Z O E Y
The door of my bedroom swung open at 3 a.m on a school night. This wasn't good.
"What is this?" My mom's voice was still asleep, but she was not. She was very much awake. She turned the lights on. I wished she hadn't. I could see the crow feet in the corner of her eyes.
She looked at me. She wasn't happy. I was. I had started reading a new book yesterday, a garage-sale-find like no other, and here I was, deep into the night, about to finish it, with tears in my eyes. Mom was still not happy. I decided I would explain.
"Mom, you don't understand." Not the best start. "My brain was like, go to bed. You told me to go to bed. Even Daisy told me to go to bed. But then the book was like, read me. And my mind just went, yes, daddy."
"What have I done to deserve this?" she groaned.
Not just a bad start then. Mom rubbed sleep off her eyes and walked closer to my bed.
I said, "You did drop me on my head a lot as a kid."
She said, "Give me the book."
Before I could even think about it, she snatched the book off my hands.
"Mom, please! Just one more chapter." I begged, reaching for her as she walked away, half of my body out of my bed. There was only one chapter left.
"Go to sleep, Zoey," she said in a yawn as she turned the lights off and left.
I fell off my bed.
"Fuck!"
I woke up. I didn't want to. It felt like I had fallen asleep just minutes before. There was a big plot hole somewhere in there and I wasn't the one who was going to figure it out. I was too tired to.
"Zoey!" Mom was already up. I could hear downstairs, doing the dishes we had been too lazy to wash the night before. I didn't answer. Mom wasn't too convinced on my alarm's ability to wake me up, so she screamed every morning.
I slid into a pair of old jeans and a black turtleneck I had stolen from my mom's closet weeks ago. She was yet to have the chance to wear something other than her work uniform or her pajama to notice it. I walked into the kitchen. Mom was packing her lunch. Daisy was calling me. I picked up.
"Good morning –"
"I never went to sleep last night," she confessed.
"Excuse me?"
"I'm so tired, you have no idea."
I got myself a bowl of cereal and waited for more. Mom was already glaring at me.
"I found this new tv show and I just couldn't stop watching it. I finished the first season and then I had to stop because my alarm was ringing, and, oh my god! Is it morning already? I can feel the comedown coming for me. It's gonna be bad, Zoey."
"Can I know what tv show did this to you?" I had a mouth full of cocoa puffs. Mom was still glaring. "I wanna watch it too. Why did you even watch it without me if it was that good?"
"Cause it was that good! I couldn't stop! Like, I held my pee for so long, I thought I was gonna explode –"
My mom's glare intensified.
"Wait," I had to stop her. "My mom's looking at me. I'll talk to you at school."
"Okay, I'm so excited for you though! You're gonna love it!" She hung up.
"Why does she call at 7.30 a.m?" mom asked, sipping from her bitter black coffee.
"She has no concept of time." I shrugged.
Mom frowned, throwing her bag over her shoulder, "I'm not paying your phone bill."
I almost choked on my cereal, "Is that my book?"
My mom smirked, "Yes."
"Why are you taking it to work with you?"
"Well, it kept you up until 3 a.m, didn't it? It must be good. I'm gonna give it a try." She was way too amused by all of it. I wasn't amused at all. I did want her to read it but not before I did.
"I haven't even finished it yet."
Mom smiled, "Don't worry. I'll tell you how it ends."
"Mom!" I was finished with my cereal and up on my feet, reaching for my book. My mom snatched her bag away before I could reach it.
"Zoey, we've been over this," she said, walking to the kitchen door. "You can't go to bed that late on school nights. I am not sitting in front of any of your teachers again to explain why my daughter slept through their classes. I don't even know how to explain-"
"It's a really good book," I tried, but something told me I wouldn't get to finish it.
"Oh, I bet it is."
I grabbed my schoolbag, "Can you at least tell me what you thought of it?"
She smiled, moving to kiss my cheek before heading off to work, "I will."
I stayed still for a while, basking in her perfume before it was gone.
"I do love you, mom!" She was out the door already, but I could still hear her.
"More than all those boy bands?"
I almost laughed, "Know your limits!"
I doubted she heard it. I could hear her car engine coming on. I looked at the reminder on my phone instead – ask mom for concert tickets. Well, that hadn't gone well. I tapped the remind me tomorrow option and slid the phone into my pocket. All of it felt too much like yesterday when I had done the exact same thing.
