Rebuilding Zerrie

Pestiferous Strumpet

"Go to hell," he told me with a beguiling grin on his face. I pulled back on my seat laughing and holding my stomach. I wasn't surprised. Not for a second did I think that he would ever say something that usually followed to the phrases "Three words. Eight letters." I was, in fact, surprised that he came up with something more clever than the usual rebound.

I looked at Harry. He was silently giggling as well. I pointed a finger at him. "You sure fooled me," I told him sarcastically, "Oh, so you think you're some sort of master now at stuff like that?"

"I don't see why I can't label myself as that," he shrugged a shoulder and stuck his tongue out at me and I stuck out mine back. We seemed like two children bickering about something shallow like over who gets to use the Gameboy Advance first. It was nice to act like a kid again, since I was never a normal kid.

Being homeschooled, I didn't go out much. My best friends were my siblings and the people I looked up to weren't really people. They were characters from Final Fantasy and Crash Bandicoot. That was true until I watched The X Factor UK and Katie Smith, Cher Lloyd and One Direction ruined my life.

"Don't flatter yourself, LaQuanda," I rolled my eyes. "You don't even come close to me." I pulled the lever of the cardoor but I realized that the door was still locked. Since it was so stressful to bend my arm just to unlock it, I lay down on Harry's lap and groaned.

"You know, that's not how you give a paying customer a lap dance," he said. I felt his arms resting on the steering wheel, his elbows pressed onto the side of my head. "I demand a refund!" He put his weight on his elbows, crushing my cranium. I cried out in pain and slapped his shoulder. I was aiming for his head but I couldn't really see.

Shaking my head to get his arms off of it, I moaned. "Unlock my door!" I whined over and over again. "I'm not getting out until you unlock it!" With all my energy (which was a lot since I was most hyper after midnight. Yes, I am a gremlin.), I bit his thigh.

He cursed loudly and banged on the window as an expression of pain. "What the hell's wrong with you, pestiferous strumpet?" He yelled but I just continued to laugh. It was so amusing to watch him get annoyed and to hear what he'd call me next. He was so creative with these names. I wondered how he came up with them.

I sat back down on my seat once he told me he'd unlock my door for me. Unlike Niall, who used the power locks to open my door, Harry reached over me and unlocked the door himself. As his body was temporarily over mine, his hair was brushing against my nose and I accidentally sneezed on it. He looked at me in disgust with a snarl on his face.

"I'm sorry I'm not sorry," was all I said before getting out of his car. I ran to the front door whist it was still raining but slipped on a puddle on the porch. I couldn't even imagine how hysterical Harry was inside his car. He was lucky there was something separating him from the rest of the world or he'd be dead right now.

For the first time, my family wasn't waiting for me in the dining room or living room. They were all either asleep or locked inside their rooms. I took a warm shower to defrost myself from the coldness of the weather before heading to my bedroom. The lights were off but the desk lamp was on.

Maegan was still filling out college applications with a laptop next to her. She looked like she hadn't slept in ages. Her hair was worse than Harry's and she was wearing the same clothes as the other day. "What do you want?" She shrieked but then saw that it was me. She calmed her tone as she spoke. "Oh, Kloe. You're home."

"And you're a mess," I said as I walked over to her. "What have you been doing?" I asked, looking at all the blank forms on her desk. But then I remembered. I was supposed to help her fill them out. I totally forgot. I was just so busy with the whole Zayn problem, I didn't have time to do it. "Oh, Maegan. I'm so sorry. I can make it up to you I--"

She shut me up. "Just grab a form and answer it. I still have to do a five hundred-word essay about the most controversial political issue for Stanford, a five-page essay about The Kite Runner, which is a depressing story about how a little boy's brother got raped, and a thousand-word essay about my biggest obstacle in life for Brown. What do you think it should be? At first I thought my Brown essay should be about the time there was a long line at Subway but I'm leaning towards my near-death experience when my Liam poster ripped."

She was going full-on mental. It was going to be a handful, having to help solve two problems at once but I convinced myself that I could do it.

***

ZAYN'S P.O.V.

DAY 5 (and we're not even close)

"Hopefully" and "probably" are two words that are used and tossed around by people, not really knowing of their enormity and how vastly different those two were. The first word implies of desire and anticipation yet there was no affirmation of its reality. You can hope and hope but it will never be real because of it.

On the other hand, probability was neither a surety or an uncertainty. It did not necessarily mean you cherished something to happen yet it did not imply of something you did not want to happen. It was neutral.

If I had hoped Perrie would forgive me, there would still be a probability that she wouldn't.

As we all gathered around my hotel room as usual, we weren't doing or saying anything. I scanned the room and saw that Harry was scrolling through his phone again. Did he ever get tired of reading hate towards the girl? There was a slapping noise coming from the corner of the room then I realized it was from Niall and the girl playing Catsup, where you hurt each other for fun.

Liam was next to me, staring at the blank sheet of paper in front of us. I was clicking and clicking the pen as if it would emit a different sound from the last time I clicked it. The moment Niall's ringtone started to play was the moment we all snapped back to our senses.

For the past few days, Niall had been ignoring his phone but, this time, he wasn't aloof. He was panicked. The phone was in the middle of his bed. I could clearly see who was calling. It was Modest Management. Now that the truth was out about who had been calling him over and over, he couldn't hide it anymore.

Nobody said a word. We all watched the phone blink, vibrate and play "Feeling Good" in complete silence. Once the ringtone stopped playing, the girl exhaled in relief, but she didn't know Modest Management like we did. Almost right after the phone stopped ringing, it started ringing again.

Finally, Niall picked up the phone, pressed it against his ear and hoped for the best.