Jon plopped into the driver seat, nearly choking, and barely able to keep a lid on what may have been the funniest thing he had ever seen. He was choking, probably going to have hiccups later, but through pursed lips and he managed to suck in enough air to keep it muffled from the public. Holding by just a thread as Zoe opened the passenger side.
Enter a very petulant teenager but take close note to her outfit. Adorned in some avian themed, feathery, glittery, gaudy, monstrosity of a dance outfit, she was now struggling to adjust the tail feathers to fit in a family coupe. There was going to be glitter everywhere.
Jon had been initially bristled at once again lugging across town to pick up Zoe from another after-school activity. Especially at the end of a very long and very confusing day. But all of it- catching the end of her performance and this walk of shame to the car, had made all the bustle worth it.
Finally, finally, finally Zoe gets a sliver of the humiliation I’ve been going through! And I got to be front row! Not so fun having to be someone you’re not in front of all your friends, is it? Little does she know how much worse it could be. She didn’t embarrass herself at all, I’m actually pretty impressed she could dance like that. And at least she’s still young and has the body to wear a leotard. Wait til she gets older and… Gah, brain, stop! There’s nothing enviable about having to strut around like some disco chicken!
Whatever happened when Zoe slammed the car door made Jon sorta forget what there was to laugh at. He had never seen Zoe ever put herself out there like that before, for any means of self expression, and here she was, in pink, crushing it, at least until…
Until she saw me, standing in the back, laughing. Oh...
Jon goes to speak, not entirely sure what he’s about to say, but Zoe isn’t having it. She snaps at the first sign of Jon parting his lips, not even giving him the chance to breathe. “I know joking about things is your love language or whatever, but would it kill you to not be a dick and always get the last joke in?”
Defensive, very defensive. Arms crossed, eyes fixed forward. Tread carefully, she’s a hornet’s nest.
“Okay…” Jon started, letting the ‘ay’ linger, testing the waters to see if she’d jump down his throat again. So far no bogeys. “Other than the recital-”
“Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to talk about it!” (Divert! Divert!) Zoe was not giving any wiggle room, going full tilt immediately. “And apparently Sandra made the costume so it wouldn’t surprise me if this whole thing was your whole idea! So thanks a lot, mom!”
Jon bit his tongue, wanting to lay out plenty of receipts of his own, if she wanted to hear embarrassing, but deferred… for the time being. “Look, I’ve been sassed at by just the worst people all day in retail, I can’t take it from you too. So fine, I cede. I won’t say a thing about your performance,” and Jon wasn’t even what he had to say on it. Silly dance about the Everglades or not, she committed to the bit. Wasn’t that commendable and deserving of a break of the usual brotherly teasing? Isn’t that all he’s been trying to do?
“So fine, never happened, but give me something to distract me from how lame Sandra’s life is. Other than the that,” Jon didn’t need to look over to feel the daggers Zoe was staring at him. “How was your day?”
Zoe paused for a second, silently sizing the situation up in awkward, calculating silence. And as Jon was about to reach for the dial, Zoe sighed and took the olive branch. “It was fine, I guess.” Which was just the first crack in her defenses, “Well, there was this one thing…”, and soon her walls came crumbling down.
In defense of Zoe, she really did try to stay true to her usual moody, reclusive self and just give Jon the bullet points of her day. It was just impossible to stay in the confines of one conversation because that was apparently her life in the outer periphery of the Sarah storm system. Just. Pure. Chaos.
Zoe started with general details about a scheme she had been unwittingly had gotten caught up in, mostly to complain how inane it all was. It was supposed to be a simple story- about Zoe giving her opinion about what constitutes dibs on a boy- a question so stupid she rolled her eyes in the re-telling. But like the event itself, it quickly ballooned into a bigger deal with Zoe not realizing her flippancy was basically rendering a summary judgment on Bryce and Monica C.’s relationship.
Which required explaining who Bryce and Monica C. were and why someone might think she would be speaking on behalf of Sarah. It was a lot of backstory and wind-up, just to complain about having one pulled over on her by Tiffany Sanders of all people, that made Sarah look like a bit of a hypocrite, through something as innocuous as her rolling her eyes.
It was a lot of talking by Zoe standards, which had her cringing when she realized she had almost forgotten to breathe, having gone on uninterrupted. But Jon ate it up as he drove, calling it “Medieval,” and loving how Byzantine and favor trading girl politics could be. It was funny as ever, these little reminders and glimpses that it was still her nerd brother underneath all that makeup and maturity.
Zoe, spurred on by Jon’s seemingly genuine interest, talked about every one of her classes. Each period, some classmate felt the need to interrupt her with some piece of gossip, almost like they expected it to get back to Sarah that way, of which Zoe had plenty of commentary on how stupid and shallow it all was. The irony that she was still talking about these rumors and remembered them near-exactly, was last on Zoe.
She filled Jon in on how he was the talk of the school, thanking him again for standing up for her journalistic integrity. So many of the girls thanked her for her mom who put that creep Childress in his place. He was the talk of the guys too, a grosser kind of talk, and one they didn’t share with Zoe directly. She made sure to leave out those comments, particularly about his body and more specifically his dumptruck ass. Some guys were even weirdly obsessive about it, deciding to spare Jon from that lesson in womanhood. It even had Zoe over-thinking about her own figure, passing on a side of tater tots at lunch. Even worse, Sarah seemed to approve. She cursed at herself and her putrid display of feminism and enabling. Jon didn’t need to hear any of that though.