I washed my cereal bowl in the sink and set it on the rack to dry. I had no idea how I was going to pay for the tickets. All my savings had gone into the schoolbooks for this year and the money I had made this summer at the ice cream parlor was untouchable. Mom said so. Apparently, college was more important than most concerts. I was still gathering the right arguments to refute that.
Outside, piles of leaves gathered on the sidewalks and the September sun hid under the brownstone apartment buildings across the street. I unlocked my bike from the railing and climbed on it, putting my headphones over my head. Then I pressed play, and just like that, life was good.
I was convinced the classroom clocks had been made in hell, convinced they somehow altered time and five minutes feel like fifty, ten like a hundred. There was consistency but an unholy one.
History class dragged on like a sloth. I wrote down 20 minutes under Daisy's 25 minutes. On our good days, we tracked time in less petty ways. I believed it had started with us keeping track of every half an hour that went by in class and ended with us breathing in relief with victories as small as five minutes gone.
"Oh," I remembered. "I figured I can't ask my mom for the tickets."
I wasn't exactly taking the title of most likely to slay a dragon home any time soon. Daisy's head had been spasming for the last half an hour, every time falling a little bit closer to the top of our desk. I didn't want to have to watch her head split open, but I couldn't just hold her head for her, so I just kept coming up with things to say to keep her awake.
This has definitely worked because she opened her eyes wide, and asked, almost too loud, "What?"
"The tickets. I have to get them myself."
She rubbed her eyes, "Why?"
"I just don't have it in me to ask my mom," I admitted. "But it's fine, I can make some money. I've done it before, right?"
She said, "Right," but she didn't sound like she believed me. I grabbed a pencil and wrote down my options on the margin of my own textbook. I was halfway through the word tutoring, when Daisy laughed, a loud, vibrant, one ah! only laugh.
"You think you can be a tutor?" she asked, but I never got to answer.
"Miss Daisy," the teacher said from the front of the class. "Do you mind sharing with the class?"
I could feel Daisy wanting to die right next to me. I knew I did. Everyone was looking at us. Of course this wasn't the first time it happened. Daisy and I had been forced apart in some classes before because, surprise, surprise, yes, we did mind sharing it with the class.
"I'm sorry," Daisy said, cheeks as pink as her strawberry milk t-shirt.
Mrs. Donovan's face said, I thought so, but her mouth said something about the US government. I turned back to Daisy.
"Why do you need to laugh so loud?"
She hid her face in her hands, elbows prompted on top of her textbook, where she had written a bunch of lyrics from different songs.
"I'm unhinged," she concluded with a heavy sigh.
"A little bit, yes," I said under my breath, pretending to follow the reading of whatever paragraph we were on. I suspected I wasn't even on the right page. "Anyway, what the fuck? You don't think I can be a tutor?"
"Zoey, you need a tutor," she said. I frowned. I wasn't a very good student, but I wasn't that bad. She went on, "You could get a part-time job."
"Do I have the time though?"
"Yes!" She seemed suddenly excited about the idea. "You could work at a cute coffee shop. Or an old bookstore. Or a record –"
"Are you done?"
"Obviously not," she said. "What are you really good at?"
I thought about it.
"I feel like my mom would love to answer that."
"Right," she said. "Besides memorizing song lyrics, writing fanfic, analyzing entire character and story arcs, and –"
"I'm useless," I concluded.
"I bet you're good with kids," someone said from behind us. Daisy and I hit our heads together with the suddenness of it all.
"What the fuck? Are you eavesdropping?" Daisy asked, turning back to one other than Luke Martin.
"I wouldn't put it that way," he said with a shrug. "I just like what you're saying better than whatever she's on about over there."
"You're eavesdropping," Daisy decided. Daisy and Luke were different sides of the same coin, but the same coin still. Daisy had decided she didn't like him and had stuck with it like a kid who decided she did not like broccoli even though she never even tried it.
I had hoped for a love-hate sort of thing, as one does, something exciting to keep me entertained, but nothing ever happened. Luke was Luke, and Daisy was Daisy, none of their fights ever ended up with them making out. I was disappointed, to say the least.
"Fine, I was," Luke said. I looked down at his textbook. He had doodles of funky little creatures all over it. "Did you do the homework for Spanish?"
