Zoey wished she could be like all the other girls at school. She was tired of the relentless bullying. The taunts, the mocking laughter, the shoving and whispers behind hands and the blatant stares. Especially the stares. Zoey wished she didn’t have to keep answering the sympathetic questions the teachers kept posing to her and she really didn’t like having to keep turning down the repeated offers to see the guidance counselor all the time.
Zoey wouldn’t even bother going to school if it wasn’t even worse at home. Her mother spent most of her time passed out drunk in the cesspit of her own failures and desperation in order to escape the brutal reality of her life. Which left Zoey trying to pay the bills on her mother’s meager welfare check as well taking care of the household all on her own. Social services would likely get involved again if school let on there was any issues at home so the bullying was a convenient cover for Zoey’s withdrawn and sullen behavior. Zoey hated the fact she was in second hand clothes from charity shops and barely had a lunch, didn’t have a cell phone and couldn’t afford to go to the mall. No wonder the other kids looked at her either with pity, disgust or embarrassment.
Zoey knew also without being full of herself that had she had money and class she would’ve been popular. She was extremely pretty and did notice the male attention she received and the open jealousy and suspicion from the girls at school until she was discovered to have a loose drunk of a mother who humiliatingly turned up at her school one day barely dressed and demanding Zoey gave her money for cigarettes. Zoey still cringed with dismay at having to drag her mother out of the school feeling her face flame and eyes smart with tears as she heard the laughter, the cat calls and jibes following her all the way down the hall and could still hear it in her head even now.
Zoey remembered social services coming to interview her at school asking about her mother’s drinking and was she being abused and neglected? Then they went to the house where her mother was sober and diligently answering all the questions and saying the right things about AA until the door was shut and another bottle of vodka opened. Zoey made sure the house was clean with food in the fridge and her mother stayed sober just for that short period of time so Zoey wasn’t taken into some foster home in even worse conditions. She made sure she was doing well enough academically at school to avoid any suspicion that her home life was impacting her schoolwork. Zoey mother wanting the welfare played the game when she had to but Zoey didn’t know how much longer she could keep it up for.
Then Zoey found her mother dead one morning. Zoey had brought in the usual coffee into her mother in a perverse attempt at normalcy and noticed her Mom was eerily still and pale. She was cold and rigid to the touch, her eyes wide open and unstaring. Zoey couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. She didn’t want to see it. Zoey left the coffee next to the bed and calmly walked out. Zoey went to school as normal hoping it was all a horrible nightmare. Only it wasn’t.
A week later and Zoey knew she should’ve called the police by now. Organized the coroner to have her Mom removed but she didn’t want the implications of that to become her new reality. She would have nowhere to go. Living in foster care was too awful to contemplate. It would be even worse than having her Mom decomposing in the next room. She could smell the rotting body and it still permeated every corner of the house no matter how much spraying and airing she did. Soon questions would be asked on her mother’s whereabouts but she didn’t want to face it just yet.
Zoey continued the duplicity for a few months until she suddenly stopped going to school. An investigation subsequently discovered Zoeys mother had died a few months prior when her partially liquefied body was found in bed by horrified police but Zoey was nowhere to be found. There were no leads or any information that could provide answers and within a few weeks life returned to normal for everyone. Zoey was easily forgotten but even in her absence there was the usual scathing and sneering comments about how little she mattered especially from the ring leader Patsy.
Zoey’s mother was buried in an unmarked grave in the local cemetery, the whereabouts of her daughter still a mystery.
Patsy was lying in bed sleep eluding her. She kept thinking of Zoey and the hatred she had for her kept rising up like bile. She knew how much Zoey had feelings for Blake and she made sure he would be an outcast for getting with a loser like her but she knew he was only with her for popularity and not because he actually had real feelings for her. She knew Blake loved Zoey and the realization of it kept punching her in the gut. Blake thought she was cruel and vapid and would often call her out on her vicious bullying of Zoey but that only made her more angry. And so fucking jealous. It was like a poison eating her from within. If she ever got hands on Zoey she would make sure she would be sorry. Since Zoey went missing all Blake could talk about was her.
As Patsy finally fell asleep she didn’t notice the attic hatch creaking from above her. She didn’t see Zoey watching her in a gap from above with malicious intent in her eyes and the glint of the knife she was holding shining the moonlight.