The Hope That Starts

by Heidi Hutchinson

  She huffed, realizing too late that both men were gawking at her. Actually, not Carl so much. He was smirking.

  “So you want to come on the road with us?” he asked.

  Zelda pressed her lips together, suddenly fearful that she would make a further fool of herself. Carl read into her hesitation.

  “You're right, the band is solid, they simply want pictures to prove it. You'd have access to pretty much everything. You'd be limited in releasing them, it would all belong to the band and Double Blind Records.”

  “Right.”

  “Luke was always the sexy front man, but now that he's married, their publicist thinks it would be good to get the remaining single guys out front. Generate some more interest.”

  “That leaves Harrison and Sway,” Zelda murmured, already planning what kinds of things she could do to make Carl's request happen.

  Holy crap, she would be going on tour with her favorite band of all time. When the day had started she was hoping she would, at the very least, be able to shoot their next album marketing scheme.

  This.

  Whoa.

  This was so much bigger.

  She swallowed and looked around the room, realizing that both men were waiting for her to make a decision.

  “Oh, I'll do it,” she confirmed flatly. She'd photograph the shit out of these guys.

  Carl breathed a sigh of relief and gave her his first genuine smile. “Good, because we leave in two days.”

  Shit.

  “Can I bring my cat?” Zelda asked. She was already making alternative arrangements in her head, but she had to ask. Hüsker Dü was priority one.

  “Your cat?” Carl asked, like he had misheard her.

  “Yes, I have a very large, needy, black and white cat named Hüsker Dü. If he can't come with, that's fine. I'll figure something out.”

  “Let me ask the band.” Carl scratched his head, a half-grin on his barely shaved face. “You can't sleep with any of them, okay?”

  Zelda opened her mouth to answer then stopped.

  Carl rolled his eyes in exasperation. “I know they're rock stars. I know that I'm probably going to get in trouble for even having you on tour, but please—”

  “I just agreed to help you clarify their character through pictures. I'm not looking to be a groupie.”

  Carl sighed with relief. “Thank God for that.”

  ***

  Zelda rattled all the way home in her hardly alive Honda Civic. One good thing about moving to L.A. was that she didn't have to worry about cold weather. The Honda was not a fan.

  She bounded up the steps of her apartment building, anxious to call Amber and her parents and anyone else she could think of to tell them her good—no, awesome news.

  Unlocking the door and stepping inside her fourth floor one bedroom, she was accosted by the smell of burnt cheese and hot dogs.

  “Hey,” Matt greeted her from the living room couch. He didn't bother to look up from his video game.

  Zelda pushed her back against the door and felt the latch click into place.

  “Did you make any calls today?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “I was just getting ready to. Had to have lunch first.”

  That explained the burnt cheese smell.

  “It's four o'clock in the afternoon,” she said flatly.

  “Shit, really? Guess I missed it today.”

  Like he had for the past three months.

  Hüsker Dü came sauntering out of the bedroom. “Meeeooow,” he said while he stretched languidly.

  Zelda smiled at her kitty, picked him up and closed them both in her bedroom. Leaving Matt on the couch, which incidentally doubled as his bed.

  Things with Matt had gone drastically downhill from their first date. He had fed her a small sob story about being dumped by the love of his life, and Zelda had taken pity on him. He was attractive and had paid for dinner, so she agreed to go on another date with him.

  After that, he had morphed into the project that wouldn't go away. This is what happened when you fed stray dogs, her grandmother had warned.

  Except he wasn't a project, so much as a leech. She had never asked him to move in, he'd just started to... not go home. And Zelda felt sorry for him. So she let him stay.

  Memo to self: staying in a relationship with someone because you feel sorry for them is the worst reason ever. Not only are you not doing them any favors, but you severely limit your own social life.

  She couldn't count how many times she'd had to turn down dates with attractive, gainfully employed men because... well, because she had a giant toddler at home that she couldn't get rid of. She couldn't imagine bringing a guy back to her apartment for a movie or dinner or something and having to explain... Matt.

  She set her cat on the bed, went to her closet, and began digging for her suitcase. Explaining to Matt that he was going to be homeless in forty-eight hours was a conversation she didn't want to have. She was feeling less sorry for him and more guilty. Like he'd become a responsibility and she was shirking it in order to go hang out with rock stars. Really, who was going to feed him?

  Her cell phone in her back pocket began to ring. She slid it out, glancing at the display. Amber, excellent.

  “Hey.”

  “So... how did it go?”

  “I'm leaving in two days to go on tour—”

  Zelda had to pull the phone away from her ear when Amber squealed like a lunatic. By the time she put it back in place, Amber was asking her questions rapid-fire. Zelda did her best to answer them while being careful not to break the confidentiality contract she'd just signed a half hour ago.

  “What about Mister Dü?” Amber asked.

  “They'll get back to me.”

  “What about Matt?”

  Zelda heard the undisguised contempt in Amber's voice.

  Amber had been Zelda's best friend since the first day they had met in second grade. She supported Zelda's every life decision, including moving to L.A. to pursue her dream. But she hated Zelda's boyfriend with a fiery passion.

