Pictures From the Past

As Zack mentally kicked himself for being weird, he began walking back to his house, which wasn’t really that far away, but he didn’t really like walking all that much and he was tired and sleepy and he wanted to go home and crash, but he had a kid and a barbeque to go to, so his life just sucked a little bit more for a while.

When he made it inside, the phone was ringing off the hook. Hailey was still up in her room, and when she heard the door open and close, she yelled, “Dad! Phone!” and Zack just rolled his eyes because his kid was lazier than he was.

Once again, Zack trudged into the kitchen and picked up the phone, when he put it to his ear, he was met with, “Baker!” yelled very loudly. Once again, it was Brian.

“Brian, dude, what do you want?” Zack asked, becoming incredibly irritable and impatient. Couldn’t anyone see that he was kind of freaking out and possibly needed a few minutes to himself to, like, get himself together or something?

“Calm down, you know I’m just fuckin’ with you. Matt was wanting me to call you and ask if you had any extra charcoal. He’s running kinda low and it’s too late to run to the store.” Zack actually felt kind of bad at that point. Only a little, but it was making his mood worse than it already was.

“Yeah, I’ll bring it when we get over there. Hailey’s doing her homework now, so it shouldn’t be long,” Zack sighed, inadvertently walking out of the kitchen and into the hallway – which wasn’t good for the phone’s cord, it’d already been stretched enough over the years – to look up the stairs. There was no one there, of course, since Hailey was in her room with the door shut.

“Alright. I’ll see you when you guys get over here,” Brian said, and then the line went dead.

Zack walked back into the kitchen and put the phone on the hook before quickly going back into the hallway and up the stairs. He resisted the urge to go into Hailey’s room and check on her and, before he could change his mind, went into his own room.

There wasn’t much to see in his room. He’d never bothered painting the walls, so they were still the same ugly, bright white color that came with the house. He had a king sized bed, not that he ever had someone to share it with. Not even Hailey had ever slept in it. She wasn’t like kids you saw in movies that got scared in the middle of the night and had to crawl into bed with their parents. She was a lot like her dad in that way. Kind of fearless and realistic about most things. He sometimes wished that she wasn’t so smart and still maintained her childlike innocence, but, growing up with Zack as her only parent made her toughen up.

Back to the main point, Zack’s room was dull and boring and he hated it. But there was no one to make it look good for, so he never bothered doing anything about it. The sheets on his bed were white, his walls were white, and he had, like, one or two crappy paintings by dead guys that he couldn’t care less about hanging from weird places on the walls. He had no sense of design coordination whatsoever, but he could get away with it because he was a guy.

He was already kind of girly, so it was probably a good thing that he wasn’t a master of interior design.

With a sigh, Zack stripped down to his boxers. He wasn’t exactly the most in-shape person in the entire world, but he was completely unashamed of his body. And his body wasn’t bad to look at, either.

He was never sure whether his students would be surprised to see him outside of school. Of course Ana wasn’t, since he was all covered up with his jacket, but for anyone from any of his classes to see him outside of the classroom, he thought, would be weird.

Why? Because he had, like, twenty trillion tattoos and he dressed a lot differently. Instead of his usual dress shirt, jeans, and tie, he normally wore tee shirts with the sleeves cut off and band names and logos on them and jeans that weren’t exactly the right size. Hailey always teased him about it. She said that he was always wearing jeans that either looked too tight or too loose. He couldn’t exactly disagree, but whatever.

So, after getting changed into one of his favorite Misfits tee shirts and a pair of (too tight, in Hailey’s opinion) jeans, Zack fixed his hair, which had finally grown just past his ears, and put on his favorite Velcro shoes, then he was ready to go. It was only moments before he’d found his way out of his room and into Hailey’s. She was in front of her vanity mirror, brushing her hair. When she noticed Zack come in, she turned toward him and pointed to the desk situated beside her bed. Zack knew she was telling him to check her homework.

Her room was really, really pink. The color was everywhere; on the walls, on her bed, even on her mirror. The floors were covered with plush, white carpeting, and her desk was white, too. At least everything wasn’t pink. Zack openly welcomed the white accents, because, if he wasn’t already girly enough, sitting at a pink desk in a pink room would just take him straight to the epitome of chick-ness. He shuddered at the thought.

