Chapter Five
Parker Reid is in school the next day, which at least means he didn’t go home and—
The thought stops its tracks in Zach’s mind. He does his best not to think about it.
Zach feels vibrantly aware of him, in a way that he never has been before.
In the hallways, in the cafeteria, in the library during the free period they both share during second hour.
Parker is wearing layers, even though the air outside isn’t cold enough for it.
A heavy jean vest over a black hoodie, unzipped over a T-shirt with a band that Zach’s never heard of plastered across the front.
His thick boots stay unlaced, the hems of his thick, dark pants tucked into the boots.
He looks like a shadow moving through the otherwise brightly lit halls of the school.
The color still hasn’t come back to his olive skin. His long hair still looks unbrushed.
At lunch, Zach finds a corner table in the cafeteria and sits down with the meal his mom packed for him that morning, right after her shift.
He feels sluggish after barely getting four hours of sleep.
The conversation in the empty classroom keeps floating back into his brain like bad smog.
He’s thinking about what he should say to Paige the next time he sees her, and then someone drops into the chair across from him.
Zach looks up and sees the scowling, pallid face of Parker Reid.
“So,” Parker says, chewing on his thumbnail, the way Paige does. “Have you thought about it?”
Zach opens his mouth, then shuts it. Has he thought about it?
Has he thought about the pair of them killing themselves together?
He doesn’t know what to say. No? Of course he hasn’t?
But he has, that’s the problem. Not in a make-a-plan sort of way, but because he hasn’t been able to get the way Parker’s voice sounded in that empty classroom out of his head.
So of course he’s thought about it. And he’s thought about all of the ways that he could possibly tell Paige.
“No,” Zach says, instead. “Um, no, I—look, should I… I think maybe you should tell someone.”
“Are you going to tell someone?” Parker asks, his shoulders hunching up against his jaw. He looks furious, his heavy brows furrowing together.
“Nononono,” Zach says quickly, throwing his hands out in front of him.
“No, I mean—No, I didn’t say anything. I’m not…
I didn’t know if you were, you know, maybe you were joking?
’Cause that’s a thing, dark humor, people joke about…
about that kind of stuff all the time. Right?
So maybe you were kidding. So I didn’t say anything. I won’t. I wouldn’t, I swear.”
Parker settles down, though he still looks suspicious.
He rolls up the sleeves of his hoodie, and when he puts his sharp elbows on the table, Zach can see that his forearms and wrists are rippled like water—it takes him an embarrassingly long moment to realize that they’re scars.
Some of them are scabbed still, red and raw, like maybe Parker picks at them.
Like, maybe this isn’t the first time those particular cuts have scabbed over.
They stand out against his skin, red and bright.
Zach swallows and looks down at his turkey sandwich, his fingers plucking at the crust.
“I wasn’t kidding,” Parker says finally.
They’re surrounded by people, but nobody is listening.
Zach is used to that. Used to sitting in the cafeteria and having no one even stand within earshot of him.
The radius might be even wider now that Parker is sitting across from him.
There’s literally nothing that Zach wants to discuss less than Parker’s proposed suicide pact, no matter how few people are around to overhear.
“Parker…” Zach says. He’s not sure he’s ever said his name, out loud, directly to him. It feels weird. He peeks up at him, watching the way that Parker watches him from across the table with an expression that is set and determined. “I—I don’t…”
“You wrote a note,” Parker points out, stabbing one finger against the table for emphasis. “You had a plan.”
Zach looks down at his sandwich, fingers ripping into the meat of it now, his heart hammering in his ears. Parker keeps talking, and the words feel purposefully vicious, like maybe he doesn’t really mean them.
“Haven’t you ever thought, like, fuck—literally nobody would care? Right? Who the fuck are you, anyway?” Parker fidgets across the table, and when Zach looks up again, he’s hunched in further on himself.
The words sink into Zach’s brain. Because, Zach reasons, he’s right.
His mom would be happier—it’s not that she wouldn’t notice that he was gone.
It’s that she would notice. She would notice every single way in which her life is suddenly better.