Daisy narrowed her eyes at him, "Wouldn't you like to know that?"
"Yes, that's why I asked," he said in confusion. I glanced over at the teacher. Usually, by now, she would be telling us to turn back around and pay attention. She wasn't. Instead, she had her back turned to all of us and was explaining the diagram she was drawing on the board.
"Well, I did," Daisy said. "It hurt me. It hurt me a lot, but I did. Mr. Campbell should be in jail for that."
"I would say life sentence with no chance of parole, at least," Luke said with a slight grin. I thought it was cute, Daisy was choking on pride. She would wait until she got home to laugh at anything Luke said.
"Did you do the homework?" he asked me. I hadn't realized I had to participate in this interaction.
"Yes?" I didn't think it sounded very confident.
"Why does it sound like you didn't?" he asked. I wished he hadn't.
"She did," Daisy said. "She finished three months of homework in a week. Pretty impressive."
"Why didn't you do it over the summer?" he asked. Again, I wished he hadn't. I was about to open my mouth to answer when Daisy did it for me.
"Because what kind of stupid question is that?" Oops. "Did you actually think that was going to help in any way or were you just trying to make yourself feel better at her expense when she's clearly already exhausted from doing all that work?! What kind of shitty thing is that for a friend to do? Did it even cross your mind that all she wanted was a little sympathy and not an excuse to beat herself even further?"
Luke's eyes were wide open now, his eyebrows furrowed in both fascination and confusion, head slightly bent to the side as if considering.
"Are we friends?" he asked.
Daisy rolled her eyes and turned back around. I drew in a sharp breath and gave him the best smile I could come up with, given I had unleashed whatever that had been on him, and then turned around too.
In front of me, a new item had been added to my list:
babysitting
My mom had a friend who had another friend who knew of a family that needed a babysitter. I had all the excitement but none of the experience, which was kept in secret for convenience purposes, of course.
I was standing in front of their house, wondering if it really had been a good idea letting mom arrange the whole thing herself. She had been so excited about me making some money, she had just given me the address, and sent me off. I was starting to wonder if she gad given me the right one.
It had been a while since I first rung the bell, and nothing had happened. The lights were on inside. I could see that much from the large windows on every wall there was. The whole house reminded me of a kids' Lego game. All in all, it was a set of different material blocks staked on top of each other in precarious ways. A miniature of it would be the kind of sculpture people put in museums.
The door opened. I wasn't excited anymore. Under the door frame, Tristan Young looked at me like I was about to try and sell him a bible. Tristan was the kind of person that used bibles to start fires. The one voted most likely to end up in jail. I had heard a lot of things and none of them said, come on in. If they did, there had to be a clause that added, if you want to feel like shit. All the same, rumors or no rumors, he struck me as someone determined on hating the world and everyone who didn't. The kind to steal candy from a kid, not leave a tip, or a smile, not pet a dog, smoke in a non-smoking area, not thank taxi drivers, be mean to his mom. I could think of plenty.
Daisy thought there was something tempting about the concept of it all, your trademark bad boy. I thought there wasn't. I thought it might be cute on paper, but that was about it. In the real world, there was nothing cute about someone set out on making you feel like shit. The world was terrible enough without people going around being terrible to each other.
I looked at everything except his eyes. I felt them on me like an ice cube. He had a shaved head, a nose piercing, and a lip piercing, and he was wearing all black. Black jeans, a black t-shirt, black socks, and all-black shoes. There was no way he could go wrong with such an easy color scheme. Daisy gave bad boys too much credit.
I heard the rumors playing in my head like a narrator I hadn't asked for.
I heard he sacrificed a goat in the school basement.
I'm pretty sure he stabbed a guy's hand because he was eating in an annoying way.
He burnt his parents beach house because he was bored.
He spent his Summer in jail for killing his drug dealer.
I felt uneasy. I didn't believe all of them. I wasn't sure if I even believed any of them. It was the possibility that unsettled me. He couldn't be very nice if people went around saying all that about him.
"And who the fuck are you?" he asked with the voice of someone who smoked too much.
"I'm Zoey. I'm here to babysit Sam?" I looked down at the name on my mom's text message. "Sam Young. I might be in the wrong house."
Tristan thought about it for a while. I had never heard of Tristan being someone's big brother. I imagined being that little boy, going to bed every night knowing your brother went around threatening to throw knives at people.
