With her phone placed strategically in her hand like a microphone, she sings loudly along to the song.
“That’s the most ridiculous song,” I complain. “Get outta my dreams, get into my car? Really?”
“You’ve never wanted a hot girl to get outta your dreams and into your car? How about to touch your bumper?”
“If by bumper you mean cock, then yes,” I admit.
“Honestly, Drew, no respect for the classics. License to Drive was the best movie ever. I loved the Coreys,” she informs me, bopping her head along to the music. The song ends, much to my pleasure, until
Boy George plays and an excited Zoey sings at the top of her lungs, off key, something about a chameleon.
With the visor pulled down, she grabs her Lipsmacker and applies it carefully. Zoey has the habit of applying that stuff a million times a day, and she only uses the stuff that tastes like different beverages. Even her lip balm’s full of sugar and junk.
“Anyway, so this damn book you’re going on about...”
“Oh yeah! So, the guy’s like the biggest jerk ever and get this… he’s pierced,” she narrates excitedly. “Then he screws this chick in the alleyway, and she gets knocked up. After one night… can you believe that?”
“Zo, it’s fiction. Anything is possible, but yes, I do believe it. Medically speaking—”
“Hold the medical, scientific mumbo-jumbo. Don’t kill my buzz.”
“Fine,” I mutter under my breath.
I swear Zoey can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes. For the most part we get along, but she’s plain old stubborn, living in this imaginary bubble filled with pizza and book boyfriends. Not that I have much spare time with my hectic schedule. I do enjoy reading when I get a chance. The past few years have had me focusing on studying, so textbooks became my life. Yet, every now and then, I love to pick up a Stephen King novel and immerse myself in his stories. No one’s pierced in that type of novel!
“Are we there yet?” she asks for the tenth time.
I shake my head. “Another hour.”
“Hour!” she yells, crossing her arms like a petulant child. “Fine. I’m going back to sleep.”
With her head leaning against the window, my eyes remain focused as we drive up the windy part of the road. My beaten-up old car barely makes it, choking as I place it into gear. Please don’t break down now.
Betty is my 1954 Volkswagen Beetle—trunk in the front, all power in the back. Lately, she’s been stalling, and I’ve been too busy with work to get under the hood to see what’s happening. I know by taking this drive there’s a chance Betty won’t make it. It’s a chance I’m willing to take, though. My biggest concern is the snorer sitting right next to me.
To set the record straight, Zoey is my roommate, or in her lame terms, ‘roomie.’
It was four years ago when I first laid eyes on her.
There is no doubt Zoey’s a beautiful woman. On the short side with strawberry-blonde hair and pale, delicate skin. Over the years, she’s been through a dozen hairstyles, but even then, it’s her deep pools of green eyes that are like these magical orbs. They have this eerie way of transcending you to a different place. Stupid, I know. In the beginning, she would reprimand me for staring at her and calling me a creepy geek who needed to get laid. Over time, I’ve gotten used to being around her without gawking at her like she’s a Penthouse pin-up girl on my bedroom wall.
As for her personality, Zoey Richards is a lot to handle—feisty, stubborn, and extremely lazy. To be honest, I hadn’t really been around women before meeting her. I was twenty-four and still a virgin.
Call me pathetic.
Women scared me. I was uncomfortable being slightly overweight, and my priorities were to study medicine. Girls didn’t throw themselves at me, and I didn’t have the balls to try anything on them. I had no clue all those years what I was missing out on. Never having a sister or a mother around, I wasn’t sure how to act around women. My dad once told me that women were like badly tuned engines—unpredictable, temperamental, and extremely capricious. This was coming from the man who was burned by a woman—my mother—and since then had a string of one-night stands to avoid being hurt again.
Nevertheless, his words stuck in my head much like that terrible Billy Ocean song.
I guess you could say Zoey’s all that and more. She is ambitious and smart and talked her way out of anything. I told her once she should have studied to be a lawyer but, of course, her passion has remained with architecture—a career that has nothing to do with talking.
It was early last year when she began dating this loser, Jess, or who her friends dubbed ‘Bad Boy Jess.’ Miss Ambitious lost sight of everything, falling head over heels for this guy. I get it, she thought she was in love, and it would end in a happily ever after.
The guy was clearly using her by living almost rent-free with us, and when I brought up Roomie Rule Number Three, she was quick to defend him and paid his share in rent. I wasn’t fucking stupid. She was normally a thrifty saver, just waiting for the day when she could design and afford her dream home. This fucker was eating into her bank account and into someone else’s pussy.
Her work and studies took a big hit, and she almost abandoned her goals so she could party with him on the weekends at out-of-town exotic locations. His drinking was out of control, and as a result, Zoey would come home drunk more times than I could count.
Then it happened—the cat was let out of the bag.