So while focusing on not bringing that up to Jon, her mouth kept running and she ended up blabbing about the other big thing she didn’t want to talk about, “So while I’m trying to finish this freaking vocab quiz Erica drops this bomb that apparently one of the football players on JV has gotten the bright idea that I might be available and apparently Dave, you know, Moose’s little brother, is planning on asking me out before summer break.” Uh-oh.
Zoe may have received a detente about her dance rehearsal, but already she could tell from her mom-er Jon’s widening eyes that this was not about to be dropped.
“Wait, Lug-head Moose’s little brother is named Dave Matthews? Oh my god Zoe, did you get goosebumps when you heard about that or did you notice it was just ants marching,” Jon snorted from laughing so hard at all this new information.
“What does that even mean? I don’t think that’d be funny even if I got the reference,” Zoe groaned, fearing for what she unleashed.
“Sorry, sorry. I just couldn’t help myself. I mean, who names their kid Dave Matthews? Like the band? They didn’t just form, this wasn’t new information. God, if Moose is that stupid and his parents are that stupid then I can only imagine how much of a drooling buffoon Dave is.”
“He’s actually not that bad,” Zoe countered. “He’s in my Honors English class and I even hear him quote Shakespeare by his locker all the time.” Zoe wasn’t prepared for how quickly her words had championed Dave’s cause. Sure, he quoted Hamlet from their assigned reading, and it wasn’t all the time, maybe just once, but then again he was a guy who did his homework, and learned, and could be funny in a conversation, and wasn’t nearly as oafish as all those other football players and that had to count for something, right? Gah! What am I doing?!
Zoe didn’t like the way Jon studied her or the warm way her cheeks radiated. Jon focused in like a lock picker as he stared at Zoe, feeling like there was some signal she was emitting but not yet understanding how to process that intuition. Zoe just knew if she didn’t change the subject soon, Jon may well be looking right through her and see… Well, that she might actually have a crush on Dave Matthews, football player. And that couldn’t happen.
So she pivoted and quickly. And with something she knew would immediately cover her scent. “Mom, you dated Biff’s dad.” Boom. No lead in or window dressing, and whatever calculating Jon was doing was immediately erased right off Sandra’s usually soft expression.
Zoe had imagined this moment to be funnier, more ‘haha, can you imagine a better way of getting back at your bully,’ the two of them could laugh at, but her brother was genuinely shell-shocked. He could finally puzzle together what Sandra’s breakup was and all those implications.
“You know what,” Jon chimed after moments of staring silence. “I’m not going to process that. Not right now. So yeah, Zoe, just please go back to talking about poetry or the paper or cheerleading or whatever. As long as I don’t have to think about that.”
And so Zoe did. It came easily. Jon was a great listener, much better and far less distracted then when he was a boy, and would chime in with thoughtful questions. Maybe there was something to this mother-daughter dialogue thing, especially now that she had someone who got the mother thing.
Things were going well and humming. Not just in their routines, but Jon and Zoe had seemed to stop most of the sniping and found a balance. Things were surprisingly smooth. Which is probably precisely why the car had to make an absolutely horrible noise and grind everything to a halt.
“What the heck was that?” Zoe was the first to react to the metal on metal screeching.
“I don’t know, but made the same sound earlier and she’s been running fine afterwards,” Jon replied. “I mean, maybe not that sound exactly. Like a much gentler version of that sound. And it also didn’t make the floor rumble. Or make the engine start smoking. Oh crap.”
Jon pulled over to the side of the road, lamenting that the one bright spot in this whole ordeal, his own car, was now billowing black smoke. He struggled but finally managed to pop the hood and once the smoke dispersed, Jon looked around at the oily mess and realized he still didn’t know a thing about cars. Or engines. Or how to get his hunk of junk back running so he and Zoe wouldn’t be stranded on the side of the road.
Jon went back and forth, trying to google anything that might help, getting frustrated at Zoe for refusing to come out and help in her leotard, and only succeeded in tiring out Sandra’s feeble upper body, chipping a nail, fighting tears, and cursing at everything of Sandra’s, but especially Sandra’s boobs which felt more in the way than usual even though it really wasn’t there fault.
Zoe on the other hand actually did something productive. She texted her group chat and those cheerleaders were quick to get the ball moving. It didn’t take long at all, since one of the girl’s father ran his own auto shop and it didn’t take much convincing to get him into his truck to help.
Jon fiddled with his phone flashlight under the hood, desperately looking for whatever the hell was a C3 valve. In his worry and desperation he didn’t notice the tow truck pulling up behind him or the show he might have been giving to anyone lucky enough to see Sandra bent over the front bumper. To be fair, he didn’t really understand just how easily it was for him to put on a show.
Walking as softly as one can in steel toed boots and denim, the mechanic managed to get right up behind Jon before saying a word. “You having car trouble tonight miss?”
Nearly jumping out of his skin, Jon yelped a bit at surprise at the man’s voice that had gotten the jump on him. Every snap movement as Sandra elicited seconds of aftershocks as her jiggly body struggled to catch up.
Luckily, the near paralyzing fear of being murdered on the side of the road subsided pretty quickly once Jon turned around. He instantly recognized the face and the voice. “Liam Black.”
“At your service,” the red head grinned.
From inside the car, Zoe couldn’t make out what they were talking about and wasn’t about to expose herself to the highway and freeze to find out. She had done her part and Jon could handle the small talk from here. But then again, Jon shot her this glance through the window that gave her the sinking feeling, just for a second, that maybe, this was a bad idea. Oh well, nothing a little screentime with her phone wouldn't fix.