"I really wish you were," he said finally, turning around and walking away inside the house. He left the door open behind him, but I just stood there.
"Are you all there?" he asked, coming to a stop halfway through the hallway, turning around slowly as he tapped his finger on his temple. I couldn't wait for him to disappear.
"Probably not," I said, more to myself than him, on the move again. This time I followed.
After the entryway, where stone walls hung family pictures I wish I had the time to look at, an open space gathered both the family living room and the dining area. Windows that started at ground level and stopped only at the ceiling opened the space even more, letting the eye wander to the backyard where ground lights illuminated a large lawn and a small deck with another dining table.
Tristan seemed out of place in the middle of it all, like a black cat that had wondered in a house meant for golden retrievers only. I watched him move through the mid-century modern sofas with handpicked pillows to match and the coffee table with pillar candles on it and expensive magazines and –
"What the fuck are you doing?" he asked, stopping at once. I almost walked into him.
"Oh, I don't know the house," I said. How was this not obvious to him?
He turned around, hands on his waist, eyes turned down at me. He was a long slim torso and even longer slimmer legs. I didn't know what to tell him.
"So you're just gonna follow me around for the rest of the night?" he asked like I was really not all there. I wished I wasn't. I wished I wasn't here at all. I was looking at the piercings on both his nose and his bottom lip when he yelled, "Sam! Come down! Your new mom is here."
I was also right about this. He probably wasn't very nice to his mom, was he?
I looked around again. There was a big potted plant I had never managed to convince mom to buy between the windows and the fireplace. The chairs around the dining room table didn't seem like they were meant for sitting but the table was covered in what seemed to be middle school textbooks. I waited for the middle scholar to show himself, fingers crossed he wasn't a child-sized Tristan.
"Hi!" He wasn't. He was ruffled dirty-blonde hair and the face of an angel.
"Hi!" I said and then hated myself for it. A shriek. I'd just shrieked. Great. I tried again, "You must be Sam-"
"No, I'm Sam," Tristan said, again, like I was not all there. He was leaning against the wooden stairwell upstairs, where Sam had come from.
I ignored him. I suspected his whole thing was that he craved attention.
"I'm Zoey," I said to the little boy, stretching my hand out to him. He was still in his school uniform, probably a private school if the smart pants, the buttoned-up shirt, and the blazer with the school's crest over his heart were anything to go by. I was beyond myself with how cute he looked. I wanted to reach out and squeeze his cheeks, but I knew most kids hated it, so I stopped myself instead.
Sam balanced on the heel of his shoes and smiled as he let his little hand fall back beside his body, "Nice to meet you."
"What the fuck?" Tristan stepped in again, sounding disappointed. "I like the old you better."
"How's the old him like?" I asked, frowning at Tristan when Sam's eyes decided to stick with the smart shoes on his feet.
"Like the real him," Tristan said, shaking his head and starting up the stairs.
I looked at Sam as he threw himself on the couch.
"Did you burn your parents' beach house?" I hadn't decided if I was teasing him or seriously asking yet.
Sam smirked but ignored me, turning on the tv instead to some kids cartoon I had never seen in my life.
I faked a gasp, "Are you a serial killer?"
He was suddenly very serious, "My brother says I shouldn't let people call me that, even if the doctor says –"
"What?" I had watched enough crime shows to know no one was a serial killer at the age of nine. Maybe he had killed a few animals, sure, but not –
He burst out laughing.
"I'm kidding, you idiot!" Ouch. "I didn't think you'd believe me! You should have seen your face!"
He was laughing so much, he had to bend over himself, his face suddenly the color of the flames in the fireplace.
"Please tell me you're in your school's drama club."
He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm down, but I thought he had more in him.
"Take your time," I said, smiling and sitting down on the couch next to him. Once, Daisy and I had laughed for so long about something, the next day we couldn't move without our stomachs hurting.
Eventually, Sam came back to himself.
"No," he said. "I'm not in the drama club. Tristan says clubs are dumb."
"I'm sure he does." I shrugged. "What do you think?"
"About what?" He was looking at the tv screen like it needed him to pay attention.
"About clubs."
"I don't know," he said with a small shrug that meant he did. "I guess the art club is cool. They get to use all these wacky things to do whatever they want. It's cool. Right?"
"It seems very cool. Why don't you join?"