  And they'd only met once.

  Not that Zelda could even call him a boyfriend. He was like a guy she slept with a couple of times and who morphed into a roommate turned layabout. But there wasn't really a word to describe all that.

  Zelda sat down on the edge of the bed. “I haven't told him yet.”

  “You know, this would be the perfect opportunity for you to tell him that it's just not working out.”

  “Yeah.” Zelda knew she was right. It's not like she was super attached or anything. She just kept waiting for him to grow up and do something with his life, instead of making her be the one to tell him to do it. Or he could just move in with whomever he was shagging on the side while she was at work.

  “I really don't know why you're with him,” Amber declared for probably the millionth time.

  “Because he was pretty?” Zelda answered with the truth, even though that had worn off pretty quickly. It was hard to admit lack of backbone to her best friend. It was easier to just let her believe she was shallow.

  Sort of.

  “He hasn't had a job in months, he never pays for anything, he treats you like crap—”

  “Yep, and you can add: is more than likely cheating on me to the list.”

  “What?!”

  “It's all right,” Zelda tried to calm down the flurry of expletives that were coming through the other end. “Well, it's not all right that he's cheating, that's not what I meant. What I meant was, I'm leaving in two days and he is staying here.”

  “Good.”

  They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes.

  “I'm very excited for you.”

  Zelda smiled. “I know you are.”

  “It's finally happening for you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you leave me on speakerphone when you dump Fatty Matty?”

  “I have to go,” Zelda laughed into the phone.

  “Please! You can
call it an early birthday present!”

  “I'll talk to you later.”

  “Fine. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Zelda chuckled as she tossed her phone on the bed. Amber wasn't wrong, the time to kick Matt to the curb was months ago.

  “There's no time like the present. Right, kitten?” she asked her big cat, who rolled onto his back so she could pet his tummy.

  She tried not to drag her feet as she went back to the living room. It's not that she didn't want to break up with him. She did. She just didn't want to have to kill her happy I-just-got-the-job-of-my-dreams buzz.

  She leaned one shoulder against the wall of the mouth of the hallway and faced Matt on the couch.

  When they had met four months ago, he had been so much prettier. Tall, broad shoulders, large blue eyes, high cheekbones. But his six-pack had been replaced with a little potbelly from eating fast food and sitting like he was right now on the couch. All slouched over and crooked. He could still hide the belly if he tried. For instance, if his friends came over, he'd straighten up and suck it in.

  But Zelda knew.

  It was a little pooch of neglect.

  He couldn't hide it from her. Nor did he try.

  When he'd moved in three months ago, she hadn't exactly been thrilled. The bloom had already started to fall from their freshly blossomed romance. But she thought maybe it was just a rut they were stuck in.

  Until he got fired from his fourth job in as many weeks and she realized that he was the one in the rut. The lazy, self-serving, live-off-his-girlfriend rut.

  He was a bum, to use her dad's word.

  And for far too long, he'd been her bum.

  He could hardly be considered a boyfriend at all. He was like the world's worst roommate. Except he'd never chipped in for rent, utilities, or food. Ever.

  Which was weird because he always seemed to have gas in his car, a sweet little Nissan that never missed a tune-up.

  “Hey, you wanna order pizza or something?” Matt didn't even look up as he asked her.

  “Sure, are you paying?” she volleyed dryly.

  He laughed.

  She didn't.

  “Princess.” He flicked his eyes toward her, then back to the screen. “You know I don't have any money.”

  No shit.

  His cell phone chirped and he paused the game, tapped out a reply and went back to playing.

  Zelda eyed the phone—the six-hundred-dollar Samsung that he had purchased a week ago. That phone could have paid their rent this month. That's what she had told him when he'd brought it home. His response had been to ask if she was on the rag again, and then he went out with his friends so she could “cool off.”

  It didn't matter now.

  She started a new job in two days. Matt was history.

  Or he would be very soon.

  “Who was that?” Zelda asked casually, moving into the tiny kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

  “Tyler.”

  “Oh.”

  The phone chirped again.

  He paused the game, replied, and went back to playing.

  This happened several more times while Zelda boiled the water, got her tea ready, steeped it, added honey.

  Pretty soon Matt got up and headed to the bathroom.

  “Tyler wants to meet up tonight, I might be going out.” He closed the bathroom door.

  Zelda listened to the shower turn on and she wandered over to where he had left his phone on the couch. She thought about checking the texts just to see if he was telling the truth. But catching him cheating wouldn't have mattered. She was leaving day after tomorrow.

  She just had to rip the band-aid off.

  It's not like she was in love with the guy. She wasn't even in like with him anymore. They hadn't had sex in months, and she knew he was probably getting it somewhere else.

  Truthfully, she had been hoping he'd just leave. She'd expected to come home one day and find him gone. Leaving her to go back to her happily single life where she and Hüsker Dü didn't have to step over men's underwear in the living room and fight for space on the tiny table in the eat-in kitchen among his dirty dishes and fast food garbage.

  She looked around the small apartment, crammed with his trash and dirty clothes. It had been so cute when she'd first moved in.

