t on solid ground.
We were roomies, best friends, then lovers.
And nothing in the world is going to stop me from making her my wife.
Chapter Ten
Zoey
I was seven years old when I first had my heart broken. His name was Michael Jackson. Not the actual Michael Jackson, but this little red-haired, freckle-faced Michael Jackson who lived in the yellow house on the corner of our block.
Almost everyone called him Jackie—a name that suited his boisterous personality. He loved to play in the dirt, throw rocks at random objects, and ride his bike along the footpath with his cap backward. The bad boy you knew you should stay away from but couldn’t help dreaming about.
One afternoon, on our walk home from school, he rode past and yelled, “Zoey, Zoey, smells like baloney.”
My first reaction was to smell my armpits. Could a person smell like baloney? Mom often made baloney sandwiches, and what would I know at seven. I thought I smelled like grape. I had an addiction to grape-flavored Fun Dips since I snuck them into my bag and ate them on the way home each day.
But his cruel words stuck with me like a broken record until my older brother, Scott, blatantly told me, “Boys like to tease girls if they like them.”
Who would have thought? Little old me. This was the most ludicrous thing I had heard in my life. You tease someone because you like them. The more I thought about it, the more I started to supposedly fall in love with him. Jackie, the uncontrollable ten-year-old who wore his blue Hypercolor T-shirt to school every day.
I decided to confront him the next day, but he never showed or the day after that. It turned out that he was a foster child and was sent to another family a couple of towns over.
It broke my heart.
I cried and thought I would never love another boy again.
Because that’s what I thought it was—love.
Whitney Houston should have prepared me for such a broken heart. Her songs became my life anthem, and until this day, I often think of Jackie whenever I eat a baloney sandwich.
There were other boys, then men, that I found myself infatuated with, but Jess would ultimately be the heartbreaker. It was a no-brainer that he would destroy me. A phase in my life that I would rather forget until recently when I looked back and thought how much it shaped my perception of relationships. I learned a lot from that train-wreck of a man and my ability to rise above it as a stronger person. While he physically didn’t abuse me, the emotional abuse scarred just as bad.
The only thing that got me through that time was the unconditional support of my roomie, Drew Baldwin.
He saw it all and witnessed me ugly-cry on way too many occasions. I look back at it now and wonder why I allowed myself to react the way I did—destructive with a thirst for vengeance. You could say a broken heart makes you do unimaginable things, but as time passed and I became wiser, I realized any man who would have stepped into my life at that moment would have had me reacting the same.
That’s what the twenties are for, to overdramatize life and to fall in and out of love.
And so here I am engaged to a man who’s left me questioning his faithfulness to our relationship with just over a week to go before our wedding. Ironically, my thirties don’t seem to be any better.
I’m trapped in a mess that seems impossible to climb out of like a fly trapped in a web, a bleak future ahead unable to untangle itself from the wrath of the almighty spider.
The morning Mia has the baby, I make an effort to get to the hospital to visit her and catch Drew. Despite him being a big asshole for smashing my pineapple, I need to talk face to face. This is not what people do before a wedding—take breaks. We’re both furious with each other, but deep down I know this is fixable.
It has to be.
After gushing over Mia’s baby and secretly wanting one of my own, we get to talking about my relationship status which urges Troy to leave the room. For someone who’s just welcomed his firstborn into the world, he seems withdrawn. Maybe it’s me and my aura of negativity as Gigi calls it.
“Okay, he’s gone. Zoey, I need to tell you something.”
I scrunch my nose. “That your baby shit her pants?”
“No…” She hesitates, her nostrils flaring followed by a look of absolute disgust. “Is that what that smell is? Should I call the nurse? How do I change a poo?”
I laugh, grabbing a diaper and some wipes from the bedside table. “It’s easy, here.”
We lay the baby on the bed while changing her diaper. It’s one of those sticky black poos. My sister-in-law had told me the first ones are the grossest, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that we have almost used a whole packet of wipes to clean her dirty bottom.