to walk back into her house leaving Zoey outside her darkened childhood home alone.
Zoey looked at her cell and decided she would call from her mom’s phone inside the house. She had no idea how many minutes she had left, and she definitely didn’t have the money to buy anymore at that time.
Zoey sighed. She walked past her mother’s rose garden that looked like it could use some watering. In her mood, she told herself that it wouldn’t be her problem just like she wasn’t apparently their problem now. Putting her suitcase down, she knelt next to the dry dirt of the flower patch and found the oddly colored rock near the mailbox. She picked it up and opened the false bottom, pulling out the spare key. At least that was one thing that went right today. Zoey had no idea what she was going to do if the spare wasn’t there.
Soon, Zoey was inside her childhood home. She turned on all the lights and turned up the heat. The house was a mess, causing her to sigh once more. Cluttered with useless things that her mother couldn’t seem to get rid of. Frankly, Zoey had on more than one occasion thought about telling her mom to get some help for her hoarding issues. Her mom just would have ignored her though, and Ted would probably just keep on ignoring the situation like he did everything else. Zoey knew the house was going to be in a bad state, but leaving and coming back to it with fresh eyes made her feel all the more overwhelmed by the chaos of the house.
Zoey struggled to navigate herself and her suitcase around the boxes and stacks of magazines Ted and her mom probably didn’t even read in the first place. She didn’t see either of them as the “cigar aficionado” type. Opening the door to her old room she was nearly crushed by toppling boxes. Her room was now overrun by clothes, shoes, and everything else her mother had bought while she was away. The bed wasn’t even in sight. She looked into her mom’s and Ted’s bedroom and it wasn’t much better. Frustrated, she grabbed a blanket and headed for the couch. She plopped herself down and soon gave into what her body was feeling and fell asleep in exhaustion.
In the morning, Zoey woke up and stared at the ceiling not wanting to look around her. At least the ceiling was free of clutter, even if it had a brown water stain that wasn’t there before. Zoey took her time lying there, but soon came to the decision that she had no choice but to clean the house. She was a total neat freak. Her room was always the cleanest room in her house. Her mom mentioned once when Ted wasn’t around that she got it from her father. After she left, Zoey’s mom probably found the organized and clean space too inviting to not fill with unneeded clutter. Being back at home, the trashed house was making more of an impact on her than it did before. Suddenly, Zoey had a thought. At least she had the power to do something about this issue in her life.
In the threadbare pajama pants and tank top she had with her, she started stacking and organizing things. Piling worthless junk with similar worthless junk until she managed to forge a wide pathway from the couch to the bathroom and then then kitchen. Finding some old and dusty cleaning supplies in a cupboard Zoey then got to cleaning the newly exposed carpet and floors. She then tackled the bathroom and the kitchen counters and sink. Finally, as the light of the day started to fade through the cracks underneath the pulled down shades Zoey went into her old room and started carrying armloads of magazines and boxes of boxes and bags of bags into the basement until she felt like she had her room back. When she finally shut the door to her bedroom, leaving the rest of the mess alone, she felt like she was home again. She took a deep breath and plopped down on her bed sending a cloud of dust up into the air. Some things were just going to need to wait until the next day.
Zoey suddenly realized it was the end of day and she hadn’t eaten anything yet. Her mind drifted back to the last few years of her life at home, and she remembered the shoebox she used to stash the money she made in tips working in the town diner. She reached under her bed and found it still there. Opening the lid she was shocked to find two crumpled twenty dollar bills still rolling around inside it.
“Pizza money,” she said out loud before grabbing her phone to call the one place in town that delivered. Finding those two bills was probably the best thing that had happened to her in the past few months. She was so tired and hungry and couldn’t bring herself to open another cupboard door hoping to find something she could make to eat only to find another mess that she couldn’t let herself leave alone, and she didn’t want to even think about what had gotten left in the fridge when her parents took off for Florida. At least she had gotten the house into a state she could walk through without having to tear out her hair. Her bedroom had even started to gain that feeling of hominess. She sat on the couch looking for something good to watch on TV, and waited for the pizza to arrive. By ten o’clock, she was full and half-way through an episode of Charmed when she remembered that she still needed to call her mother and tell her what’s going on in her life.
“Hello?
“Yeah, hi mom. It’s me.”
“Zoey?”
“Well isn’t this a nice surprise. Hey Teddy it’s Zoey on the phone.”