"Well, Dave is on it, and everyone makes fun of him for it. I'm nine years old, I don't need that kind of trauma."
I laughed, "I'm guessing those are Tristan's words."
Sam nodded with a smile, eyes still on the tv screen, "He says there are less sucky ways to build character. He didn't use the word sucky. I'm just not allowed to say what he actually said, but you can guess, right?"
"Right." I smiled.
"Anyway," he said, looking at me. Had I earned his attention yet? "I don't really know what he means."
"Well," I thought about it for a while. "I guess he means that being made fun of would make you strong, but you're nine years old, you don't need to be strong, you need to feel safe. And there are plenty of other ways to make you grow into a strong boy anyway, right?"
"Right," he said, eyes wide widen as if it helped him see what I meant better.
I frowned, "Do you make fun of Dave?"
Sam shook his head very fast, "No! Dave's really nice. We're friends. He lets me borrow his comic books all the time, and when he comes over, we work on our own comic book. Well, it's not really a comic book, because we're nine years old, so we don't really know how to draw all that well, or write, I think our teacher would cry if she saw the spelling on that thing, but anyway, listen, we made this really wacky story, and we tried drawing it out with the speech bubbles and everything, and, well, I think, Dave thinks the same, that it's really cool. He's coming over this weekend. I have a new video game I want him to play, but I bet we're gonna be working on our comic book too."
Sam spoke very fast as if he had both a lot to say and an outstanding understanding of people's lack of a lengthy attention span. I decided I liked Sam.
"What's it about?"
Sam went on. I thought he really wanted to. The book was about two nine years old superheroes, Mas and Evad (their names spelled backward), who spent their days fighting bad guys and the struggles of middle school.
"Mas is invisible so it's really easy to draw him because you don't have to draw anything at all," he said, laughing. I smiled. He went on. "In the first chapter, he doesn't really like being invisible because no one sees him. It gets really annoying at school because the teacher never sees it when he raises his hand, so he can't participate, and in gym class, no one picks him because they can't see him either, and when he's home, his family forgets he's even there because well, they can't see him."
He went on. I suddenly saw him very well, sitting next to me on the couch, legs crossed so he could sit facing me, hands going to too many places at once as he spoke. The character named Evad didn't feel any pain, which could be annoying because it meant he didn't know when to get out of dangerous situations since he didn't know he was in them in the first place. I thought it was all very insightful.
"Anyway, listen," Sam kept interrupting himself to make sure I was still listening, like a phone call with bad signal that makes you wonder if the other person is still there every other minute. "With time, they learn to make the best of their superpowers, so it's really fun. Like, Mas can go watch all the movies he wants, and he can cheat on tests pretty easily, and he can talk to girls, and -"
"What do you mean, he can talk to girls?" I was tempted to laugh.
Sam shrugged, "Well, I don't really know how to talk to girls."
"Why?"
"I get really nervous sometimes, but see, Mas is invisible, so he can just say whatever he wants to them without being embarrassed. Tristan says Mas will probably come out as gay in the sequel, but I don't think so."
Now I was laughing.
"What does Mas say to the girls?"
"Right," he said, sitting even straighter. "There's this chapter where he spends the whole day whispering things in girls' ears, and they all think it's in their head when it's really just Mas. It's really fun."
"All good things I hope."
"Well, yes, that's why Tristan makes fun of him, but I think it's nice. Like, he says to this girl that he likes her braids, and then to another girl, he says she's really pretty. I could never do that, but Mas does. He also sometimes just says they're really smart, or good at dodge ball, or that they have pretty handwriting."
"I think that's really nice of Mas. I think he's my favorite character."
"Oh, but Evad is also really nice. He fights bullies." He went on. I listened.
"Can I see this book?"
Sam threw his head back in an embarrassed smile, "I don't know. It's not ready yet."
"Okay," I said, "Well, I really hope I get to see it when you finish it. I think you're really onto something here."
"You do?"
"Absolutely," I said with a smile. "What other comic books do you like?"
He went on. Time did too. He dragged me up to his bedroom at one point, so I could see his comic book collection – it was very impressive, and I was suddenly very jealous – and then back down again because he wanted to play a game with me. Because he didn't know how to turn on his game console and I had no idea either, we had to go for a board game. We sat across each other, the coffee table between us with the game Guess Who? laid on top of it.