She would notice not having to tiptoe around his feelings; she would notice not having to skip work to drive him to a psychiatrist appointment for new medication.
She would notice when she was able to quit her warehouse job for something less awful, because she wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of him.
She would notice that things were better with him gone.
Parker keeps staring at him, his expression smoothing out to something more serious. “It’s easier if there’s two of us,” he says, sounding reasonable. “We can make sure we go through with it. And then neither of us has to do it alone.”
For a moment, Zach is back in the train yard.
The sound of the birds in trees, the feel of the August morning warming up around him.
He can still feel the crunch of the gravel under his feet.
It was just him and the trains and the birds and the note in his hand.
He’d been so astutely aware of how alone he was.
What would it have been like if he was standing next to someone like Parker?
If he had a hand holding him on the train tracks?
“I don’t know,” Zach says, voice weak. It is decidedly not a no, and Parker straightens his shoulders.
“I’ve been researching,” Parker says, digging into the pocket of his jean vest and producing a very cracked iPod Touch. “Except, I had to get really creative with the search terms. The search engine kept trying to give me a hotline number.”
“Maybe you should call it,” Zach reasons. Parker shoots him an annoyed look over the table.
Zach swallows as Parker unlocks the iPod and slides it across the table.
It’s open to the Notes app. On the screen is a list of what can only be described as ways to die.
There are pros and cons beneath each one.
Zach’s vision starts to blur, going fuzzy around the edges.
He stares down at the iPod until it goes dark.
His breath starts coming faster, rattling through his closing throat.
Parker reaches across the table and snatches his iPod back.
“Don’t freak out,” he sulks.
“I am,” Zach gasps. “I am, I’m freaking out, I’m sorry—”
“No, don’t—stop freaking out,” Parker snaps.
“I can’t—not here, okay; I really can’t do this.
” Zach fumbles for his school bag, digging at the bottom for the emergency supply of Ativan.
His hands are shaking so badly that he spills most of his books onto the ground as he tries to dig for it.
When he finds the bottle and swallows one of the pills dry, he looks up again to find Parker is watching.
His face is blank, and his mismatched eyes are lifeless, unamused by Zach’s theatrics.
“What is wrong with you?” Parker asks as Zach carefully puts all of his books back in his bag.
Zach laughs, the sound surprised out of him. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to, and it comes out slightly hysterical and terrified. “Um,” he says. “I think a list of what isn’t wrong with me might be shorter.”
Parker’s lips pull at the corner. “Me too.”
Zach’s appetite has long disappeared, so he packs his turkey sandwich away and shoves it back into the bottom of his school bag.
Everything about this moment, this entire conversation, is surreal.
Parker Reid is sitting across from him at lunch, trying to discuss the various ways they could…
take their own lives. Together. Zach wills his thoughts away from the finality of such a decision, tries to ignore what it might mean if he entertained Parker’s plan.
It’s easier if there’s two of us.
The Ativan kicks in, and Zach feels the panic start to drip away. He rubs his palms over his knuckles, resting his hands in his lap. Parker’s plan gets easier to think about the more the medication starts working. Which is maybe the opposite of what’s supposed to happen?
“Do you want to like…” Parker makes a vague gesture in the air between them. “Meet up after school or something?”
Other than Isaac, who is obligated to hang out with him by virtue of being his neighbor, nobody has ever asked Zach to hang out after school. His mom would probably be over the moon if she knew. A new friend. Exactly like she’s wanted.
Except Parker only wants to hang out so they can figure out the best way to die.
“I—well, okay, yeah,” Zach says, blinking across the table at Parker.
He can’t seem to sit still. Like maybe all of this stuff bothers him more than he’s willing to let on.
Parker’s hands are moving restlessly, and the table rattles a little from where his long knees are jiggling beneath it.
It’s like Parker is made up of television static, always moving.
He keeps lifting his hands to tuck his hair behind his ears, but all his other twitchy movements make it so that it falls around his shoulders again.
“Cool,” Parker says.
He gets up then, without a goodbye, leaving Zach alone at the table.