Zoey could hear Ted mumbling something in the background before her mom’s voice came back on the line.
“I don’t know Ted, I’ll ask her what she wants.”
“Mom, I just need you to listen to me for a minute.”
Zoey ran through her situation as briefly and unemotionally as she could, and afterwards she could hear her mom swallow the moisture in her mouth and shuffle into another room.
> “Well dear, just take the time that you need to get back on your feet. Ted and me won’t be back until next month. Do you think you’re going to be longer than that?”
“I.. I don’t know mom. I don’t really have a plan yet. Do I have a time limit?”
“Well I just thought if you were gone before we get back I just wouldn’t need to tell Ted...you know how he can be sometimes.”
Zoey’s heart sunk but she couldn’t say she wasn’t shocked to hear what she just heard.
“I’ll do my best mom, but you know I can’t say that I’ll have my life fixed in a month.”
“I know you’ll figure it out. Just don’t make any big changes to the house in the meantime and we’ll figure out how to tell Ted if we need to. And dear?”
“What mom?” Zoey was a little angry at how hurt she was feeling. She knew it would be like this, but it was hard knowing her childhood home now had conditions on it.
“I’ve got some money stashed away in my top drawer if you need it for anything. Ted doesn’t know it’s there so just take whatever you need.”
“Thanks mom. I’ll let you know when I know what’s up.”
Zoey at least knew that her mom would do what she could to help her. Zoey was both angry and sad for her mom at the same time. Zoey never wanted to be in a relationship that made her choose between it and something else she loved. Just another reason for her not to like Ted. She wished her mom wouldn’t be so afraid of being on her own.
Before going to sleep Zoey went into her mom’s room and found a small jewelry box stashed in the top drawer. She opened it and found a roll of twenties in it. Zoey counted out a hundred dollars from it and put it back the way she found it, and hoped she didn’t need to go back for more to get herself back on her feet.
Chapter 2
The next morning, she got dressed and headed out into civilization. She needed a job. Money was the problem and she wasn’t going to get anywhere without getting money back into her account. Finding a way back to her life in the city and eventually her classes at school wasn’t going to happen without money, and more money than her mom had hidden away from Ted.
Walking through town there really didn’t seem to be any promising options. The same handful of stores and restaurants were around and Zoey didn’t even run into anyone she knew that could maybe let her know about who might have some way for her to make a little money. In the local paper though there was one lone job ad: a late shift at a gas station on the outskirts of town. It was a gas station that had been around forever and Zoey knew exactly where it was. It was going to be a long walk to and from it if the bus wasn’t running when she needed, but like it or not, it was really the only option she had. She called the number on the ad and by the end of the day, she was the new employee of Supreme Gas.
Her first night there was just like every first day on the job she had ever had, and Zoey had had a lot of different part-time and full-time jobs. Roger, the owner, seemed nice enough and showed her where everything was around the store. He showed her how to use the cash-register.
“Honestly though, you won’t be doing much. We get enough business to make it worthwhile for me to pay someone to have it open, but the girl who used to work this shift quit because she said it got too boring.”
If Zoey was still in school this would be her dream job; a place that would pay her to sit around and do her homework. But since she didn’t have any of that anymore working all night here was going to be tough.
The owner hung around for the next few hours and helped Zoey through her first few transactions.
“Well I think you can handle things for now. I’m gonna head home. Suzy runs the mechanic shop connected to the station here and runs things in the morning for me. She’ll show you how to do a cash out and drop it in the safe. Okay?”
Zoey was a little surprised he was leaving her alone so soon.
“Oh okay, so I’ll just call if I have any questions then?”
“Yeah sure, or just save them for Suzy in the morning if you can. Shouldn’t have too many problems though.”
And that was it. The owner walked out the door letting the chimes on the door ting in the emptiness of the store, and Zoey was all alone. Looking out the glassed front of the store she could see the murky line of trees that bordered the other side of the road the gas station was on. She looked out and thought of the miles of empty forest beyond and started feeling watched again. Just like she was as a kid walking down these roads. Just like she did a few nights before when she was walking to her childhood home carrying her suitcase.
