ZOE GALAXY: The Invitation

Chapter Four: The Road to Hell

A loud knock on her bedroom door startled Zoe back to reality. She quickly slid out of her dad's jacket and hid it under the covers. Her mom got terribly upset if she saw Zoe wearing it.

"Zoe? Are you up?" Her mom poked her head round the door, her hair in rollers.

"Jeez mom, you scared the crap out of me."

 "Happy Birthday. Look at you, I can’t believe you’re seventeen," her mom’s voice went high. "Do you want breakfast?"

Zoe noted her mom’s "nice voice", the one reserved for birthdays, Christmas and her mom’s church people. Zoe checked her clock. It still read 4:44. "What time is it?"

"It's five-thirty. I'd like to get an early start. Okay?"

"Yeah, okay. I'll be down in a minute," Zoe grumbled, closed her journal and listened to make sure her mom went downstairs before creeping across her room to return her dad's jacket to the hook. She hated how guilty she felt for wishing he were here instead of her mom.

Life would be so much easier if I were dead, Zoe thought and then chuckled at the irony of that statement. She didn’t really know what being dead meant. Her mom had lots of ideas about the afterlife and stuff, but when she asked her for proof her mom just rolled her eyes to the sky. She assumed her mom was rolling her eyes with God, but she never looked up to check.

 My Life as a Dead Person – a great title for a book, she mused outloud.

She dug out last year's journal hidden far underneath her mattress, reminding herself she needed to give it to her best friend Noah to stash. Zoe’s mom was such a snoop. This journal would get her into serious trouble. More therapy for sure and maybe even meds.

She flipped to the last entry:

Still miserable. Trapped inside this bubble of malaise (my new favorite word). Thick like mayonnaise, a quicksand that makes every step towards happiness impossible. Who will play with my friendless passion?

Lights out, nothing here but quiet, still deadness.

She grabbed her new journal and reread the mysterious sentence: I live in a meaningless world. She didn’t know what to make of the sentence, the meaning, or how and why it showed up in her journal. She agreed with whoever wrote it, though. Most definitely. Her world was something she trudged through every day, exhausted from the sheer effort required to exist...to attend high school, get halfway decent grades, choose a career, get into college, make/keep friends, dodge her mom's sermons and the most exhausting – beat back the constant stream of thoughts telling her she’d never fit in, because God f-cked up and she was broken, damaged, beyond repair. Just showing up for her life required constant acting, because all she wanted to do was curl up in a little ball and disappear into nothingness.

She peeled off her black t-shirt and put on her 'church clothes': tan dress pants, a cream silk blouse with little rose shaped buttons and her only pair of high-heel shoes. All clothes her mom had bought. She loathed the outfit, but she'd had enough fights with her mom to know she would lose if it was a Sunday. And Sunday it was.

As strict as her mom was about Zoe's Sunday clothes, she was super lenient about her make-up. Probably because her mom wore more make-up than anyone in town. For instance, just on her eyebrows she wore: gel to slick them down, two shades of colored brow powder to match her dyed hair, and a liner to draw in the tails of her razor thin eyebrows. Zoe glopped on black mascara, black eyeliner and gray eye-shadow making her eyes look haunted and her skin hungry. Satisfied with her seventeenth birthday death face she headed to the kitchen.

"I made your favorite. Pancakes," her mom said as she flipped one with a plastic spatula.

No, you didn't! My favorite is French toast, which dad would have remembered. She couldn’t help resenting her mom, it was pretty much a constant thing. "Thanks, that’s so nice," Zoe lied and plunked down at the kitchen dinette. Lying was something she was forced to do as she’d learned long ago her mom really didn’t want the truth. She wanted Zoe’s agreement. She wanted to be right.