"Is it a boy?" he asked.
"Really?" Tristan's voice almost pulled a scream out of me. "You're playing that game?"
Why was I even needed if Tristan was going to be home the whole time? Wasn't he old enough to take care of his little brother? Rich people didn't know how to live.
"I wanna play too," he said when Sam just looked at him like a kid caught being bad. "Guess who's hungry?"
"You?" Sam asked, smirking.
"Right!" Tristan said, ruffling his brother's hair when he walked past him to crash on the couch. He looked at me, "Do you wanna make yourself useful?"
"I don't remember agreeing to babysit you as well," I said. I wasn't sure I had wanted to say it. I just knew I had. I couldn't help but look at him and see a big sign that read, proceed with caution. I felt I had just done the opposite.
Tristan frowned in confusion. His eyes were the surface of a frozen lake stretched as far as the eye could see, and I felt very small under their scrutiny. I looked away. He leaned over on the couch to check my game. The smell of cigarettes leaned over too and some other smell I couldn't put my finger on but would very much like to.
"She looks like a bitch, Sam," he said once his scan was completed, leaning back on the couch after. Sam smiled in triumph.
"Is it Katherine?" he asked.
"Yes?" My face was all confusion, "How did you guess?"
Tristan had a smug smile on his face that vanished just as it had appeared, replaced instead with bright teeth coming out to play with his lip ring.
"Game over, right?" he said with a shrug, "Sam, are you hungry?"
Sam nodded his head. If the gesture had a voice it would ask, yes? Is that the right answer?
I wanted to say something, but Tristan was looking at me and I was too busy trying not to look back at him.
"Great! Isn't this just so convenient, Z..." He dragged out the Z.
"Zoey."
"Right, I don't really care." He shrugged. "My brother really likes cheese toast."
I wanted to message Daisy to tell her we had been tricked by years of glamorized bad boys. There was nothing glamorous about being treated like shit. It was just shit.
"Oh, and Zola," he said as I started moving. Either he had a strong case of short-term memory loss, or he was just being shitty. "Don't forget Sam eats for two."
My favorite characters would have stood up for themselves, but I just stood up. I didn't feel like wasting my energy on this. I thought there must be some dignity in letting shitty people do shitty things without gratifying them with a reaction, but probably it just meant this: Zoey, baby, you're a little bitch.
I made my way to the kitchen. I only had to walk inside to feel better about the whole thing. It was the kitchen my mom and I dreamed of – stone counters with beautiful wooden and metallic details, an isle in the very middle with pretty flowers in a big pretty vase, a sink so beautiful it would be a pleasure to do the dishes, matching cutlery and plates and bowls and glasses and mugs – I suddenly wanted to cook a meal for a whole family. I didn't.
Instead, I poured Sam a glass of orange juice and prepared one cheese toast only, which I cut in half and piled on top of each other. There, a meal for two, if only both parts were a nine-year-old only mildly hungry.
Then I walked back into the living room. Sam was still sitting on the floor, eyes fixed on the tv screen where Tristan was watching some inappropriate adult cartoon. He looked away from it when I walked in and placed the plate in front of Sam, handing him the glass of juice.
"Enjoy," I said, with a smile.
Tristan rolled his eyes, "When I said he eats for two, I mean two people, not two hamsters."
"You should have specified," I said, sitting on the other end of the couch. The control remote was sitting between us. He saw me stare at it and moved it further away.
"That my brother is not a hamster?" he asked, eyes wide open. It said, you really aren't all there, are you?
I didn't answer him, pretending to watch the tv show instead. Sam was smiling at his toast, mouth full of it. Tristan got up from the couch and left for the kitchen. I could breathe again.
"Do you think he's mad?" I asked Sam. I knew he was.
Sam shrugged, "He says he never cares enough to be mad, but I don't think so. I think he's always mad."
"Right," I said, looking for the remote, "What do you wanna watch?"
Sam smiled while trying to chew as fast as he could so he could answer me without spitting food all over everything. I stopped him when I realized it.
"Actually," I told him. "I think we might be stuck with this."
Sam looked confused, but then Tristan walked out of the kitchen and towards the staircase, holding a pack of beers, a cup of noodles, and the remote. Even with all of that in his hands, he still managed to flip me off on his way up the stairs.
Daisy really was wrong. There was nothing tempting about a bad boy.