Chapter 2
Zoey had been working at the gas station for a week now. She was slowly getting used to it, even if unwillingly. It was a pretty low maintenance job. She would just sit there all night, waiting for a customer to show up. They would straggle in and then out, leaving her in peace. In the end, the job wasn’t as bad as Zoey had anticipated. It was a job, and at the end of every night shift Zoey would calculate how much money she was adding to her paycheck. She was sparingly using her mom’s money for food when she needed it and hoped that she would soon find another job. If she could stash a thousand or so it could be enough to get her back to the city and into an apartment where she could start working as many jobs as she could there and eventually get back into her classes.
The distant and lingering fear she had of the night and the dark forest surrounding her town though still snuck up her spine more than a few times a night. She hated working at night, the hours slowly going by until she could go home. Her fears ran from the real yet paranoid to the fantastic and monstrous. She always wondered what would happen if someone decided to rob the mini-mart or tried to do something to her. She shuddered at what her imagination threw at her from all the horror movies she had seen in the past. When she started feeling scared Zoey would usually grab a magazine from the rack to take her mind off it. She had gone through all of them at this point, and was eagerly waiting for Thursday when Suzy said the new magazine issues were usually delivered.
The only magazines she hadn’t read yet were the adult ones behind the counter. Feeling the loneliness and fear pressing her one night though she grabbed one and started looking for an article to read somewhere in it. Her eyes skimmed past the glossy images which were in their way doing the trick for her and distracting her mind. Her fear subsided as she saw the images of the women posing nude in a variety of submissive nude poses. Zoey thought about why guys found this girl or that pose particularly sexy as she leafed through it soon landing on an a much more explicit image than the past few. The guy and girl porn stars weren’t censored in any way and Zoey gazed for a few moments at the scene. The looks on their faces were ones of ecstasy and Zoey was reminded of how long it had been since she had had sex. Her life had been so stressful the past month and a bit that she had hardly anytime to remember that she enjoyed sex and the thought of it was now getting to her. Suddenly she heard a loud engine outside and scrambled to close the magazine and put it back where it was before whoever it was came into the store. Zoey recognized the sound of the engine though. It was him.
The same man that had visited the gas station every night she worked. He would come, park his Harley Davidson at pump station number three, take off his helmet, and slowly make his way into the mini-mart. His Harley didn’t look like a normal Harley. The logo was there, but everything else looked a little different. It older and more vintage than the other ones she saw on the road sometime. As Zoey looked at it, she assumed it was a custom bike. Maybe he built it himself or something. He did, after all always show up covered in grease like he had been working on something.
As he approached, Zoey took a few steps to separate herself from the small rack of adult magazines back behind the counter as she peeked out the window, observing him. He had short messy hair, his body looked ripped even through his shirt and leather jacket, and his face was rugged and fine, decorated with just the right amount of stubble. Zoey bit her lip as he got closer, before trying to
compose herself and pretend that she wasn’t feeling like the lack of sexual contact was being felt by her in that moment.
He stepped inside now, the doorbell chiming as he stood there looking around for a moment before finally stepping over the threshold. He looked at her, as he always did with his dark eyes. He never offered a smile however, like always. The first time Zoey saw him she was immediately drawn to him, but was also a little scared of him. There was a certain seriousness in everything Zoey saw that he did, and she had never heard anything from him except for a few grunts and mumbled thanks.
Zoey was nervous as he approached the counter like always. She couldn’t help imagining herself riding this guy like the porn star in the magazine she had just been looking at. Blushing slightly, looking down, trying to make her body language hide everything that was going on in her head he placed a crisp bill on the counter. She took it quickly, processing the transaction through the system for the gas. It was strange but she could swear that he was sniffing the air slightly while he waited for her to fumble the change from the cash drawer.
“I…I’ve seen you here every night this week.” She stammered softly, before looking up at him from under her eyelashes. He gave her a quizzical look before nodding.
“Yeah. So?”
“I was just wondering if you maybe worked the night shift somewhere else like me?”
“I don’t.” It was the first time he had ever spoken to her in his full voice and her breath caught in her throat as she heard the husky sound. At least Zoey knew that he could say real words now. She froze, looking at the computer screen with reddened cheeks. He gave her a moment before speaking again. “Can I have my change now?”
Zoey quickly nodded as she glanced at his face, smeared slightly with what looked like grease again. She handed him his change and receipt quickly and looked away in embarrassment. As he was making his way out of the store, however, the urge to finally know his name overcame her. She didn’t understand why, but she needed to have some kind of familiar contact with someone. The hot regular that drove a dangerous looking Harley was the closest thing she might have in the job.