  Boys are stupid, she surmised cynically. And they smelled bad.

  And she seriously disliked confrontation. So she had put if off until it had grown into this. And this was a very gross place to be.

  Matt's phone rang and she glanced down at the display.

  Tyler.

  Weirdly, Zelda had never met Tyler. She'd met dozens of his other friends, had made more sandwiches for them than she could count, but Tyler had never come over.

  Curiosity, and maybe her newly official lack of care for decorum, getting the better of her, she answered the phone before it reached voicemail.

  “Hello?”

  “Who's this?” a female voice asked sharply.

  Zelda smiled. Finger, meet big red button.

  “This is Zelda, who's this?”

  “Is Matt there?” the girl asked. She sounded angry. At least one of them was angry. Zelda had officially reached sardonic.

  “Yes, he's in the shower. Is this Tyler?”

  Silence.

  “What's he doing in the shower?”

  “I'm not sure...” Zelda said, drawing out her voice like she truly wondered. “Whatever it is cheating bums do in the shower, I suppose.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” the girl asked in a way that said that if it was a joke, she did not find it funny.

  “Nope, not a joke,” Zelda said carefully. She didn't want to be mean to the girl. Chances were, she had no idea Matt was such a dick. But at the same time, she wasn't going to lie to her. “I'll have him call you when he gets out.”

  “O-okay,” the girl said, completely unsure of how to handle this situation. That was okay; Zelda would do the bulk of the heavy lifting.

  Zelda hung up the phone, walked into the bathroom, and flushed the toilet.

  Matt's surprised yelp wasn't as satisfying as she was hoping it would be.

  He shut off the water and threw the curtain back.

  “Princess,” he began to pontificate, reaching for a towel. “It's not funny when you do that to people.”

  Zelda closed her eyes, attempting to steel herself against his idiocy. “Two things,” she said calmly. “First, do not call me Princess again unless you want me to empty the cat box into your underwear drawer.” Her eyes opened. “Second, Tyler called.”

  She slid his phone across the counter towards him.

  He froze. His giant Adam's apple bobbed grotesquely as he swallowed. How had she never noticed the size of that thing before?

  “This is good, actually,” Zelda went on calmly. “I've been looking for a way out of—” she waved a hand back and forth between them—“this... for a while now. I haven't paid rent yet, and seeing as I got a new job today—thanks for asking, by the way—I'm not going to need to hold onto the apartment...”

  She trailed off, waiting for him to catch up.

  Part of her felt bad. She knew that she was a little bit responsible for this. If she didn't think she could have 'fixed' him or whatever, it never would have gone on as long as it did.

  New rule: no more pity dates. None.

  Matt's face remained blank. Not guarded or cautious or anything that would signal he was aware of what she'd just told him. Just... blank.

  So she went back to her bedroom to finish packing. She'd said what needed to be said. He could do what he wanted with it.

  As far as possessions went, she didn't have much, and what she couldn't take with her, she could just give to her friend Mindee who lived two units over.

  Matt came into the bedroom behind her and rifled through some dirty clothes on the floor, smelling different shirts before settling on one and slipping it over his head.

  “I have to meet u
p with Tyler, but when I get back we'll talk. You can tell me all about your new job,” he said, sitting on the end of the bed and slipping on some socks.

  Zelda turned to him slowly, her face frowning in disbelief. He couldn't be serious right now.

  “No. I just broke up with you,” she said, starting to wonder if she had imagined that whole thing. She kept the anger out of her voice. Maybe it was the sarcasm that had thrown him off, he was never very good at understanding her. Still. “I know that Tyler isn't real and you're cheating on me.”

  He stared at her, his face blank.

  Okay, she hadn't been sarcastic at all that time. This shouldn't be that hard.

  “Are—um, are you feeling okay?” She was oscillating between thinking he was really that stupid (but no one could be that stupid, right?), and wondering what was in those cheddar dogs he ate all of the time.

  Lacing his fingers together he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his lips pursed... in pity? Seriously? “Listen, Princess, I know things have been hard around here the past couple of weeks. I'm going to go hang out with Tyler and give you some time to cool off. We'll talk when I get home.”

  He stood up, dismissing what she was sure was a look of disbelieving horror on her face.

  “We're breaking up,” she said again, then shook her head. “We're broken up. Done.”

  He shook his head and gave her a cocky smile that she had never found as endearing as he thought she did.

  “You're so cute when you're angry.” He picked up his wallet and keys off of the dresser and kissed her cheek on the way by. “Awesome about the new job. Looking forward to getting a better place. This will be good for us.”

  “What?” she asked, rubbing her hand over her face in an attempt to clear her thoughts. “No, this isn't a fight...” Was her brain leaking out of her ears? Was this how she was going to die? Still in a relationship with a jackass simply because he was too stupid to be dumped?

  “Sure it is,” he said, tucking his wallet in his back pocket and sauntering to the door. “Lots of couples fight. Working through those fights is what love is all about.”

  “I don't love you,” she blurted out, the desperation to be both heard and believed causing her voice to pitch and crack. The door closing behind him was the only reply.