“Do I look okay?” Hailey asked as Zack sat down and began looking over her worksheets. He didn’t even turn his head, just mumbled a quiet ‘uh huh’.

Hailey rolled her eyes at him and continued fixing her hair. She and her dad were alike in that way, too. They both took forever to get ready.

It wasn’t long until Zack was done looking over Hailey’s homework. She was a smart kid, so there wasn’t really anything wrong with it. Every now and then, she’d bring it home and he’d find a few things wrong, but most of the time Hailey knew what she was doing. Zack was actually considering having her placed in gifted classes. It wouldn’t hurt.

“You’re good to go, kid. You ready?” Zack asked as he stood from the desk. He fidgeted around, shifting uncomfortably. He didn’t really like being in her room in the daytime. He felt like people could see through the windows and were secretly laughing at him for being in there. It was completely insane and irrational, but that was who he was. Hailey didn’t really mind it, mostly because she was used to it.

“Yup.”

After they’d gotten outside and into Zack’s car, the ride was mostly quiet. Zack turned on the radio, though, because he liked hearing Hailey singing when she thought he couldn’t hear her. She was still at the stage where she liked crappy, pointless pop music and High School Musical bullshit. Zack just dealt with it since he was determined to get her to listen to metal by the time she was at least thirteen. She still had a little while to go.

They had to make a stop at some random K-Mart because Hailey was squirming around in the back seat and throwing a fit about how she needed to pee. Zack ended up mentally smacking himself for not making her do it before they left the house, but there was nothing he could do at that point because they were already out and he didn’t feel like wasting gas by going all the way back home and Matt’s house was too far away.

It was really weird when he went somewhere with Hailey. People stared at him (or he imagined that they were, since he was a complete spaz) with disgust in their eyes, most likely thinking about how terrible a parent he must’ve been. Because he had to be a terrible parent since he had tattoos and piercings. Also, he had to be addicted to every drug imaginable and unable to hold a steady job, because that described Zack perfectly.

Insert extremely obvious eye rolling here.

He normally tried to ignore it, though, because he knew better. He was a good parent. He loved his daughter more than anything. He was a pretty decent person in general, y’know, aside from his recent ‘I think one of my students is cute’ faux pas. He’d been a teacher for about two years, he’d gotten nothing but praise from his fellow teachers and his students love him. He wasn’t addicted to anything besides cigarettes. He was nice, and that was what mattered, right? That he knew how good of a person he was and that his friends and family knew? Right.

So why did he feel like such an…outcast? He was always freaking out about what other people saw in him. Why was that if he knew so well that he was a good person? There wasn’t an answer for that, because he didn’t know.

Eventually, Zack and Hailey made it to the barbeque, Hailey with an empty bladder and Zack feeling like he’d been run over by a monster truck. That was the way it usually went, though, because when you’re a parent and a teacher and you’re trying to keep a grip on what’s left of your social life, your energy gets drained pretty easily.

Zack had situated himself at one of the tables Matt and his wife, Karleigh, had set up for the older people to sit at. There were a lot of people there; all of them people that Zack knew very well. There were adults and kids, but Zack had only really come to socialize with his best friends. Everyone else was sort of unimportant to him that day.

He kind of felt out of place. Almost everyone there was married or engaged or in some kind of serious relationship, and everyone was around his age. Matt and Karleigh had a kid together, Brian and his fiancée, Katie, were trying to have a kid, and he was a single parent and miserable.

Not completely miserable, but he was getting there. He felt bad when he brought Hailey to events like the one they were at. She had to see kids with both of their parents, having fun and being a family. Zack felt bad because he couldn’t give her a family. All he and his daughter had were his friends and his parents. He couldn’t magically make her mother come back. Fuck, he could barely remember the last time he spoke to her. He actually really didn’t want her mother around. She wasn’t a good influence at all. She hadn’t changed since she and Zack’s little one night stand and he didn’t want Hailey to be around her. It wasn’t like she wanted to be around Hailey, anyway.

