Chapter 1
“Oh, come on! Now is not the time to join the Mile High Club,” Zoe thought angrily. “I’ve got to pee.”
Rocking back and forth from her heels to her toes and back again, Zoe Lawinsky stared up at the light indicating whether the aircraft toilets were engaged. They were. And had been for the last three years, it seemed. Looking over her shoulder, she wondered whether she could scramble over the seats or the food trolley that were preventing her from using the toilets at the back of the plane. They weren’t engaged.
“What the hell are they doing in there? Hmph! Sorry, that was an obvious statement,” she thought to herself.
In all fairness, she hadn’t seen two people enter the toilets. It would be a he, of course, and she would strangle him with her bare hands when he emerged. Women are so much more considerate than that. Has a man ever let her merge into traffic? No. Has a man ever let her stand in front of him in the queue at the movies? Of course not. Maybe it was that blond air hostess with the big boobs? In that case, she would take a bit longer as she would have to re-apply her make-up before showing her face again.
After some quick calculations, Zoe estimated the culprits should be out before they landed in Honolulu where Zoe was changing flights to Los Angeles and then flying on to New York to attend college. That was about six hours away. By then, she either would have puddled on the floor or internally imploded. Neither option sounded very appealing.
“Come on, Zoe. Think about something else,” she thought desperately. “Anything. Anything. Anything. Any ‒ James Halford. Wow! Dreamy James Halford! With his coal-black hair, his black eye-liner and painted-on leather jeans. With those sky-blue eyes that shine like the outback sky on a hot summer’s day. And his pale skin that makes Edward Cullen look like he has a tan. James Halford.”
James Halford had been moved into her Year 12 class halfway through term, as he had been expelled from his previous school. He smoked at the school gates before school or whenever else he got a chance, leaning against the fence with a cigarette hanging loosely between his curving lips. And those eyes! They simply glowed with derision, rimmed in heavy black eye-liner that the teachers tried futilely to get him to remove. He wore the school uniform, only because he had to, but the tie remained jammed in his backpack, the blue shirt unbuttoned slightly to reveal the cluster of dog-tags and Gothic crosses he wore.
Zoe would deliberately hang back to watch every afternoon as he pulled on a torn old leather jacket and helmet before scrambling behind his older brother, Hanson, on the Harley-Davidson road cruiser. Zoe would stand there drooling, listening to the throbbing engine as it slowly faded into the distance.
The two brothers were in a band, The Death Peppers, James the lead vocalist and guitarist, and Hanson the mad drummer. Zoe had seen their posters around town, and they looked awesome, even more dolled up than he was at school ‒ more leather, loads of eye-liner and very, very cool. He dyed his hair last Christmas holidays. Zoe’s parents said he looked like an electrocuted skunk, with the band of pale grey down the middle, frizzed up madly with the aid of three cans of hair spray, but Zoe didn’t care. He looked amazing.
Then school ended, and Zoe got a job. Yeah, OK, it was at Snag-a-Bargain ‒ the cheesiest, tackiest, crappiest discount variety store since the dawn of mankind. Her uniform was canary-yellow and scarlet ‒ a mini-skirt with a polo shirt ‒ and she had to wear the cap. It didn’t matter if it gave her hat hair; she had to wear the cap. And smile, often, even when customers erupted like Icelandic volcanoes because they couldn’t have a refund on something that “no longer suited their needs”.