He wanted to give Hailey a mom, he really did, but until someone came around that he actually felt right with, he was gonna have to stick with being Mister Mom, and that really fucking sucked.

“Dad, I can get in the pool, right?” Hailey asked, somewhat out of breath after playing tag with a few of the other kids.

“Did you put on your swimsuit at home?”

“Yup.” Zack just nodded and waved her off.

Once he was sure she was gone, he groaned and rested his elbows on the table, cradling his head in his hands. He had a massive headache and he was tired and he was making himself feel bad, not really on purpose, but he couldn’t help it. Even when he tried to stop, he couldn’t.

He wanted to wallow in his self pity for a while, at least until the food was done, but his friends insisted on ruining that for him every time he tried. This time, it was Matt.

“You feelin’ alright?” he asked, taking the seat on the opposite side of the table Zack had been sitting at.

“Not really,” Zack mumbled, letting his head slip from his hands and onto the table. There was a loud thunk and he really, really should’ve thought that through more thoroughly. It was too late, though, and his head felt like it was about to fall off. “Ow…”

“Hailey wearing you out?”

“Life is wearing me out.” Zack was rubbing his head now, and since Karleigh had been watching when he’d decided to be an idiot and thump his head against a damn table, she brought him some ice in a little Ziploc baggie. He thanked her about twenty times and put the ice on his head.

He was sure there was gonna be a huge welt there later, and he had to go to work the next day because it was only Thursday, and people were gonna ask about it. He knew he had to make up some huge, totally believable lie about how he got in a fight with The Terminator (because the dude is real) and won. His life still pretty much sucked, but at least it was entertaining.

“What’s going on?” Matt asked, crossing his arms. It was weird for him to see Zack like that. He’d known him for a long time, and every time he’d seen him that way, something really, really bad followed. He was almost positive that this time would be no different.

“Uh…stuff…” Way to be vague, Zachary.

Matt raised a brow and tilted his head, narrowing his eyes at his friend. “Uh huh. You know if you don’t tell me I’m just gonna force it out of you, right?” he asked plainly. Zack nodded.

“I uh…y’know…” No, Matt didn’t know, because he didn’t speak creep. Zack figured that out after Matt’s eyes glazed over like he was trying to figure out what the fuck he was talking about. “At school, I um…”

“Aw, Zack! You’re banging one of your students, aren’t you? Dude, when your ass gets thrown in jail, don’t expect me to bai-“

“No.” Zack rolled his eyes, crossing his arms stubbornly. “I just…one of the girls. She’s cute. It bothers me, ‘cause, like, I didn’t even notice her until today and then I decided to be creepy and follow her when she was walking to work and we talked and she shows no interest in me whatsoever and that weirds me out and…fuck. I don’t know. And there’s all this shit on my mind about Hailey and how I wish I could give her a mom. I’m having a bad day, dude,” he babbled, finally coming to a stop when he realized that Matt probably couldn’t keep up with the speed in which he was talking.

“Um…” Matt didn’t really know how to respond to that, but hell, he figured he’d give it a shot. “Hailey’s mom isn’t a good person. She doesn’t need to be in Hailey’s life and you know that. It’s not your fault that she doesn’t really have a mom. You made a good decision by taking full custody of her, and you’ve done a really good job. She’s ten now. That’s ten years of you and only you taking care of her. You gotta be proud of that.” He conveniently left out the part about the underage student.

Zack pushed his lips off to the side, his eyes downcast. He didn’t know what he was staring at, but it was pretty interesting at the time; mostly because he didn’t want to look Matt in the eye when he said, “What do I do about the girl? I’m so scared that I’m gonna do something really fucking stupid and lose my job over it.”

Matt sighed. “So, you said something about how she’s not interested in you. Why does that weird you out?”

“Because all the chicks dig me!” Zack really couldn’t believe he’d said that, and he couldn’t take it back. He felt like an idiot when he saw Matt failing to hold back the smile that made his lips twitch.

“How does that make you feel?” Matt couldn’t help but ask. He also couldn’t help but burst out laughing when Zack threw his empty cup at him. He finally calmed down, though, and got back to business. “No, seriously, how does it make you feel knowing that she’s not interested in you?”

Zack shrugged, fiddling with one of his lip rings. “I dunno. Like, it makes me wanna find a way to make her be attracted to me, I guess.” No, actually, it made him want to go up to her and shake her, all the while yelling ‘Why don’t you think I’m sexy?!’ but he couldn’t tell Matt that because it would make him look like a douche. A douche bucket, and we all know that you can’t have people thinking you’re a douche bucket.

Matt wanted to go find a newspaper, roll it up, and hit Zack with it. He also wanted to say ‘Bad Zack, you don’t hump underage girls!’, but that was a little much. And Zack wasn’t a dog, but if he was, Matt was pretty sure his name would be Spike and he’d be a little pink poodle.

“Dude…just ignore it. Not every female teenager in Huntington is gonna wanna bone you. It’s something you have to deal with. Don’t go after her, because that would make you a pedophile. Just ignore it,” Matt said in his very threatening ‘this is final’ tone. Zack could do nothing but hang his head in shame.

How could he have been so stupid? One little girl breaks the chain and he gets all flustered over it? That wasn’t right and he should’ve ignored it, like Matt said. It’s not like he could act on it, even if he truly wanted to. That would be super duper creepy. And he’d probably go to jail for statutory rape, which would mean losing Hailey and his job and his entire life. So, uh, that definitely wouldn’t work. And he didn’t even want to have sex with her. He didn’t even really know her. Just that her name was Ana, she was in his class, and her parents owned his favorite pizza place.

Okay, so, Zack didn’t really know what he wanted aside from sleep at that point. But he was hungry, he was at a barbeque, and his friends were kind of assholes. So he had to make the most of it.

It wasn’t long until his friends Jimmy Sullivan and Johnny Seward were sitting at the table with him. Matt had gone back to the grill, and Zack was left all alone with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dipshit, and the worst part was, they kept making him laugh. How the fuck do you wallow in misery when you’re laughing? You don’t, that’s how.

And then Zack realized he forgot the charcoal. Well, he didn’t forget, because Brian actually came over and yelled at him about it (in the most obnoxious way possible) and made him feel like an ass. But it was fine, since Brian apparently knew Zack would forget, and picked some up from the store on his way there.

Everyone was drinking when the food was ready. Except Zack, of course. Jimmy and Johnny had taken it upon themselves to get hammered, and Zack was gonna have to take them both home, Brian was tipsy, Matt was on his way there, and everyone else who didn’t have kids to worry about was trashed. At least Zack wasn’t the only halfway responsible one, which made him feel a little better, but not much.

It was weird for everyone else, because they’d keep looking around and wondering what was missing. Some figured it out sooner than others, and some didn’t figure it out at all, because they were too occupied with their kids or getting annihilated. What was missing was Zack.

He was always somewhere in the middle of everyone, doing something entertaining or helping someone with something. He almost always had a smile on his face that made everyone else smile, too. But that day, he was nestled in a corner with only his closest friends, and everyone was missing out on his infectious smile. And they didn’t know it, but that smile of his wouldn’t be around to infect them for a very, very long time.

So, they all had their laughs, Zack smiled for his friends and his daughter, and no one else, Johnny stuffed his face with ribs and got barbeque sauce all over his face, and they had a genuinely good time. They made Zack forget that he had been such an idiot, but, when it was time to go home, he remembered.

“Did you have fun?” Zack asked Hailey as they walked to the car. Matt had let Hailey borrow a towel to dry off with, so she was dry for the most part. Zack was really, really thankful, because his car was kind of precious to him, and he didn’t want water all over the seats.

Hailey opened her mouth to speak, but Johnny, who was completely smashed, interrupted her. “Yeah, man! I had a fuckin’ blast,” he was stumbling around and slurring his words, almost unable to keep up with everyone else, “have I ever told you how much I…fuckin’…love you, dude?” he turned and asked Jimmy, who giggled and nodded.

Hailey and Zack looked at each other knowingly, their eyebrows raised. They would both be happy when Jimmy and Johnny were gone and they could go home alone.